"What we've got here is (a) failure to communicate."

It has been a month now since I joined eHarmony, and so far they have sent me 219 matches, some of the latest ones being from PA, OH and Texas.  I have spent the morning eliminating anybody that hasn't been active in the last month, is too short, too old, too dumb, too unappealing, lives in a trailer or has pictures of themselves pushing dogs (poodles no less) in strollers! I think I got two Js, and three people have actually contacted me. One guy wanted to bypass the question and answer process altogether and go straight to email, which I don't want to do for many reasons, not the least of which is that he is almost 80. I have played along with the question and answer process with a guy that lives in The Florida Keys, and have gotten as far as the last three questions, which don't have multiple choice answers – almost like essay questions I guess. I really don't like these 3 questions; it is starting to sound like an interview for a job that I don't really want.  Seriously? What is the most adventurous thing I have done in the last year? What 3 traits do I bring to a relationship, and what are my general feelings about money and personal wealth? Answers would be:  1) Joined eHarmony 2) don’t know, and 3) You better have some if you want to date me. I doubt if I will be continuing with that guy, he doesn't really appeal to me, even though he seems like a fun person – he’s in a band and plays percussion on his prosthetic leg.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, what is the deal with Zoosk!? Last week, just on a whim, I decided to check them out. I haven't joined the site, haven't even posted a picture of myself, just linked it to my Facebook image which at the moment is a yin yang fish drawing, and I have had 15 guys contact me – but here’s the humorous part - only three of them are over  40, the rest range in age from 18 to 39. What kind of scam do you suppose they are trying to pull off contacting a 65 year old woman that has no picture with comments like “when I saw you I fainted and hit my head, I need your name and number for insurance purposes”, and of course the old “did it hurt when you fell from heaven”.

In retrospect I don't know if I really am ready to be in a relationship, or even want to be in one. I have always had the theory that if it was meant to be it would happen.  But then I wonder how is it supposed to happen when I am one step short of being a hermit living in a cave! I don't own a car, so I don’t go anywhere – in fact the last time I went anywhere and met a man that I was even remotely interested in was last year on my birthday, when Dana and I went to Bond (which has since closed). I met two guys that started to talk to me, and after about ten minutes Dana whipped me out of there so fast it made my head spin. I didn't say anything about it at the time, but later the subject came up and she said she needed to get me out of there because they were getting “too interested” in me. Huh?????  I still don't understand what that was supposed to mean. Although I have to respect her decision, I was getting a little ‘tipsy’ (understatement) and probably about to start making a fool of myself, she was not. And as I recall, the better looking of the two, which was the one I was interested in, was kind of shy and waited for his friend to get there before he actually spoke to me. In fact I think it was his friend that made the first move, and he bore a striking resemblance to the Buddha. Even though I greatly respect the Buddha’s teachings, I don't necessarily want to date him.  So I really don't have a lot of (if any) options for meeting a prospective date/mate.  Bars have proven unreliable in the past, that’s where I met the first husband and the long-term-ex-boyfriend, and two of the worst relationships I have ever been in were with guys I met at work! Which is why I have a strict policy against dating people I work with – not that I have a snowball’s hope in hell of meeting anybody at work anyway, I'm only there two days a week and rarely see a human being when I am.

I guess it’s all irrelevant anyway – I've paid for it, so I have to stick it out for the next 11 months. It’s just not even giving me any interesting blog content at this point, I thought I would  at least have something funny to relate by now! Maybe I am being too selective – eHarmony is saying ‘yes’ because I have specified non-smokers only, they seem to think I should loosen my restriction so they can send me more matches. But that one is a deal-breaker! I absolutely will not date smokers, and I have found that people lie about it anyway. I can't tell you how many guys I met the last time I tried this experiment that had non-smoker on their profile but in reality were “trying to quit”, unsuccessfully I might add.

This is all starting to make me feel a little shallow and self-centered, but I don't intend to settle for anything  less than a perfect match, and why should I feel guilty when these guys aren't exactly beating down my door either. 

I guess I am just going to have to look for other subjects to blog about – like whether or not I am going to have to get the sandbags out of the shed! This year’s rainy season is making up for last year’s dry summer.

~Peace out and don't forget to feed the fish~

Keeping up appearances

So far eHarmony has sent me 126 matches – they are slowly branching out across the US now, last week they added Texas, Virginia and Arkansas to the list, and so far this week they have sent me Missouri, Delaware, DC and Ohio. I had to chuckle when I saw the match from St. Louis – that’s getting awfully close to my hometown of Rockford, Illinois! I wonder how long before they start sending me matches from Canada.

I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that I had downloaded my favorite book, EXCUSE ME, YOUR LIFE IS WAITING by Lynn Grabhorn to my kindle, and have started to re-read it. Don’t you love it when people say “this book/movie/song changed my life?”  Well THIS   BOOK   CHANGED   MY   LIFE! I first read it in 2009 after having returned here from the failed attempt to “go home again”, and had just lost the job that I had started only nine days before, after a year and a half of unemployment . I had used up all the money that I had renting the guest house, that was a block and a half from the beach by the way (insert smug face here), and was pretty close to being at the lowest point of my life. In a nutshell, the book explained the Law of Attraction to me – as if I were a three year old. I really liked the way she put it, “cruddy out, cruddy back”, and for the first time in my life I understood that my own stinking thought process was attracting all the things I did not want into my life; like unemployment, cars breaking down, bad relationships, and the way I looked. For instance, I remember when I was a  kid seeing a woman whose neck had something that resembled a football tucked under her chin. It actually frightened me, and I overheard my Aunts saying that she had a goiter. I didn't really know what that was, could have been an alien waiting to break loose for all I knew, but I was terrified of goiters, and swore I would do anything possible to avoid getting one. Not to the point of being obsessed with it or worrying about it constantly, like I would eventually do about my car breaking down, but I did send that “I don't want” thought out into the Universe, and sure enough in 2001 I found out that I had an undiagnosed hyperthyroid condition, and I had . . . . you guessed it. . . . .   a GOITER!!! Okay, it was tiny, I couldn't even see it, but it was there just the same.  

So as I look in the mirror, and see the inevitable changing landscape that used to be MY face morphing into my mother, I realize that all the things I don't like about my changing body are the same things I swore would NEVER happen to me! I have always had body issues, my step-father has the distinction of being the most critical person on earth, and I was teased and generally made fun of right up until I married my first husband, and then he and his sister took over the challenge of completely destroying my self-esteem. I was bow legged, flat chested, wore glasses, had ugly feet, etc., etc. and that was just my physical attributes. Honestly, I could never understand why the man wanted to marry me so badly in the first place, until about ten years into the marriage when I realized that he just wanted something different (I was an American living in Britain), and a green card! With all the negative comments about my looks, I was pretty convinced that I was average at best; years later I would look back at pictures of myself and realize that I was actually pretty.

When I was younger I swore that I didn't mind getting older, but I did not intend to look older. And that still holds true to some extent – the wisdom I have gained, and the experiences I have had over the years has only made me stronger. One of my favorite saying is “youth is wasted on the young”, and that is so true, if I knew then – when I was strong and pretty – what I know now, I could have ruled the world!! Or at least made better choices.  But that’s not the way it works is it? As we get older, our body stops producing collagen and everything starts sliding south. I don't know if it was the five plus years of stress, and the inevitable depression that came with it causing me to neglect my normally stringent skin care regimen or what, but over the course of the last year I have seen some not-so-subtle things happening to my face.  My eyelids are getting droopy, those awful dimples that I hated so much since childhood have now become massive craters and worst of all, I am starting to develop the dreaded TURKEY NECK/waddle. My friends will tell you, getting a waddle has probably been my biggest fear (more than being abducted by aliens) – which just goes to show – what you think about you bring about. I have obviously obsessed about it enough to make it materialize – a definite “don't want”.

So what, if anything does this have to do with eHarmony? Well first of all I need to point out that eHarmony was probably my least favorite dating site (next to POF) when, ten years or so ago I decided that I might shrivel up and die if I was not in a relationship. At that point I didn't think I could possibly survive on my own, and I didn't really like myself very much at the time, so the last person I wanted to spend quality time with was ME.  eHarmony kept trying to hook me up with a lot of really not-so-attractive guys, and even though I went on a couple of really awkward dates nothing ever materialized. Of course now I realize that I was the one making the dates awkward. I was so desperate to make them like me that I was afraid to do or say much of anything.  It’s been close to ten years now since I did the whole online dating thing, and my attitude towards it has completely changed. I think it could be summed up in one word – meh.  Don’t care if I do, don’t care if I don't, totally ambivalent.

The biggest obstacle to this process is the fact that I DON'T LIKE OLDER MEN – which is especially strange considering I am an older woman. I recently saw something that said that the ‘accepted’ age difference is half your age plus 8, in my case that gives me an age range starting at 40.5 – okay, I'm cool with that. Apart from that hit and miss online dating adventure ten years ago, I have only dated three guys that were my age since I got out of college. My first husband was six months older than me, second husband was eleven years younger than me, and the last long term relationship, and very possibly the love of my life, was thirteen years younger than me. I still remember the first younger man I dated, I was 21 and he was 19, not a big deal – or so you would think. My mother called me a ‘cradle robber’ – this is the same woman who years later saw absolutely nothing wrong with my marrying somebody 11 years younger – go figure. 

I chose eharmony out of the plethora of online dating sites because they supposedly match you up based on compatibility. This does not stop my first priority from being do I want to see that face when I wake up in the morning.  It sounds really shallow, but physical attraction is extremely important to me. At this stage in the game of life I am expecting this to be a forever proposition, I ‘settled’ with both of my marriages, and I am no longer willing to do that. Sure I have had some very rough times being on my own in the past, but I have managed to make it out of the tunnel not only unscathed, but very much wiser. But a relatively good looking and healthy older man that does not have twenty-year-old arm candy is really hard to find these days.  Unfortunately age has the same ravaging effect on men as it does on women, which would probably explain why so many older men are now sporting goatees – it hides the waddle!

Case in point, Tom Berenger, here is a guy that back in the day was an absolute drop-dead-gorgeous hunk – well, at least I thought so. I just saw him on Major Crimes this week and didn't even know who he was he had changed so much.  Now, seriously, Tom just needs to lose weight and he would look pretty damned good.

Does anybody know if Tom is single?

~Namaste~

Diving into the Dating Pool

I joined eHarmony two weeks ago, and I am already regretting it. Actually I think I was regretting it the minute I clicked the payment button. It would seem that they have exhausted the eligible bachelors here in Naples -both of them- within the first week; they then started sending me matches from the surrounding area for a couple of days, and the next thing I know I’m getting matches from the Keys and the east coast, which is not good since I don't have a car and therefore can't even meet anybody halfway! So I tightened up my distance preferences to 30 miles and did not receive any matches for two days. This morning I went into the settings and changed the distance from very important to somewhat important, and instantly got seven new matches, from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee!!  How can you start a relationship with someone that is three states away?? Perhaps eHarmony is sensing my ambivalence.

I don't know why I felt I needed to be in a relationship at this stage of my life anyway, I am notoriously bad at relationships – two ex-husbands and a long-term-live-in boyfriend kind of prove that. But, after all I have gone through in the past six years; the rebuilding process is pretty much complete now – I have a nice home, not well-off but comfortable, have an okay part-time job that doesn't drive me nuts too often, have lost 31 pounds and am almost to my goal weight, I have a whole new wardrobe, I look good and feel great. For once in my life I can honestly say that I have no complaints – so why do I want to screw everything up by admitting someone else into my perfect-for-me life?  Well, I guess that maybe I am just bored?

I have been pretty ambivalent over whether or not I should be in a relationship for a very long time now. On the one hand I prefer to live alone, I actually enjoy silence and my own company, and if I need somebody to talk to – well, here I am!! But sometimes I think that it would be really nice to have somebody to do things with. I have found that whenever I am indecisive on an issue, if I back away from the problem God or the Universe will make the decision for me. In this case one minute I'm thinking maybe it’s time for me to get back out there, and the next thing I know I'm updating my eHarmony profile. I don't even know why I chose eHarmony considering I didn't like it the last time I tried to “get back out there”! I had a couple of dates, most of which were pretty forgettable; one guy was a whole blog topic by itself, one was incredibly clingy, overbearing and difficult to get rid of. But I did meet one guy that I liked very much. Unfortunately the feeling was not mutual although we have remained friends ever since. It might have worked out if we were closer, he lives in Clearwater, and I would have gladly moved, especially since at that time I had absolutely no reason to stay here.  Still don’t really, I only have two friends left here in Naples, and one of them might be moving soon. So maybe that is why God, the Universe and eHarmony are sending me matches from all those other places – I honestly have thought for some time now that I probably won't stay in Naples, that I might want to move to one of the aforementioned states, especially South Carolina. Maybe that’s what’s happening here, perhaps I should try to keep an open mind.

I'm not really excited about diving into the dating pool – it gets a lot harder when you get older, especially if you have been out of it for a long time.  And if my track record is anything to go by, I'm not very good at it anyway.  Dating for me has always been awkward and uncomfortable. For some reason, I never feel as if I can be myself. I guess I am afraid that they won't like me; apparently I have rejection and abandonment issues.

Thinking about it, the last time I did eHarmony, Match.com, yahoo Personals, and POF, I was only interested in the guys who were waaaaay faraway – the guys that I had a snowball’s hope in hell of ever meeting - maybe I'm better at long distance relationships after all.

I will give eHarmony the full year, even though I usually bail after the first three months of rejection – if nothing else, it might give me some more good content for the book I have been writing about my adventures in online dating titled Please Remove Me from Your Mailing List.