Dating Game 3

If you’ve been following the blog you might recall that I did a couple of posts about online dating. Two girls named Sue, one a cousin, the other a cousin in law, encouraged me to have a look at some dating sites after I suddenly became single at the beginning of my seventh decade. One of the Sues (Sue Kelly) had a practical reason for encouraging me. She was writing a book about being sexy after age 60. A chapter describing a few real life experiences with cyber romance would be a great addition.

I concurred and agreed to look into it under the guise of a social researcher…….yeah sure. I was interested but didn’t want to admit it.

Let’s be honest. Most people think of it as the last resort of the desperately lonely. But what’s the alternative? 

Church socials? Friend recommendations? It would take forever to meet the same amount of single people that would be possible in just a few weeks online. Perfect? Not even close. Because of over-choice most people are never satisfied. Tomorrow or next week they might find someone better.

To play this game fairly, if you’re not attracted to someone after a first date you should be courteous and tell them.

Her:   Thanks for the conversation but I really don’t think we’re a match.

Me:    What’s wrong with me?

Her:   According to the rules, I don’t have to tell you that.

Me:    I paid for the coffee, you owe me.

Her:   Okay, if you buy me a donut.

Me:    You’ve had five already!

Her:   You asked for it. I wasn’t looking for a musician. Doctor, Lawyer, anything but a piano player.  

Me:    You’re a cashier!

Her:   So what’s wrong with that?

Me:    Oh come on, spare me the “poor maligned service worker” routine, you just trashed my profession!

Her:   Profession? Pretty high and mighty for a job where you don’t work, you play! And not that well…. I’ve heard you. 

Me:   Oh, very nice coming from the only cashier in the world who needs a calculator to change a Looney into quarters. 

Her:  Well I never……..

Me:   Never what? Never actually had a real date? Wouldn’t surprise me.

The first “date” is more like an interview. I had eleven of these meetings and most of them were actually enjoyable after ten minutes or so of abject terror. I mean, all you really know about the person is what they put in their profile and let’s face it, we’re selling a product, ourselves, and we all decorate the packaging and embellish the sales pitch a little. So if I implied that I was a famous concert pianist (not saying I did) I would have had to either defend it, come clean or weasel around the topic for two hours. That’s stressful. 

But you have to find ways to stand out from all the rest of the over excited drooling testosterone goons and actually get that first date. And the ladies of course, have their own competitive situations.

So everyone loves their families and pets.

Nobody really needs to be on a dating site.

Just about everybody likes to cuddle by a fireplace and take romantic walks on the beach.

Very few people smoke and the ones that do have an impossible “socially only” habit.

Everyone over fifty is young at heart and their friends say they don’t look their age.

Most want to travel the world and my guess is few can afford it.

A frightening number want to dance. A lot. All night. Frequently something exotic like the Aruba Frumba or a Viennese Schmaltz. 

Quite a few of those over sixty refer depressingly to finding a “best friend” in their “final chapter” of life.

Pretty much the lot of them have friends who say they’re honest, sincere and have a great sense of humour. 

Some are bold enough to stipulate tall, athletic, good looking or all three. Don’t bother applying if you’re not. 

And pictures! About half wear sunglasses. With a limit of six photos, frequently three or four will be of their dogs or horses. The pictures of them are consistently good. Most looked younger than their stated age.

I have to make a comment here. We all know that the right picture can make us look very different than we are. Lighting, angles, type of camera and lens and a pro photographer can make us look better than life.

Naturally, in our profile gallery we are going to post the picture or pictures where we look our best. 

So here’s where it gets a little strange. All of the eleven ladies I actually met looked better in real life, some strikingly better. WTF?

I chose to contact the ladies who had the smallest amount of the profile “cliches” described above. Not all responded.  And some would stop contact after a few emails. I was forthright and purposely not overly careful 

in my communications. All of the ones I talked into meeting with me were very nice. I had some great conversations, most of them longer than two hours. 

Ten of these occurred over a four and a half month period and I hadn’t yet met anyone I really wanted a future with.

Then the dark horse. Appropriately, a low definition photograph of a girl on a horse. She sent me a smile. I checked her profile. A no bullshit “I don’t know why I’m doing this” attitude with little information other than she loved music, had kids who didn’t live at home and resided near a town (she specified but I’m not going to) about two hours from Toronto.

I decided to thank her for the smile and invite her to chat online. I remember I was in Cincinnati Ohio on a concert tour with Gord. We exchanged email messages for a few days and I was intrigued by how easily she was conveying a very down to earth personality using such an impersonal medium as email.

Okay, time to stop mincing words. She was brash. She freely dropped F bombs. She made no effort to be cute and try to impress me. I could almost hear her yawn as I listed (bragged about) my successes in the music business. She posted a new picture. It was okay but it didn’t rock my world. 

When I’m on tour I’m too busy to think about anything except the show, the airplane, navigating, and breakfast. So I didn’t really think much about her until I got home and even then I didn’t see her as a good possibility.

We agreed to meet but I kept having to cancel. We were finishing up the 2018 tour with some shows around Ontario. She saw that we were going to be in Orillia and emailed that she was going to be there that day and why don’t we meet for coffee? I’m way too busy on a show day to consider meeting with anyone but I started thinking about it. Maybe I could spare an hour……WAIT A MINUTE! The show had been sold out for months but perhaps I could ask our tour manager Warren, if a dear old friend (I know, I know…….but I’m not going to hell for one fib) could sit by the sound board. 

I didn’t have to fudge the truth. Warren had an extra ticket anyway. A cancellation or something. She was in.

I saw her afterwards across the reception area. I stopped and spoke with some friends from Chicago keeping her in the corner of my eye. To get to where she was sitting, I had to navigate a minefield of legs and feet and I stumbled as I awkwardly made my way over to her. She looked up at me and we said hello. It was undoubtedly her, but she looked so different from her picture. Her features were softer and much more refined. She spoke confidently but gently, not in the slightly tough way I expected. It’s true that all of the ladies I met impressed me and there wasn’t one date that I didn’t enjoy, but it took about thirty seconds to predict that this was going to be a different thing altogether. I knew I had to summon up some charm. My high school sweetheart told me one time that although I definitely had some good qualities. “Charm isn’t one of them”. (Yes Lori, I’m paraphrasing a little but that’s the gist of it. Don’t worry, at seventeen I didn’t have a clue what “charm” meant. Still don’t.)  

I decided it was enough just to be careful and not make an ass out of myself. We talked until they asked us to leave and then we resumed the conversation back at my hotel until 5 am. I was smitten.

She was number Eleven. My lucky number. Her name is Kim.