After being asked to dance at the New Year’s Eve Umphrey’s show, something lit up inside me after quite a while of having been extinguished. 17 months of sickness and 6 months of loss didn’t leave much room for romance between Anna and I. Not to say there was none during that time. We spent a weekend in Chicago for Anna’s 44th birthday and it was very romantic and sweet and one of the finest weekends I’ve ever spent in my life. Going to the theatre. High tea. Going to the Art Institute (even though she only had the energy for about 45 minutes). Making sweet love for one of the last times.
But that New Year’s dance left me with the embryonic hope that maybe, in some way, I would be able to love someone again.
We had that talk when Anna was sick. She wanted me to find someone else and to be happy. I told her I wasn’t interested. That I was planning on her being around for a long time. I was. I had to have that hope. And I did. There were people that lived more than 5 years after a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. Anna could be one of them. My friend and neighbor, Alan, lost his wife about 6 months before I did. She told him to grieve for a year and then remarry. Anna wasn’t quite so specific with her directive. But I think I understand. If I were the one to be going, I would definitely want her to remarry if it was what she wanted.
I’m now at the point where, occasionally, I can imagine spending my time with someone else. What I can’t possibly imagine is someone else being a step-parent to my kids. One of the driving forces in my life has been the very unpleasant relationship I’ve had with my stepmother. She’s a very unhealthy woman who has seen her share of suffering but has never faced it head-on. Thus, she was pretty efficient at passing that suffering on to my brother and to me (and to my dad) growing up. My mom’s second husband was also an angry, violent man. He treated us all - my mom, my brother, my stepsisters, even my Dad - very poorly.
I told myself that when I got married, I would never divorce. I would do whatever it took to make the relationship successful so that my kids would not have to go through what I went through growing up in terms of stepparents. Now, without having chosen it, I have the Faustian bargain of potentially trading the companionship of another friend, partner, lover, confidant, dreamer, see-er of visions, traveler, and sufferer for the risk of my kids living through my former hell. Yes, I understand that it’s much more complicated than that and there are a million reasons why things were the way they were in my family of origin. But that’s the bargain my monkey mind faces anyway.
So, despite all that, I decided to throw caution to the wind and at least dip my toe in the waters of dating. Being a netizen since the days of 300 baud modems and dialing long distance from Allston, MA to San Francisco to find good conversations on The WELL, it only made sense to check out online personals.
I don’t know how many of you have seen these, but let me tell you, it’s quite an experience. I wanted to see who was out there, but you really can’t do much lurking without setting up your own profile. So I put one up on Yahoo! Personals, just a few words to get started. The way these things work is you enter your gender and zipcode and you specify your potential mate’s age range (I went with 32-42), gender (I went with female - I’m curious about, but probably not looking to get serious with men), and you’re presented with a list of possible matches. Everyone provides a tagline or headline and then some verbiage about themselves. They also specify biographical stuff like never married/divorced/widowed, how many kids, education level, smoking/drinking preferences, etc. And they normally upload a few photos.
After reading through a few hundred of these profiles now, let me tell you - it’s a hell of an insight into the human condition. First, most people can’t write a coherent sentence to save their souls. Not that we all have to be Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Thordora, but geez. And can someone please point more than half of these folks to a spell checker? Now, my wife was dyslexic and several other people I love dearly have mild to severe dyslexia. So you can’t judge someone on their spelling. But if you’re going to try to attract the best person out there, wouldn’t you run your profile by someone you trust? And wouldn’t you spend more than 10 minutes writing it?
And then there are the pictures. Some of the pictures are so blurry or dark it’s impossible to tell what the person looks like or they’re sort of frowning or they have their ex-husband’s arm still around them. And this is not just a few. My photos aren’t winning any awards, but they’re at least not underexposed. So once you rule out the half that smoke, then the half of those that are unintelligible, then the half of those that are inscrutable, then the half of those that are trite (I mean who the heck doesn’t like long walks on the beach at sunset and cuddling by the fireplace?), then the half of those that listen to country music and what are you left with? Pretty much squat.
I’ve found exactly one profile on Yahoo! Personals that makes me inclined to put finger to keyboard and make contact. Someone who seems to know how shine some light on the prism of her self and to radiate some of the resultant color to her profile. But she smokes. For me, that’s a deal killer. I lost one beautiful soul through lung cancer and couldn’t do it again.
I’ve found that if I widen the distance of my search, I can find all sorts of potentially interesting people in Indianapolis and Chicago, but I’m not leaving this area and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to relocate. Not to mention, how the heck would you date someone 60+ miles away when you have about 4 free hours a week? Yeah, there’s that whole interwebs thing, but, well, Indy is just too far.
So then I decided to check out match.com. I had seen ads and wondered if it maybe attracted people who were more, perhaps, dedicated to actually finding a date? I had put together a decent profile on Yahoo! by this time and copied it over to match.com (where you get to add a few more blurbs). It’s really about the same, as far as I can tell. The site’s more user-friendly, so that helps. And you can do reverse and mutual matches (i.e. you meet their criteria and/or you both meet each other’s criteria). So that saves time and the effort of looking through dozens of NASCAR fans.
I found one profile on match.com pretty quickly that was rather intriguing. Her headline was a Jack Kerouac quote I’d always liked about living a passionate life. She likes The Grateful Dead and Tom Robbins and Van Morrison (all big, big faves of mine). She has a young daughter she’s very dedicated to. She’s an english teacher. The Kerouac alone probably would have been enough. So I wrote to her, putting my best foot forward. She wrote a relatively short, but pleasant reply. I suggested we IM or get coffee or whatever she was comfortable with. This was almost 2 weeks ago and I never heard back. I suspect I won’t at this point.
The last few weeks have found me at relatively low tide on grief beach. But I did find myself stopping a couple days ago and just staring at a picture of Anna in the hall. One we had done with my dad and brother and all of our families in matching white polo shirts. She looked so gorgeous in her bushy red hair against that white shirt. And I remembered so many plans and so many dreams. And I realized that I’m really probably not ready for dating at this point. I think the online personals may have been a bit of a shiney thing. I do miss having someone to kiss on the neck, right between their jawbone and their ear. And I do miss having someone with whom I can share the joy and rage of the day. And I do miss having someone to fuel the fire of my ideas and fueling their fire too. And I do miss looking into someone’s eyes and making that instantaneous, deep, real connection that says “we were thrust here, unwilling, unwilled, and unprepared, but let us face it all together because it’s sure as hell better than facing it alone”. But I think the time is not yet.
