I’ve recently decided to start dating again, after a very short dry spell of only 20 years.
My last date – and this is the truth – showed up at the door of my tiny apartment in Laguna Beach as a blind date, wearing ratty shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt with a hole in it. A noticeable hole.
It was a blind date. He was a fellow journalist and we’d been fixed up by friends.
I asked him, “This is how you impress a potential date? Wearing a shirt with a hole in it?” He looked hurt and said, “I thought we were going to the beach?” Then, he asked where to find the cheapest place to eat. Sad to say, it didn’t work out.
Which is OK, because I feel like I would have needed to run his credit before dating him again. My late mother worked for a credit reporting agency, and she used to illegally run guys’ credit reports before she’d agree to go out with them. Good idea, Mom. If they have a lot of collections on there, your future together might not be so bright.
Luckily, men have been contacting me on Facebook, wanting to strike up friendships. Even better, they’re all handsome, in the military and are carrying cute puppies. Apparently, only men with puppies are allowed to post on Facebook. Occasionally, they also have their arms around girls that I assume they’re passing off as their daughters, to disarm you and persuade you to “friend” them. Although, nowadays, who knows?
Lots of women from Russia also contact me, calling me “dear one,” and offering to strike up close personal friendships. I want to tell them, “Sorry, honey, but I don’t swing that way.”
My 19-year-old daughter, Curly Girl, has made it clear that she would have to approve of any man I dated, and she refuses to recognize the irony that it hasn’t been that long since I made the same demand of her. Not that it ever did any good – she never did listen to anything I say.
We were watching an episode of “90 Day Fiance,” this TLC reality show where people bring their love interests over from other countries on a marriage visa and then must marry them within 90 days or they have to return to their countries of origin. Some of the romances, mostly arranged online, are clearly just ludicrous.
“Do you think it can work out?” says the 47-year-old mother of two about the 22-year-old hunk she wants to marry from a Third World country. Um, no. Her daughters are horrified. Her friends are horrified. She is besotted and determined to bring him to the U.S. and marry him anyway.
“I wouldn’t let you do that,” my daughter, Curly Girl, says, turning to me. She’s lying on my bed and I’m sitting in my reading chair while we watch together. “You’d better not marry anyone we don’t like.”
Well, considering I’m 61 years old and I’ve never managed to marry anyone at all, probably not a huge issue. (My kids are adopted).
Also, I’m chubby, flabby, crabby, stubborn and demanding. Great marriage material, in other words.
My friend and I looked at an online dating site for old folks recently, urged on by one of my colleagues who met his latest spouse there, and I must say I was amazed at the number of older men pictured in their profiles wearing wife-beater T-shirts and mirrored sunglasses. Yeah, that’s attractive.
I know lots of guys who are good husband material, which was proven when they married my friends decades ago. Sigh.
If I ever did manage to get a date someday, it would have to be someone who likes to read. One description of a guy on this online site asked if he reads, and he answered, “If I have to.” Maybe not my soulmate.
True story: My friend Janie is trying to teach me how to attract men. We were at Crystal Cove beach recently, where she was giving me tips as we walked along the shore. Apparently, I need to learn how to talk to random guys.
Suddenly, she pointed to a guy wearing a shirt with an outline of a whale on it, and the word EAT emblazoned in the middle, who was walking toward us. She ordered me, “Say something to him.”
I was flummoxed so I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. I looked at him and said, “So, do you eat whales?”
He gave me a look and then walked as far away as possible. Janie looked at me, disgusted, and said, “You’ve got no game at all.”