A Trend Such as it is

A pattern develops. You are the type to find patterns anyway. It's what makes you so good at math. You try to explain this to the children. Math, you say, it's not memorizing formulas and multiplying big numbers in your head. It's finding the pattern, the way things fit. When you know the patterns the formulas practically memorize themselves. Actually, come to think of it, you don't say it nearly enough. What you find yourself saying instead is, "Yes, you have to memorize it. Suck it up." Oh, well. No body's perfect.

Anyway, rambling aside. The pattern.

You go on a first date. You've reached an age of skepticism. You don't like it, but you can't change it. You're not inclined to like people right away. You are even less likely to like dates. Perhaps it's wisdom. More likely, it's bigotry.

So, the fact that he's charming on the first date creeps up on you. It takes twenty - maybe thirty minutes - before you begin to realize that your cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. It takes longer before you remember to hope that he feels charmed by you. You forget sometimes that you are as much on trial as he is. You have a big head, after all, so you usually figure that you are the more attractive, intelligent, and witty of the two of you at the table in the coffee shop.

Let's face it. Usually you are.

Your conversation meanders in a pleasant way. You are interesting. He is, too. You both leave stuff out, but put enough stuff in, that the conversational stew you create together tastes lively and rich. It's an appetizer for later conversations that you start to realize you are getting excited to have.

You part ways after spending more time together than you expected to spend. You might hug. You might even kiss, chastely, because it's a first date. You might mention later meetings. You might leave them hanging silently in the air between you.

And then. It's over. That's it. There's a call or an email, sometimes prompted by you, sometimes by him. He's not ready to date. He's met someone else. He's not sure what happened, why his last girlfriend dumped him. He's not over it. You are smart and funny and interesting, he says, and he wishes you all the best.

All the best.

Blah blah blah.

Not you.

Me.

Blah blah blah.

You've wasted all of your best ingredients on a conversational stew that you'll never get to taste again. If it happened just once, you'd sigh, and curse your luck. But it happens more than once, and so you feel that it must be a pattern. If only you could figure it out. It seemed easy and fun. And then it was not.

Your Turn

OK, in an effort to convince myself that I'm not crazy, here's a question for you, gentle reader:

If you're in a committed relationship, how did you know he/she was right for you? How long did it take? How can you tell that it will work? More importantly, since I like things that are all about me: Would I be able to tell or would I be too crazy to decide?

That is all. Now write your essays. See you in the comments.

I Can't Figure Out How to Make This About Bacon

I have a friend, "Mimi" who has a knack for making me feel bad. She doesn't mean to, and it only happens every couple of years or so, which is why I continue to put up with her. Actually, to be honest, she loves me very much and really, genuinely wants to help. She just doesn't know how. For example, once when I was telling her about feeling lousy about being single and in my thirties and how there are so few men for every single woman and how maybe I should move away from Minneapolis because maybe the shyness of Minneapolis men is the problem, Mimi honed into a different problem: Me. She suggested that maybe I should get a sexy new haircut and wear more stylish clothes. Men, she said, are more driven by looks than women are. This is what she did, she said, before she met her husband.

Now, my friends in The Illiterati have said the same thing, but somehow when it came from them it felt more like an excuse to get together and go shopping and be the center of their attention for an afternoon. When it came from Mimi, it made me feel like a big awkward dolt.

Anyway, I should have run the other way when Mimi suggested that she set me up with a friend of hers. She's older than I am, and she said she couldn't tell whether this guy was too old for me or not. Did I have an upper age limit?

Well, you know, you want to be open. You want to accept love wherever it comes, but don't we all have an upper age limit? I have two. One is the one that I will say to people to prove how open I am. That one is 50. It's a total lie. My true upper age limit is 45. This is the upper age limit that I hold onto because I believe that I am hot. If I stop believing I'm hot, then before I accept that I should be with some old, crotchety geezer, I'll probably just decide to stop trying. Note that if you're over 50. I don't really think that over 50 is old. I just think that my age plus 15 will be old when I'm over 50.

And, so when I join dating sites, I tend to tell men over 45 that we are not a good match, without really bothering to find out more. Unless they are totally hot (which they haven't been), I even get a little bit offended that they think that they have a shot with me. Did I mention that I am hot? What would a hot woman in her 30s want with an old man who isn't hot? Especially if that's all I know about him?

You can only call me ageist if your partner is not hot and more than fifteen years older than you are.

I joined a dating site recently. My profile has generated no activity, except for one note from an old man telling me that he liked my profile, one note from a barely literate man who uses the user name "Shyman123" or something equally pathetic, and one note from a man in Malaysia who is in love with me. This is grim, grim, grim. It makes me feel a little bit lousy, but I try not dwell on it, because what's the point in dwelling? They don't know me. If they did know me, they'd know how hot and funny and sexy I am, and the number 35 would not be so frightening to them.

If they knew me, like Mimi does, they would know how great I am.

Mimi called me mid-week. The set-up wasn't going to work. He was bringing a date. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. Still, I was invited to dinner. The dinner guests included Mimi, her husband, a well-established gay couple, my potential set-up and his date, and me.

The problem? The guy, even though we were no longer being set-up, was at least fifty-five. Easily. Complete with gray hair and a bald spot. I can choose not to take it personally when the Internet considers me over the hill as a woman, but how can I decide that it doesn't mean something when Mimi does it?

I sat at dinner, where I was easily twenty years younger than anyone else at the table, and until I recovered my composure and found my charm, I wanted to cry. I love the gay couple (or half of them anyway) and I love Mimi and her husband, but doesn't anyone else see how terrible it is to have to decide that men my own age are now considered, even by people who love me dearly, out of my league?

Fuuuuck.

The Saddest Valentine

Don't worry. I am so rarely dating anyone on Valentine's Day that it's not really a holiday I dwell upon. I think there may have been a total of five V-Days upon which I was hooked up. I'm pretty sure at least two of them didn't believe in the holiday. At the time, I pretended not care about it either, but, here's a tip, men, women would have to be pretty impervious to the insidious nature of our culture not to care at all about Valentine's Day. If you're lucky enough to have a woman in your life today, be nice to her, even if she says she doesn't care about the Hallmark Holiday.

Anyway.

On one particular Valentine's Day, I was hooked up. I was dating a guy who was completely out of character for me. Some of you remember this time in my life. He was categorically good-looking, not cute-in-an-unconventional-way, like most of my dates. He also had muscles, which was weird for me, because they reminded me of nothing so much breasts. Curvy breasts, growing out of his arms. Breasts on his chest. Funny how the manliest man I ever dated always made me think of breasts when he took off his shirt.

The One With All the N's just got excited because she will use this as proof that I am a lesbian.

"Manly" and I met through the print-media personals ads. I was ahead of my time. Internet dating before we used the Internet to do it. He charmed me first with his voice on the telephone, deep and soft, like a plush carpet. He had a self-depreciating sense of humor, and a charming smile. Some things about him when we first met struck me as unusual especially since I'm such a pinko Commie liberal. He described himself as politically indifferent. He didn't even vote in every election. (What? They let you vote and you didn't line up to exercise your power? I don't understand.) He also served in the Army Reserves. Not a big deal, he said. Every month he would have one weekend when he would be unavailable for dates. That part actually sounded OK. I like my space. I just thought he would disapprove of my pacifist upbringing. And, let's be honest, I sort of wanted to convert him to the Way of Peace. I definitely wanted to make sure he voted in every election (even though it was likely that we wouldn't be voting for the same candidates).

Despite these differences we got along unusually well. Manly was very into nature, and he taught me the difference between white oaks and red ones. On one of our first dates, we sat on a blanket and watched a meteor shower overhead. He lived in a cabin on Medicine Lake and he would get up early in the morning to start my car when I had to drive back to Minneapolis for work. I secretly enjoyed being taken care of. Some feminist I turned out to be.

It all changed when, in January of 2003, after we'd been together for three months, he got word that his reserve unit was activated and called to serve in Iraq. The seriousness of the situation added some seriousness to our relationship that we wouldn't have given it otherwise. What was I going to do? Dump him because he was going to war? Unthinkable. Marry him before he left? Equally so. Instead, I just held onto him a little bit tighter, trying to enjoy the time before he left as much as I could. He told me that he put my name on a list. It was the list of people to call if something happened to him. It was at once flattering and horrifying. Of course, I belonged on the list, but there was no way I belonged on such a list. We only knew each other for three months, and my name was on the same list as the names of other men's wives and mothers. It was spelled wrong (Alia), but it was on the list.

The day he left was February 14, 2003. We got up early, in his little cabin, which was packed up and ready for him to leave. He put on his uniform, and I drove him to his base. We stopped to get gas, and he cursed that the guy behind the counter didn't volunteer to give him a discount for being in uniform, for leaving me for war. I didn't cry when he left my car. I didn't cry when I returned home. I composed a letter, in my little apartment, telling him that I loved him and telling him that I would wait for him. Such things probably shouldn't come up for the first time in a letter, but we had too little time in person to say them out loud.

That afternoon, I drove to Fort Snelling, where I was allowed to drive past the guards because my name was on that dreadful list. I boarded a coach bus full of wives and mothers and children and American flag t-shirts and red, white, and blue earrings. We drove to the hangar where our friends and boyfriends and husbands and fathers and wives and mothers waited for us in uniform. I was afraid. Afraid that I would be spotted as a fraud ("Where is your flag?"). Afraid that I wouldn't recognize him in his uniform when he was surrounded by other men in uniform. Afraid that he would not want me to hand him a letter that said "I love you", right before he went to war. Afraid that he wouldn't want to say it back.

The army gave me a red carnation. The army gave me a flower. I clutched it tightly as if it could help me recognize Manly in the sea of uniformity.

I did recognize him. Even though I had seen him hours before, I already missed him. I already felt like he was a stranger. He had to prompt me to hold his warm, dry hand in my clammy one, as we listened to speeches sending our lovers off to war. "Are we glad to be here?" said the chaplain. I half-expected a patriotic yes from the crowd. "No," whispered the pacifist. "No," came the thunderous response of the crowd of flag-waving family members.

I gave him the flower and the letter. We kissed, even though we both felt awkward doing it in public. He held the letter up, and then he was gone, and I was back on the bus full of quiet, grieving strangers.

I got home to a giant bouquet of flowers and a note, with the kind of things that it's better to say for the first time in person, but we never had time.

That day was sad. The next day I marched to protest the war with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and I felt all alone, because I had been in a much different crowd the day before. The following day was my first day of student teaching. Those three days were almost the hardest of my life. So was every day after his unit left training and actually went to war, and I had to hear about dead soldiers on the news. The day the phone rang and it was for "Alia" was the most terrible day of all, even though the news that prompted the call was not tragic. I hear they come in person for the truly tragic news.

We survived the six months he was gone. We did not survive his return. In the end, we were too different, and the "I love you's" felt more real on paper.

In the context of all of that, it's so much easier to be alone on Valentine's Day. Don't you think?

Dating that Feels Like Homework

At new teacher training this week, I found myself surrounded by that usual crew of early-married teachers. They look like people I'll be asking for hall passes in a couple of weeks, shiny-faced, bright-eyed, unwrinkled kids, but they're all sporting diamonds on their left hands. More power to them, I say, but when one of them told me that she didn't even know you could administer the Heimlich to yourself on the back of a chair, I suffered through a brief flash of envy. I've eaten a great many meals all by myself in my little apartment. Granted, I've never choked or needed to save myself, but I know exactly what to do if I ever do.

I've also had a birthday recently.

My birthday was the deadline for the end of the dating hiatus, and I was feeling like it would be nice to forget the Heimlich-on-the-back-of-the-chair trick. Furthermore, I ran into my first true love at the coffee shop on Tuesday. Now there's a scab I can still pick when I feel like watching myself bleed.

It's all driven me back to the dating world.

This time, I've landed on a website that promises me dates with potential. It's not that one with the right-wing Christian gay-bashing dates, but it's a little bit like that one, in that you don't get to search for dates until the website's algorithm determines that your personalities and dating wants and needs match in some way.

So the website sends you some matches, and then you can move a little slider bar right or left to indicate your interest in each person. Only I can't possibly tell how interested I am from a picture and a paragraph - unless they have some sort of obscenely hideous facial hair growing out of their upper lip, or they make horrendous grammatical errors in their essays. I feel like I should be able to tell, but I can't. Or, actually, to be brutally honest, I feel like moving all of the little slider bars all of the way left (to the "no spark" end), but I keep telling myself that I have to be more open in order to actually ever meet anyone, and so I procrastinate on moving any of my slider bars, because it's too hard to make a decision.

Meanwhile, every man who sees my profile and moves the slider bar even the slightest bit to the right generates an email of "interest". Seriously, I've gotten about one auto-generated email an hour from this thing. The emails bring up more profiles with more pictures and more cursed slider bars. I've stopped even opening them. I can't face it.

And what do you get if you both move the slider bar to the right? You get to move on to the free-response portion of the test. You choose some questions. He chooses some questions. And you both write essays.

I keep thinking that there must be a more fun way to do this. It'd be great, for example, if instead of slider bars and multiple-choice tests and short-answer questions, I could get flirtatious banter and dinner and flowers. Why can't dating be more like that?

Home Sweet Divot

I've had my bed for enough years, and enough of those years have featured me sleeping alone in it, that I've managed to wear away a me-shaped divot on one side of the mattress. There's something comforting about that indentation in my bed. It gives me a thrill similar to the one I feel because my space bar and home keys are shiny with wear. I made this. I did it all by myself, and not because I was trying to, but just because I used these things enough times that eventually they yielded to the weight of my body or to the gentle tapping of my right thumb enough times in just that one spot on earth.

How many nights did it take for me to curve the mattress to exactly fit just the way I sleep? How many words did I type so that my soft skin finally wore away the plastic beneath it?

At any rate, it's nice to be home to the one mattress in the world that is shaped this way. It's freeing to have instant access to the Internet any time I want it (although I'm trying not to want it quite so often, since I should be doing dishes or learning Calculus), and, even though I have had to spend the past two days at a conference for math team coaches, it's wonderful to have some measure of control over my own time again. This morning I ran for 40 minutes in the dog park, catching again that sense of rhythm I get from the sound of my feet on the ground and the feeling of air entering my lungs. I was molding the muscles in my legs not by trying to but by using them over and over again, wearing away a path in the dog park with my running shoes at the same time as the dirt whittled away at the tread on their bottoms.

Why Crushes are Better than Dates

Crushes never live with their baby's mama (even though they both date other people now). They don't have disturbing relationships with her that involve threatening to take the baby away or calling the cops on each other.

Crushes will be easy to talk to once you get over that stuttering. You'll have so much in common you won't be able to shut up.

Crushes will shave and wear a nice shirt for your date.

So, anyway, that's why my dating moratorium until August is still in effect. And P.S. I'm in the market for a new crush.

Fun Bunnies

My college roommate, Kristen, had a family parable about feeling left-out and unloved. It went something like this: Once upon a time, there was a little bunny who wanted to have fun with all of the other little bunnies, but they never invited him to join them, so day after day he sat on the sidelines watching all of their fun and games, and he was very sad and lonely. One day, he asked his mother why the other bunnies never played with him, and she suggested that he make his own fun. He should play his own games and have so much fun by himself that eventually all of the other bunnies would want to see what he was doing so they could be part of his fun.

Another friend (the one with all of the N's) says that I should have a baby by myself. It wouldn't really be by myself, she says, because I have loving and supportive family and friends. And I'm running out of time, and my hunt for dates has been largely unsuccessful anyway. You know the whole boring single-woman-wants-sperm-donor-baby story, because I'm sure you've read all about it in the New York Times magazine.

I caught myself, in mulling over this plan, thinking about that little bunny. The problem with the mother bunny's advice of making fun by yourself is that, when what you really want is companionship, frolicking by yourself just isn't all that much fun. Sure, you can play jump rope alone, and tiddle your winks in solitude, but if all you really want is company, then those other bunnies aren't going to be fooled into thinking that you're having all kinds of enviable fun by yourself. They're going to know it's a trap. And they're going to stay on their side of the playground away from your little bunny games, because you're going to reek of desperation and loneliness.

I'd be a good mom, and sometimes I'd probably have fun doing it even if I were all by myself, but the thing is, it would bring me farther away from what I really want. What I really want is a companion who will hold the rope while I jump and tiddle his winks against mine. (Why do all innocent little children's games have to sound like sex when I write about them?)

How to Live Alone

1. Realize first of all, that television is a crutch. Sometimes, your legs hurt, and you need a crutch, but most of the time, you can walk without one. Believe that you will dream of something to do if you turn off the TV, and, somehow, you will. One exception to this rule is when you're on a knitting kick, and then only if you knit a lot of rows while you watch. It is, of course, also OK to watch the complete Jane Austen which debuts on channel 2 on January 13.
2. Be aware at all times that the complete Jane Austen is only pretend. The real Jane Austen died alone, leaving behind only her pack of beautiful lies. It's OK to pretend that you are Elizabeth Bennett, but don't get carried away and pretend that Mr. Darcy exists and is about to rescue you from solitude. The key here is to embrace solitude. How can you do that, if you're forever expecting some dude to say, "Almost from the earliest moments of our acquaintance, I have come to feel for you a passionate admiration and regard."? Modern dudes won't say that. They'd totally get laid if they did, but they still won't. I may never understand men.
3. Get a dog, for God's sake. I don't know how you've lasted this long without one. He'll force you to get up in the morning. He'll sleep with you when no one else will. He'll watch your every move, and keep you from spending the day in your pajamas. You definitely need a dog.
   
4. Don't get cats. You shouldn't have to live with a litter box. What's the point of living alone if you have to scrape litter off the bottoms of your feet after you get out of the shower? Seriously. You'd rather have roommates than cats.
   
5. It's not really that hard to cook for one. In fact, whenever you make a meal, you are really making a week's worth of food. You are lucky this way. No one will eat up all of your leftovers and leave you without a lunch. You'll be eating the same food for a week, though, so you'd better make it good.
   
6. Go to the movies. Go out to eat. Attend political rallies. Do it alone. It's OK. No one is looking at you and feeling sorry for you. They feel more sorry for you when you sit at home alone, anyway. Go. Be. Do.
   

Secret Optimism

Despite being a rather depressive and pessimistic person (especially at this time of year), I do have a secret deep-seated belief that there are many men with whom I could happily spend the rest of my life. I also believe that if I keep looking, I'm bound to find one of them. Sometimes, I think that I've already let some of them go in my youth and my ignorance. But since I'm not a believer in the One True Love theory, it doesn't always make me despair knowing that those good men are long gone.

On the other hand I'm starting to think that none of my true loves dates online. Oh, well. I'll go back to joining stuff. Maybe I'll volunteer for some Democrat. I'm pretty sure all of my true loves are Democrats. I'll also continue to beg my friends for blind dates. Somehow I think this will work better than joining the lonely hearts online. Although, I must say, married people don't seem to take their responsibility of setting up their single friends very seriously at all. Come on, people. Be a pal. It's no skin off your noses.

And now I've become distracted by the word "deep-seated". I initially wrote it as deep-seeded, but, since Google is so easy I looked it up. It's "seated". Wouldn't it be better if it were the other way? It's firmly planted, right? So seeds. Plants. Get it? Oh, well. Stupid English never makes sense, anyway. That's why we should all do math all the time.

What I Want

What I really want right now is a connection. I want to stay up late into the night talking, because we can't think of anything not to say. I want to wake up the next day too tired to function, but blissful and somehow energized, because I can't wait to say the 24 more things I've thought of to say the next night. I want to feel excited for the phone to ring. I want to be sure about someone. I want to feel beautiful and smart and exciting, and I want to be able to make him feel that way, too. I'd love to come home to a meal cooked for me on some ordinary Tuesday. I want someone I can call when some lame very-special Christmas episode of "Bones" makes me tear up, so the tears can turn to laughter and snot, instead of moroseness and despair. I want a travel companion who knows how to take off on his own sometimes. Someone who could read books on the couch next to me while I grade papers. A warm place to put my feet at night. I want him to kick my butt into graduate school already. I want someone to plan with me. I want him to crack inappropriately surprising jokes that keep me from ever really anticipating his sense of humor. And if it's not too much to ask, on top of all of this, can he be tall and lanky, too, please, so that I feel like touching him? Often.

Have I squandered another perfectly good lifetime listening to Car Talk, or can I feel this way one more time again before I start knitting tea cozies and adopting stray cats, while I peek around my curtain and call the city about neighbors who don't shovel their walks properly?

Volunteering with Singles

So I joined the Single Volunteers Twin Cities, and yesterday I attended my first event. I wore a tight shirt and everything, even though we were packing boxes of food donations and I was bound to get sweaty. It turned out to be a bit of a waste of a tight shirt, because I was by far the youngest person there, and I'm not into old guys.

My job was to go through bags of food donated during the mail carrier food drive. I checked expiration dates and put the good stuff in boxes. It turns out a surprising number of people donate really old food to food shelves. It's kind of silly, since food shelves toss it out, but I tried to give the anonymous donors the benefit of the doubt, picturing really old people on social security desperately trying to find something in the back of their cupboard to share with poor folks. I don't know how accurate my picture was, but I didn't give anything (not even expired food) when the mailman asked me for my donations. So there you go.

Anyway with another attempt to find them under my belt, the mystery of the missing single men my age continues to this day.