Dating Made Simple

A bad aspect of being a preacher’s daughter is that you don’t get to start dating until you’re about 53, more of less. And even then, your parents are going to chime in with all sorts of advice that’s about a thousand years old. You think I’m exaggerating, but they really thought we were pushing the envelope because we kissed guys we weren’t engaged to.

Actually, kissing is a good way to show you how behind the times we really were. When I began dating my first real boyfriend in my 20’s, I started freaking out because I didn’t know how to kiss a guy! What if he tried to kiss me and I just stood there like a lump on a log!? All 4 of my previous kisses had been the type of pecks that 5-year-olds gave each other, and I was extremely worried about my lack of lip lock know-how.

Because of this, I enlisted AmyRose, who was always much more street savvy than me. Amy thought I would probably benefit from visual aides in this department so she drew a man’s face on her old bedroom wall (Mom and Dad were planning on re-painting it anyway). She added lipgloss all over “his” lips, I guess to indicate where they were since my eyes would presumably be closed for most of the routine. She then had me practice kissing the wall repeatedly. There are pictures of this, but I prefer they stay buried at the bottom of my file cabinet and never see the light of day.

So as you can see, my parents had conspired to keep dating as out-of-reach as possible up to the point of our leaving home. (After that, it was out-of-reach just because I was afraid of looking like an ignorant loser). This is why it was so fortunate for them when online dating exploded onto the scene. Finally! my parents thought, Dating in a way that requires ZERO physical contact! Just what we always wanted for our kids! They didn’t realize that you can only talk to a person for so long via email before you’re expected to meet him, but whatever.

My mother immediately set about trying to convince all of us to sign up for an online dating service. She figured we would plug in our statistics: medium height, green eyes, Protestant, and voila! the perfect man of God would appear via the information superhighway and woo us with his devotion and knowledge of ancient near eastern civilizations.

I believe that AmyRose was the only one of us never to succumb to Mom’s admonitions – she instead wrote all over the bedroom walls, in marker, about how dumb some of Mom’s ideas were.

Lindsay had to lie about her age to sign up, which is probably not a good way to begin a dating relationship anyway. Ryan tried it once or twice for a few days apiece. But I, ladies and gentlemen, insisted on beating my head against the brick wall of online dating for quite a few months, I am sorry to say.

Have you ever watch 3rd Rock From the Sun? I love that show. It's about a bunch of aliens disguised as people, and they're living together as a family unit, trying to figure out how to do life on earth. When Dr. Solomon finds out about "tipping" servers at a restaurant, he responds in typical Dr. Solomon fashion, which I don’t remember exactly, but it goes something like this:


"Now, my good man, you are our server this evening. Here is a stack of one-dollar bills sitting on the table. Every time you do something right, I will put a dollar over here for you. Every time you do something stupid, I will take a dollar out of that pile and give it back to me."


That is a good way to describe how my initial blind dates went... me adding and subtracting points in my head, based on the inanity and stupidity of the man sitting across from me...