Love and Other Tragedies

(2013-2014)

A terrible thing happened one day: my therapist told me to get a life, to go on dates. I took umbrage with this. Did he not think I had been doing that very thing for the last decade while my friends snapped baby pictures and coached Little League games?

My friend Lena is the worst of these offenders. I was in her wedding to Deke 10 years ago, and she was the most beautiful bride I'd ever seen. I remember looking longingly at her in her big, white dress and thinking, "She looks like a snowman."

Lena, Deke, and their 3 offspring live in a 4-bedroom house in the suburbs now. She is a Juice Plus consultant which means that she has a fun hobby while she tends to the more serious business of raising children. Lena posts many adorable pictures on the internet. Not only do I have to look at her perfect blond brood, but now, thanks to Juice Plus, I also have to face regular images of the beautiful "Tower Garden" she's growing to teach the children healthy living. Even the produce is mocking me! It knows I can't grow beans.

I myself live in a one-bedroom apartment with my cat, Mocha, who my friend Nikki assures me is getting fatter every day. I cannot help this. I feed her 1/3 cup of cat food in the morning and another 1/3 in the evening. It is not my fault if she has a slow metabolism, although I spend considerable time worrying that I'm not exercising her enough. How do you exercise a cat? I don't know.

Aside from gaining weight, Mocha is also excellent at leaving tufts of fur everywhere. I tried using a Furminator to groom her, but that ended with both of us mad and even more fur on the floor. Eventually I gave up and took her to a groomer. I paid $70 to have my cat groomed. I'm becoming *that* person, the one who spends more money getting her cat groomed than herself. Maybe that is why the psychologist thinks I need to start dating more.

The idea of dating exhausts me. Gone is my youthful exuberance in getting dressed up and going out with different men every week in an effort to find the "right" one. Now the thought of wasting 2 hours on someone boring or pompous or just okay is merely annoying. Nonetheless, I was commanded to go on dates, so on dates I was determined to go.

Online dating has many pitfalls but perhaps the worst is that there is only so much you can tell about a person from a few pictures and a short profile. That is how I ended up on a date last week with a guy who was... intellectually disabled.

"Couldn't you tell!?" cried Nikki, when I relayed this information later. Nikki can afford to be judgy because she has been married for 8 years. Also, she has 7 cats and a big house. People like her with all their houses and cats make me sick.

"No, I could not tell," I responded defensively. "His emails just sounded like, 'Hi, E. What did you do today? I went running and then ate tacos.' And you know, some men just can't write."

"So what did you do when you realized he was slow?" Nikki asked, bemused.

I will tell you what I did. I sat there for an hour and a half and talked to him, while the guy at the next barstool over looked on in wonder. You can't just be rude and leave because someone is a bit handicapped. Think of his feelings!

That experience put me off of dating for almost a whole week. Then another man asked me out and I knew there was nothing for it but to get back in the saddle. Sigh. This time, I was determined to stay positive and try my best to be charming. Watch out, World. Also, I figured that since he was a doctor and had quoted an actual poet, it was unlikely that he, too, would be mentally handicapped.

So I put on my highest heels and ventured into a wine bar in the Central West End. It started out all right, I suppose. He told me all the languages he knew -- Italian, German, French, English, and Latin-- and then I had to guess where his second home was, based on his accent. Then he told me lots of stories about his family's yacht. You wouldn't think one family could have an hour's worth of yachting stories, but they did. Then he moved on to their vacation home in the French Riviera and all the 5-star hotels he'd stayed in during his motorcycle trip through the Swiss Alps. He tried to teach me about the Venetian carnival season, but my eyes glazed over somewhere around, "After I left my apartment in Monaco..." 

In my head, I calculated that if I had talked for 2 minutes about international education, then he had been talking for 1 hour and 53 minutes. Could anyone think himself that interesting? Even if he did own lots of homes in Europe?

When he took a breath -- and believe me, I'd been watching for it for 20 minutes -- I said I was having a bad reaction to my anti-fungal medication and bolted for the door.

There has to be an easier way to "Get a life! Go on dates!" and yet I know there isn’t. If there were, certainly I would have found it by now. So I keep going on these dates, convinced that for every dozen bad ones, there is one good one. I told my single friend Casey this when we were at the art museum pretending to be classy. Casey created a summer schedule for us that includes salsa dancing, wine tasting, evenings of jazz, and several cultural festivals. This is all courtesy of her belief that the more we expose ourselves to crowds of tasteful people, the more likely it will be that single, straight males will notice us. You have to admire her tenacity and vision.

When I told Casey my theory about one good date out of a dozen, she wanted to know what actual research this was based on. A Harvard study? A Gallup pole?

“It’s based on me going out on actual bad dates,” I explained.

Casey, to her credit, thought that this source of research was even better than the professional, scientific kind.

See, that's why you cultivate friendships over relationships.