One of my biggest fears when I was going through my divorce was the thought of dating again. The last time I’d been single was in… let’s see… 1999. I was certain a whole lot had changed since then. PLUS, I kinda just fell into most of my relationships in the past. A guy was a friend, then there was flirting, then I seemed to have a boyfriend. My mom still calls me a serial monogamist. Its just how I roll.
So here I was like 10 years later without a clue. I wasn’t in college anymore, so I didn’t have that built in outlet for meeting people. I was, at the time, unemployed so I didn’t even have work as a way to meet people. Then you throw in that pretty much all of my friends were married/in a relationship and I was at a complete loss. How was I supposed to even meet a guy, let alone find one to date? It was frustrating then and it is still frustrating now.
The first guy I “dated” was a college friend of my bestie. I really liked him, but the whole dating thing didn’t go so well. We lived 40+ miles from each other AND he worked in hospitality, so actually being able to work out times to see each other was a little tough. And of course since I was new to dating every little thing made me second guess our “relationship.” After a few months he just stopped calling/texting. And a few weeks later his Facebook status changed to “in a relationship.” Um, okay.
Texting, email, and Facebook REALLY does have an impact on dating. I guess we are now in this kind of instant gratification world. You don’t have to call someone’s home phone, leave them a message on their answering machine, and wait for them to call you back. You can call their cell and leave a voicemail. Or send them a text. Or an email. Or a Facebook message. And all these different modes of communication just make it worse. You can send a text which gets to them right away, but then you wonder if they don’t respond. Or if you see them post something on Facebook but you haven’t heard from them that day, you start to wonder. Do you see how all of this can cause a problem? Dating in this technology driven world is a bit difficult.
And then you add in online dating. Oh good-ness! Don’t even get me started on that one. The last 5 months on Match.com have been, in my opinion, a complete waste of time and money. You would think it would make things easier… being able to see pictures of someone online, read about them ahead of time, and then hide behind your computer screen while you send messages back and forth until you get up the nerve to meet in person. But that really only works if people respond to your messages or “winks.” And if you don’t, then you wonder what it was about your profile/pictures that caused them not to respond. And the last thing you can do is send them another message asking why they didn’t respond to your first one (believe me, i’ve wanted to do that a couple of times).
So here we are almost 3 years later and I’m still at a loss. I know that I probably just need to find activities where I will meet new people, but that is kinda hard too. It is all just hard. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I’m 40 🙂
