One of my friends has a client that wrote a book called The Ring Formula, How to Meet, Date and Marry Mr. Right.

He also has a blog.

I’m trying to be over this  ”Why Can’t a Black Woman Find a Good Man” meme, but something he said in one of his posts kind of struck me:

a man’s greatest fear is not commitment. Instead, his greatest fear is not marrying the woman of his dreams and, in turn, downgrading back into the less powerful and permanent bachelor Clark Kent.

My question, then: so he always has a roving eye? He’s always looking for something ‘better’?

I don’t know that am anyone’s dream woman, really.  It’s kind of depressing that I can’t bring myself to describe me as such. I hate a delusional chick, and me calling myself a man’s dream would be highly delusional.

Does any woman really feel like she is a man’s dream woman? Am I supposed to think that way?

I looked up some reviews of the book– none bad yet. A lot of people said Dr Tartt was able to bring the process down to a simple science. And basically, here’s what I’ve been saying to my “but you have a job and a place to live and a car and you’re self sufficient and men should love that” group of friends:

Newsflash: They don’t care. I mean, they care, just… not as much as you’d think they would. Men care about power, about feeling like the “head” of a relationship, about being needed, about being your man. They care about being visually and physically stimulated and being cared for and taken care of. They care about being made to feel important.

So for all my hard work and being independent,  it doesn’t mean as much as one would think it means. It does score me points in the ‘can handle myself’ and ‘responsible adult’ department.  My friends tell me all the time that they’d date me if they were a man.  I always laugh and say, “not unless you’re a man that thinks like a woman.” Those things I have, that you say make me a good woman, in my opinion only make me a good woman to a woman.

So, I’m trying to look at me from the perspective of a man. I wouldn’t date me. Honestly. Now to figure out why. And to change that.

On the dating front, I was talking to someone kind of nice at a dating site… but two weeks in a row he hinted at meeting up and never followed through with actually setting up a day and time. The second time, we had established a day and a location and then he went radio silent about a time. I haven’t heard from him since about noon, last Friday. *shrug*  I’m done.

I’m waging a war between being open minded, and knowing what I want and what I can deal with. It’s difficult. Kind of messy, inside my head.

This all your fault. ALL of you. Even if you read this blog but don’t comment, it’s your fault too!

The other day, when I was ‘Up In the Gym, Workin’ On My Fitness’, I had the highest number of visits. Ever. I have no idea why, still. But I was digging through my stats to figure out of it was an anomaly, or did I ping the damned blackberry forums again, or am I really that interesting?  I’m not really that interesting.

Anyhow, there was a term that someone used in search to find my blog. One of my weird habits is that I like to search the same terms to see if my blog will pop up in my search. It never does. Anyway, it DID lead me to this relationship forum that I used to post on. I lost the web address two laptops ago and hadn’t posted there since just after FK and I split. 

I had to dig up my login information, but apparently I love the sight of my own words because I looked up all my old posts. Some from dates I’d had before I met FK and then the post from after I met him, and two weeks in, four weeks in, a few months in, so happy at 5 months in and then we were done.  It started off so great, and then I started making posts about how I was confused about something that happened or things he said vs things he did and the ‘wtf’ posts became more and more frequent. I chalked it up to having never been in a relationship before and tried to take advice to heart. It was actually kind of nostalgic to read my reaction to our first few dates. I was so sure he was the One.

So sure. Meh.

Anyway, I had to close the page because I was getting all misty. My eyes skipped along the rest of my posts until I came upon a post that made me roll with laughter. I remembered that one! It was a post from when I was at Yahoo! Personals. Form letter, no doubt, but I like to call this one, “Dude, Step Away From the Thesaurus!”

.. am looking for a single woman who is a Christian, career working woman, physically attractive, in good health, sensual, delightful, exquisite, attention giving, has a loving demenor, tantalizing, succulent, mentally and emotionally stable. I am also looking for a single woman that is sweet, spiritual, sincere, special, dependable, genuine, loving, loveable, easy to get along with, thoughtful, supportive, understanding, caring, consoling, nurturing, respectable, reliable, trustworthy, family oriented, wise, intelligent, great communicator, good listener, nice, kind, cheerful, a happy person, someone who can treat a man nice, sacrifical, good mannerisms, good attitude, liberal and opened minded, can express her love willing, openly, and support a good man effectively, considerate, compassionate, romantic, warm-hearted, and just a little kinki(smile).

I seek a single woman who loves and respects her father and currently has a positive relationship with him. I also seek a woman that soft, delicious, affectionate, humble, classy, humerous, tender, patient, good-tempered, desirable, generous, huggable, squeezable, blissful, blossemed, hospitable, assessable, reliable, responsible, motivated, loyal, and she can keep her man first, continually pleased and satisfied (smile).

Right? Hilarious. Just the general humor of the entire note is… wow. Don’t want much do you?  What’s even funnier is I HAD ALREADY MET HIM.

This guy was smarmy and wasted my time.  He made me meet him in a bank parking lot. It was clandestine and NAS.TY. I shiver at the thought of him. Claimed it was ‘really safe cause it was right off of a busy street’. Proceeded to ‘interview’ me as to my worthyness to date him (because women who were in their 40′s were wanting to date him… uh huh) and there were plenty of fish in the sea. First he berated me for not giving him my phone # when he asked for it– because he was in such high demand that he expected to get what he asked for and if he didn’t, he could just move on to the next person. Then he berated me for being cautious and choosing to remain near my car. I am 5′ 3″, he is well over 6′ and I’d guess to be about 250ish. He scared me, and he made a lot of assumptions about me, my sexuality and whether or not I was interested and would be devoted to him.

When I emailed him later that I was not interested in pursuing anything with him, he said that I needed to be more open minded and trusting of people, and that I needed to work on my interpersonal and nonverbal communication skills– he said I appeared to be closed off and untrusting and not open. DUH. I really wanted to write him back with some choice suggestions for him, but I refrained. And promptly forgot him.

Two years later, I got a message from him on Yahoo!, like we’d never met and had an awful exchange. Really, you can’t remember women you’ve already met?  All I remember of his ad was that it was unimpressive. It may as well have said: Wanted: SuperWoman. Qualifications: None.

I wasn’t a paying member at the time so I couldn’t respond. I considered it, so I could send this:

Thank you for your response to my profile. However, sir, we have already met and you have already deemed me to be unsuitable to date you. Therefore, I would like for you to go away, leave hastily, hurry on, clear out, depart, leave, move, pull out,abandon, abdicate, absent, beat it, blast off, blow, cut out, decamp, desert, disappear, emigrate, escape, evacuate, exit, get away, git, go forth, make feet, march out, migrate, move on, move out, part, perish, pull out, quit, remove, retire, sally forth, say goodbye, scram, secede, set forth, shove off, slip away, split, start, start out, take leave, tergiversate, troop, vacate, vanish, and withdraw.

*shrug*

This reminder is going a long way toward killing any desire I had to return to online dating.

So, I did it.

I got the email today. The piece of HIM that I’ve become so accustomed to getting every week that it seems normal. It usually comes on Mondays, but it must have got hung up somewhere because it came today.

I LOVE email, and I have my gmail roll to my blackberry with a special notifier that lets me know I have mail. When I hear that jingle, I always feel a little happy and roll on over to that account and log in to see what gems await me. I subscribe to WAY too many blogs and newsletters, so it’s usually something I’ll want to save for later. Today, that email address and the form letter and usual impersonal format, the one that says ‘you’ve got matches, come look at  ‘em!’ was just… screaming at me.

But it wasn’t screaming, ‘click me! He might be waiting!’ This time I didn’t feel a warm fuzzy and remember HIM because that was where I met him. I felt pathetic and loser-ish for trying to hang onto HIM via a random email that had nothing to do with him. I felt ridiculous for hanging on for so long, for getting in my own damn way, for setting up my own roadblocks and helping to build my own wall.

Yeah, time to let go, I told myself.

So I logged in. And I deleted my account. It asks you why you’re deleting your account, and I sort of laughed at the reasons they listed:

• Did you find someone?
• Did you not find enough people?
• Did you have issues with the website?
• Did you give up?

The last one is kind of humorous, actually. But nowhere in the list did it say, “Are you not interested in using this site at all and were just hanging onto your profile hoping to remain some sort of pseudo contact with a man that isn’t even on this site anymore and furthermore broke up with you via email? Cause if so, good riddance, sister!”

That option wasn’t available. So I laughed and chose the last one and closed it out. For good. And didn’t feel badly about it. No pangs. No anxiety attacks. No regrets. I went on with my day and didn’t even think about it until a few minutes ago when I realized I wanted to blog about how easy it was.

Since I was feeling brave, I went ahead and broke up with Piz.za Hut emails too. Tomorrow I am pretty sure I am  getting an email from Wi.ng Zone. GONE!

Sweeping changes, people. SWEEPING changes!

I make myself laugh.

Let’s chat about something sort of taboo. Something people used to think was the sign of the Lahoooosaherrrrr. Something people attribute to the desperate and needy and undateable.

That’s right. Internet dating.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for any amount of time, you know that I have a personal vendetta against eScamyourmoney (eHarmony), for no other reason than it didn’t work for me and it seemed scammish when I joined. Twice. Whatever, shutup.

There’s a lot to the story, and someday I’ll get drunk and rant it all, but HATE. IMMENSELY. And their commercials SUCK. I love how they pretend they’re not a hideously overpriced, judgmental, overly religiously based internet dating site. eH is no better or worse than Match or Yahoo! Personals.

So anyway. A long, long time ago, back when the internet was something nerds used to log into their AOL accounts and their alt.geekshit.incomprehensibleterms.net chatrooms, online dating was a really innovative way to meet new people. It was a very romantic idea to think that your Prince Charming, or reasonable facsimile thereof could be around the corner, or across town, and you’d never know it, and if it weren’t for the internet, you might never meet them.

The internet was rare, and it was slow and you had to be really dedicated to getting online. It was hard work, and it required a home computer and a little bit of know how. The people that you’d meet online where there on purpose. They weren’t just bored, or paying bills and happened to jump in a chat room for a second (online banking didn’t yet exist, neither did Pandora. Or for that matter iPods! Hang on, lemme turn the tape over on my Sony Walkman Sport Edition– this walk down memory lane is taking awhile). [Read more →]