A String of Saliva and a Nose Full of Nickels

Since the departure of Sweet John, a man I met online and dated for almost a year, I've been wondering: Am I willing, much less ready, to return to online dating, to pull on the wet swimsuit of ridiculous usernames and perfunctory communications with men who for all I know are 20-year-old women calling themselves Roger and plotting to swindle me? Or worse, 40-something men actually named Roger and plotting to kill me?

I have always had mixed feelings about online dating, part of it stemming from being born toward the end of the Baby Boom. It set me up to embrace much of what the Information Age has brought but be baffled by the rest. And I'm ambivalent about online dating. Through it, I have crossed paths with some very weird people and credit gut instinct, a modicum of smarts, and an army of angels for the fact that nothing seriously harmful has happened to me. Then again, online dating is the reason I have some of my closest male friends, because that's what becomes of love interests when you don't become a couple but the next best thing happens.   

I had a knee-jerk reaction after Sweet John, resulting in a message to some man on Match.com whose hobbies included trumpet-playing. What he'd written about himself was neither intriguing to me nor off-putting. Judging from his picture, he wasn't handsome but seemed likable.

Oh, why not?  I thought, and typed:

Hello, TootingMan:

I enjoyed reading your profile. If you'd like to communicate further, please let me know. 

Hoping to hear from you -

SickOfThis

The next day there was a message from TootingMan saying that sure, he’d be happy to become better acquainted. He included his name (real, I assume) and a phone number in case I’d like to chat, which at that point I would not. I messaged back, ignoring the chat part, and we shared a brief, dull exchange of about four messages ending, by some weirdo miracle, in a date for coffee that next Wednesday. 

Wednesday found me pondering what business I had using an online dating site. I really should take a break from it until I've adjusted to the new me. You see, life has just plopped me at a scary and confusing crossroads. About to turn sixty, I have changed so radically and so recently that my head spins from it. Not long ago, I let my gray hair grow in, a decision for which I have no regrets. But to borrow from Leonard Cohen, suddenly "I ache in the places where I used to play." I'm finding that weight gain lurks in the bushes ready to jump me if I eat so much as a candy bar, and will cling to my wobbling frame unless I work out for five hours a day over the course of the next three weeks while eating only kale. Overnight my feet became drier than the BBC News Hour. 

That, of course, is not true; nothing could be drier than the BBC News Hour. 

As the date loomed, I found myself willing to go, but lacking the happy little jump in my stomach I've often felt when meeting someone new. I checked my messages at noon, saw that he was canceling because a trumpet gig had come along and was surprised by how relieved I felt.  

Then I looked at his picture again. In it he was laughing, and a string of saliva stretched from the roof of his mouth to his tongue. The string was obvious, so why didn't I notice it before? And his nose was huge; it was splayed across his face, resembling the underside of a shovel. 

I thought of the W.C. Fields movie The Bank Dick where a little boy looks at Fields then asks his mother, "Mommy, doesn't that man have a funny nose?" The mother replies, "You mustn't make fun of the gentleman, Clifford. You'd like to have a nose like that full of nickels, wouldn't you?" 

Please understand, I don't put a lot of stock in "attractiveness," whatever that is. But what made me look at that picture, read a profile that wasn't interesting to me, share four messages that did nothing to spark my interest, and arrive at the conclusion that I should reach out? 

Maybe subconsciously I wanted someplace warm to keep my nickels.

Is it My Fault He Was a Fraud?

I love men, but like unrefrigerated mayo at a Fourth of July picnic, men don't love me back. 

I'm still sorting out an experience where there was enough of what I can only call malevolent relationship weirdness going on that for just a minute, I wondered if it was my fault.  

Was it my fault that after nearly a year of dating a man, he told me something jaw-droppingly "surprising" about himself (no, he wasn't married) followed by his unilateral decision that this issue was too big an obstacle for a continued relationship? And all just one week after encouraging me to be freer with him? 

When he told me all this I cleverly pointed out: "But this is just one week after you encouraged me to be freer with you." 

It seems that when I became freer with him, I became happier with him and we couldn't have that in part because the surprise he'd just shared, aka the bomb he'd just dropped,  might not be conducive to my continued happiness. 

When asked, "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" he replied, "Because you couldn't have handled it sooner."

Interesting how Jack Nicholson here knew what I couldn't handle when I'd handled much bigger bombs from much better men. 

"What do you want to say to me?" he asked, dipping his head tenderly to one side so that it appeared he really cared.

"I have nothing to say to you," I replied.

"Well, if you did have something to say to me, what would it be?" he coaxed.

I won't quote myself here because my response was lengthy and contained a lot of Fs. 

He smiled and said he understood.  

It would be a huge leap for me to imagine how this man could profess to know what I could or could not deal with much less understand how I felt. For me it had as much to do with the deceit I perceived as the revelation itself.  

And that's where I come in again: Was this somehow my fault?

Maybe it was and maybe this is the reason: Maybe I just happened to attract a man who knew not that his secret was something I couldn't handle, but that it was something I should never have to handle. And instead of being open with it, or better yet, not pursuing me in the first place, he helped himself to almost a year with me under false pretenses.

In short, maybe I'm the reason because I'm the one who just happened to attract a fraud.