My memory is a little dim on the exact time frame when I made the leap from IJL to internet dating. At some point after a period of dating detox, I decided to fling myself back out there; I just wasn’t sure where “there” was. I mean where do people go to actually meet people to date? The vast majority of my friends were married or engaged so it’s not like they would go with me trolling for potential dates. At the time I wasn’t meeting any desirable guys during my every day life and I didn’t know where to start.
I kept hearing about everyone finding people on the internet and decided to give it another go. Eharmony had annoyed the crap out me when I tried it a few years previously in between boyfriends, so I wanted to try somewhere else. When I think now about what finally made me quit Eharmony, it was that every guy I had met on Eharmony all swore that their favorite book was the “DaVinci Code” but seemed to know little about the actual book and way too many of them asked me about my hopes and dreams as part of the prescribed series of getting-to-know-someone-questions. I found this vastly amusing at first and then highly annoying. The forcing of conversational intimacy before I’d even met someone was disturbing. Eharmony would start out with picking out a few multiple choice questions to ask your match and they would do the same. Then you’d progress to asking people questions where they could provide a little more information. After that it moved on to something like mini-essays and then you could just send regular emails but through the site so the people you were talking with would still have no real idea how to contact you off of the server. I ended up eventually trying Eharmony again but first I turned to Catholic Singles.
Catholic Singles was certainly an odd pick for me. I’m not that devout a Catholic; now more often than not I’ll go to a Unitarian service or something different. But at the time I still somewhat identified myself as a Catholic and had heard okay things about the site, so I decided to give it a go. I really had wanted to try J-date as I’d heard awesome things about the people there, but they tend to want people to be actually Jewish and although my mother has always said she would like to be Jewish if they believed in Jesus and let her eat ham on her matzoh, sadly I didn’t think that would be enough.
Most of the people that I first saw on the site were highly odd. One guy’s screen name was “Eye Who Art In Heaven” which was not just creepy but also seemed slightly sacrilegious. I had a couple conversations with some guys but nothing developed for a while. About 3 weeks into my membership, I started talking with Justin*. We exchanged a few emails and decided to meet. Our first date was okay. Not great but not terrible. He was really into fantasy baseball. Every year he and his friends would go to a casino for the fantasy draft. They would wear suits and try to wheel and deal each other. I really couldn’t identify with that but compared with machine guns, euthanizing my dog, taxidermy, or similar, fantasy baseball didn’t seem all that terrible.
I wasn’t a smitten kitten but he was a decent guy and I had decided at some point that if a guy did not show obvious signs of being deranged, that I would go out with at least twice. I figured that nerves could be a factor for the first date, at least for the guy. By the time I got halfway through IJL, I was no longer nervous on first dates. Honestly what I needed to work to avoid was being so apathetic about the date that I canceled before it even happened, as after 10 or so crummy dates in a row I really started almost dreading them.
For our 2nd date, I suggested we meet at the Lebanese Taverna at Pentagon Row. One of my favorite restaurants, this place usually had a good crowd plus was right near his work so I thought it would be more convenient for him since he had been kind enough to head my way for our first date. He said that sounded okay and we settled on a time to meet.
Justin* showed up about 20-30 minutes late which wasn’t too cool. I wasn’t overly annoyed as I just hung out at the bar and chatted with some of the people there, but it was kind of inconsiderate of him. But all of that paled in comparison with what would happen next.
As we sat down and started looking at the menu, he started making all these weird faces and sighing. Then he started muttering about how he couldn’t eat this, he couldn’t eat that, etc. I started getting really annoyed at this point. I asked if he wanted to go somewhere else and he said no, that he would figure something out. A few more minutes go by and I told him that we really should go somewhere else if he didn’t like any of the food. He said he would have that problem no matter where we went. Then he told me he had inoperable stomach cancer and had a hard time eating anything.
I think my response was to stare at him blinking repeatedly, mouth ajar, totally unsure of what to say.
This continued for a while and then I moved quickly into repeated apologies and me feeling like a total ass. He said it was okay, that it wasn’t like he was going to drop immediately it was just that the particular kind of stomach cancer he had meant that the doctors couldn’t remove the masses as it would be too dangerous. So he spent a lot of time flying around the country to various specialists trying out different treatments.
We had a completely awkward conversation where I wasn’t sure what to talk about, what was okay to ask him. Neither of us had a great time. At the end of the date we shared a quick hug and then went on our separate ways. I didn’t know if he would want to go out again as we didn’t have all that great of a first date; but based on our 2nd date I didn’t want to ‘dump’ a guy who just told me he was sick. It turned out that we both kind of realized that we weren’t a good fit. He and I kept in touch for a while. He ended up meeting a more religious woman on the site and they were doing really well the last time we spoke. He’d tell me how he was doing and what new treatments he was trying. But it was a really awkward type of friendship. I don’t even know if I’d call it a friendship; more like we both felt strange completely severing all ties.
That was my only date from Catholic Singles. I was pretty freaked after that. I was so freaked that after a while, I eventually returned to eHarmony. That story will have to wait for another day as I don’t think I can do justice tonight to the guy who tried to massage me across the dinner table on our first date and knocked over my drink. Guess which part made me more upset…
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