How We Meet

As 2017 came to a close, I read the following profile on Match.com:

I am retired from my career as a manufacturers’ representative but still enjoy working seasonally as a Washington, DC tour guide. I truly enjoy the history of the USA and especially of the Nation’s Capital. Love to meet people from around the country and the world. I enjoy relating the American political and historical experience through the lens of this gorgeous city Washington, DC. My pursuit, hobby and passion, is Italy and the Italian Renaissance. Enjoy travel. Love the poetry and the sensuality of blues music. I consider myself to be a warm, honest, loyal, thoughtful, and caring person. I have begun my pursuit to find that person with whom I am able to share my life, to celebrate the start of a new day, to find joy in each others’ happiness. I look forward to days spent in discovery, conversation and laughter. To sit with in a comfortable silence. Plan a garden or a trip around the world. Be at peace each night with the setting of the sun. I would so like to experience again the delight, elation and wonder of this type of relationship. Let it be.

This man’s code name was appropriately enough: Let It Be.

I was doing my second go-round on Match and felt jaded about the process. Every day Match sends you 24 photos of men to go through, decide if you like the way the man looks, and what he has to say in his profile. For me as a writer, how the man wrote was important. I suspected that Match men looked only at a woman’s photographs.
During my first go-round on Match, I met, dated a lot, and had some fun, but I never found my forever man. I told myself this person did not exist except in my imagination. The first time around I did what Match suggested. I went through every photo and even emailed those I felt I had something in common with.

The second time around I was determined not to spend much time on Match. I decided not to email anyone. Let them contact me. This time I posted more photographs of myself and used my old profile that goes:
I seek a companion for hiking, museum-going, conversation. I am interested in WWII, the European Theatre. I spent last summer in Paris, researching the Nazi occupation for a book. My first novel, THE LAST GOVERNMENT GIRL, won the Maryland Writer’s Prize for Best Novel. I am passionate about landscaping, impressionism, and hiking in the Shenandoah and along the Canal. I am a member of two gyms and enjoy exercising. The other day a friend told me I had “the right to bare arms.” Recently I bought a gorgeous midcentury modern and am learning to decorate it, although I remain an inferior decorator. Every morning when I look out my giant wall of glass, I feel like the luckiest woman in the DMV to live in this house. I have a small, but close family and a wide circle of friends, who will say I don’t take myself too seriously. My sister, whom I adore, says I am “too nice.”

By this time, I had read other Match women’s profiles and was saddened by their desperate tone. Too many women tried too hard to sell themselves. Their profiles mentioned how fun-loving, witty, and humorous they were. Also they included their athletic pursuits, yoga, running, kayaking, stand-up paddle-boarding, even doing yoga on stand-up paddleboards—oy veh! This made my knees hurt.

Profiles of both the women and men often said “I like to laugh.” And who doesn’t? All of us are over 60 and looking for that certain someone. If we didn’t laugh at this, we’d cry. Circumstances had gone very wrong in our lives, so that we found ourselves alone either because of a spouse’s death, which was my case, or through divorce.

Still I refused to sell myself. Take me or leave me. I like me, and what others think of me is none of my business. So my profile stated I sought: “a companion,” disingenuous of course. “A companion” evokes Lucy Honeychurch’s overbearing cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Companions Wanted might have been an advertising section in the back of a nineteenth century ladies’ magazine. I certainly couldn’t find who I was looking for there!

No, I wanted more than a companion. I was certain about some qualities, less certain about others. Most of all I wanted meeting him to happen naturally as it had in my previous relationships. But I had to give up this notion for it is not how people meet in the 21st century. We meet online. I was in cyberspace checking out profiles on December 29, 2017 when I broke my own rule and wrote three fateful words in an email to Let It Be. I wrote: well-written profile.

I know what you’re thinking: how English teacher of me, but I had read a lot of profiles by this time and was disgusted. Some could not even spell the code name they had chosen. Recently at my nail spa, I read in a women’s mag that a woman can tell how a man feels about her by reading his texts. If the man uses lots of LOLs, BTWs, B/Cs, it means he doesn’t care that much. He isn’t taking time to make his language precise. He’s bread-crumbing you, girl, meaning he’s sending a quick message to keep you on the line; your relationship with him will never go anywhere.

So Let It Be’s profile told me he was serious about the pursuit of his woman. He emailed me back to say he was new to Match, lived in McLean, liked my profile, and asked how we should proceed. I suggested coffee at Café Kindred. We met there on January 3, 2018 at 10:30 AM. My life has not been the same since.