Pittsburgh Internet Dating Stories

Last night, Cathy Day gave a reading from her new book, Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love, at the Joseph Beth Booksellers in the Southside Works. She drew a large crowd – the booksellers kept having to bring out more chairs.

I went with a guy friend I met on Match.com, and saw a couple of familiar faces in the crowd, including Samatha Bennett, award winning columnist for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and fellow blogger Cynthia Closkey (My Brilliant Mistakes), but luckily no men from Match dates gone bad.

Cathy is very funny, and anyone who makes me laugh gets my $25 – I bought her book and started reading it last night. I already found passages that have rung really true for me. Here’s one:

“That’s when hits me. I’m not looking for dates in Pittsburgh. I’m not looking to get laid. I’m really not even looking for a husband. What I want, what I need is a family. This realization surprises the hell out of me, and something completely absurd and incongruous pops into my head [a scene from the movie Shall We Dance in which Susan Sarandon says:]

‘We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet…I mean, what does one life really mean? But in marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, every day. You’re saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will witness it. ”

- Cathy Day, Comeback Season, page 37

I had struggled for years to get out of my marriage. Whenever I brought up the subject, my ex would say “I’m not leaving my kids. If you want out of this marriage, you leave.” Since I refused to leave my kids too, we’d reach an impasse.

We might have gone on forever, not realizing how unhappy we were, if he didn’t take 6 week long business trips each summer. When he was gone, I felt a weight lifted – I was lighter, more free, happy and when he came back I always crashed.

Finally, he agreed to leave.

This should have been a great victory for me but I found it very hard, and I couldn’t understand why. But I think this passage helps.

For 20 years I had a witness to my life, someone listened to me, someone who noticed. Now he might have noticed all the wrong things – like when I gained 5 pounds or had bitten down all my fingernails, or laughed too loud , or sat the wrong way, or befriended the “wrong” people. But I was still noticed by someone. I still counted.

When we separated, even though I stayed in the same house, with the same 3 kids, kept the same job, and outwardly had very little change to my daily life, I felt unanchored, like I was floating around lost.

Maybe part of that was not having someone who “had” to listen to what happened at the office today, or how Zack was doing in World History, or what piece of furniture the dog chewed.

My desire to blog might have come from the same need to have a witness to my life. And the blog has had a lot fewer entries lately, partly because I am in a relationship, which means I’ve got someone to listen to my stories again (even if his eyes do glaze over at times if I talk too much about office politics…)

As I read through Cathy’s book, I’ll give more comments. I think it’s great that we have a local writer who has a published book on online dating, especially one that’s so brutally honest – and in her own name.

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Beth called me the other day. She was upset with her ex-husband, Fred. Fred had taken their teenagers (16 year old twins – a boy and a girl) out to dinner Tuesday night and had announced to them that he had gotten a vasectomy a week earlier. Beth had been trying to very circumspect in her dating, knowing she was setting an example to her teenagers, and was very upset.

“He might as well have announced to them that he was having sex” she fumed. “Teenage kids don’t want to think of their parents doing ‘it’. And now what about all my lectures about not having sex outside of marriage? They are hardly going to listen to them anymore knowing their father is sleeping around!”

I tried to calm Beth down, and gently reminded her that she was dating and was hardly celibate herself.

“But I’m not telling the world that.” she said, “and I am certainly not telling my children!”

Beth was actually glad Fred had had the medical procedure. He had been dating a lot of younger women, and her fear had been that he would remarry and start another family, and then forget about his older children. She had 4 years of double college tuition ahead, and had been counting on his help – if he remarried and had a baby and day care to pay for, he might have a harder time swinging it.

But what about the effects of this on her kids?

She went back and had a heart-to-heart with them, and found they were not nearly as upset as she had been. In fact, they were glad they would never be competing with younger siblings for his attention and resources. As for the fact that he was having intimate relations ouside of marriage, her daughter just rolled her eyes. “Mom, it’s not like we didn’t already know that! Dad hardly kept it a secret.”

Then she looked at Beth and said, “Now if I found out you were having sex, that would be so gross. I just can’t imagine it, and it would really bother me. But Dad? I would expect it.”

So it turns out there is still a double standard (at least in Beth’s daughter’s eyes) about sex. I know men who would be secretly proud to find out that their sons were getting some, but really upset if their daughter were.

Is this your experience, or is this just among a few people in the Mt Lebanon Catholic School crowd?

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