Pittsburgh Internet Dating Stories

I  came across this doing research for a client…  a family therapist and marriage counselor. I loved the last paragraph.  (This is from www.barbaradeangelis.com)

HOW SOON AFTER GETTING DIVORCED SHOULD SOMEONE START DATING AGAIN? HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU’RE READY TO HAVE A RELATIONSHIP?

It all depends on circumstances surrounding your divorce. The more wounded, angry or victimized you feel about your break up, the longer you need to wait before even thinking of getting involved again. If your relationship ended very badly or suddenly, you will need more time than if the break up was mutual and long overdue. If you have children, you will probably need more time to stabilize the family than if you and your mate didn’t have kids. If there was infidelity, you will definitely need a longer healing period than if the marriage ended amicably. Understanding the four stages of recovery mentioned earlier in this section will also help you identify where you are in your post-relationship process, and therefore, when you’re ready to get involved again.

A few important cautions: Don’t jump into a new relationship just to fill up the emptiness and avoid facing your pain. Don’t fool yourself into thinking your former partner was the problem, and now that you’re done with him or her, all you need to do is find someone else. (Remember–you chose that person…Find out why before you choose someone else. And after reading through these advice sections, I’m sure you know that I am going to tell you that you need to do some deep emotional work on both understanding and healing your past, as well as getting clear on how to avoid making mistakes in the future.

Now, it’s possible that in spite of everything I’ve said, the Universe will suddenly deliver a wonderful new partner into your life very soon after your break up, and in the midst of your healing process. Please–if you find yourself falling in love with a wonderful person who is committed to his growth and supportive of yours, who acknowledges your need to heal, and who is everything you’ve ever wanted, don’t say “Could you come back in about nine months?” Grab on to him, and thank God for bringing you someone to keep you company during your recovery, and even aid you in the process. Love is a gift and has it’s own sense of cosmic timing that is often unfathomable.

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Marriage On and Off the Rocks

A friend of mine, Chris Posti, is publishing a book, Marriage On and Off the Rocks. This book contains 24 true stories of men and women who have gone through difficult times in their marriage – some have been able to keep their marriages together and others have not.

I was interviewed for the book and was pleased to find that my story made the cut – under a fictitious name of course (you won’t find BlueEyes1962 in the book!)

Chris says, “It is my hope is that these true stories will serve as a mirror, showing the reader what he or she needs to do to have a successful marriage or a successful life after a divorce, whether or not they decide to remarry.”

My story is an old and familiar one, which is probably why it is included. I married the wrong man for the wrong reason, then tried desperately to make it work for 20 years, even while it floundered on the rocks. Freedom came when I finally abandoned ship.  I am now dating a wonderful man, but I doubt I would have looked at him twice 25 years ago. Then, I wanted someone who would “save” me and take care of me – now I know the only person who can do that it me.

Because I am freed from needing a protector/provider/alpha male I can have an equal relationship with a real man.  It’s so wonderful – I have never had this before. When I was younger I was looking at utility (Will he be a good Dad? Will I be able to stay home and raise me own kids? Will he keep me safe?) and never thought of the price I might have to pay for these things. Now I don’t want anything from a man except to really know him and love him, and be known and loved back.

Chris takes real stories such as mine, presents them in our own words, and asks questions to make you think. I  encourage you to check out Chris’s book (for sale Aug 10) and her blog: http://www.marriageonandofftherocks.com/

PS. May I make another plug for a dear friend of Chris’?  Bernice Boyden, through her company, Success Matters Coaching & Consulting,   coaches people through transitions in their lives – job changes and personal changes, including divorce.  Her business is young, and the website is still under construction, but you can find it at http://www.successmatterscc.com

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Dear Friends in Mt Lebanon and the South Hills:
Do you know any women who are recently divorced and who could use a little camaraderie over the holidays?  I’d like to start a very informal little group to meet for coffee (or wine or beer) a few evenings before the holidays.

The dates I picked out of the blue are:
• Friday Nov 21, 7:00 – 9:00 PM and
• either Friday Dec 12 or Dec 19.

Please think about who you know who might be missing their “family” and could use the company of other women going through the same thing.  I had a hard time last Christmas, and really feel for anyone who is going through this.  I could use some support but also want to reach out to other women in the same situation who I don;’t know who might enjoy a sympathetic ear .

Could I ask you if you would be so kind as to send this link to your friends (those happily married, like many of you, might know someone who is not).

Please feel free to have anyone call or email me with questions.  We would meet at my home in Mt. Lebanon. I can be reached at connellyp@mac.com

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My friend (and cleaning lady) Peggy is dating a guy she really likes, and she we as telling me about the trials he is going through with his ex.  They had been married for 15 years, had 3 kids together, and a few months before she left him she had major cosmetic surgery done – the whole nine yards – breasts, lipo, tummy tuck.   The worst of it was, as Peggy explained:

“He spent $20,000 on her – and he didn’t even get to benefit.  Before she had even healed, she was gone!”

It made me think – I often noticed before a couple announces their divorce that the wife suddenly starts looking really good.  We called it the “Divorce Diet.”  I guess this is just a new take on that!

PS.  I just googled the term “Divorce Diet” and it seems that it really refers to the weight people lose after their divorce – often unintentionally, because of the stress.  Here’s an example:

I’ve heard people jokingly refer to the weight you lose when your marriage breaks up as “the divorce diet,” so it seems that losing weight is really common in these circumstances. It’s been really dramatic for me…I lost almost 25 pounds in the 5 months since my husband left me, and I didn’t have that much weight on me to begin with: I went from about 135 to about 110, and I’m 5’4″.

I’m just grateful that my body responds to stress the way it does: when I’m truly stressed out I can’t eat, but I can sleep like a champ…I use it as an escape. The opposite reaction– not being able to sleep, but wanting to eat everthing in sight–would have been *much* worse, and I know that happens to some people….

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Just what goes on Sundays at your place?
If I meet a hot guy…here’s the average Sunday…morning sex…coffee…sex…shopping…dinner with the family…see a movie…wine…night sex. But that’s sunday, not everyday can be sex 3x’s a day, just sundays…well okay saturday’s too!

Job: medical/dental
Which virtues give you most of your self confidence?
The fact that I could write a prescription that would render you unconscious. (Just Kidding)

If you could ‘Do Lunch’ with anyone, who would it be?
That’s an easy one, Osama Bin Laden. That way when he wasn’t looking I could put a triple dose of anthrax in his food and that terrorist moron would ‘drop dead’!!

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I think if I could change something about myself it would be to never have did so much LSD in the 60s, no, wait I was born in the 70s-nevermind….

Someone may want to say “hello”, but not know how to get the ball rolling.
WELL, THEY COULD ALWAYS COMMENT ON MY BEAUTIFUL HAIR, MY BEAUTIFUL BROWN EYES, MY FLAWLESS SKIN, MY BODY BEAUTIFUL…

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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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More real quotes from online profiles of men and women in the Pittsburgh area:

About me and what I’m looking for:
I am looking for a guy with an air conditioner. Its really hot outside and very hot in my bedroom at night. I enjoy the simply things in life — cold air. Once the summer is over, I am ok with going back to being single.

About me and what I’m looking for:
i am beuatiful and thin i will do anything fun i like to listen to music i love animals im very smart. i had many boyfriends but no marriges one was close but he died in a car accident ten months ago.

About me and what I’m looking for:
I am a gay man trapped inside a womans body! Yeah, figure that one out. If we ever talk I’ll explain that.
I have been described as crazy, unique, silly, weird, you know, the usual complimentary terms for a woman (oops, I meant for a gay man). I like to think of myself as unique.

About me and what I’m looking for:
I’ve played the hand I was delt NOW I’m ready to stack the deck in my favor. The late Erma Bombec wrote” Life happens when your not looking”But boy I am looking this time-so bring it on.

About me and what I’m looking for:
I like adventure and will adapt to almost any setting. I am new here so I don’t know what to say. … I give up.

What is Your Religion?
I’m Orthodox Christian. My faith is very important to me. That said, I don’t expect anyone else to understand, so I don’t push my belief system on anyone. All those who do can suck it.

What is Your Religion?
I am a God-Fearing woman who is a practicing Catholic. However, I’m not happy with the actions of the Catholic Church! Plus… since I’m divorced, I’m going to HELL when I die! (ha ha ha!) WHY DOES CHURCH WINE TASTE LIKE MAD-DOG?!?!

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I got a knock on my door an hour ago and it was my new neighbors, Pete and Margaret. I had slipped an invitation for a “Leap Day Adult Neighborhood Mixer” under their door earlier today. They moved in before Christmas, and I had tried many times to introduce myself to them then – running over in the cold with the same plate of home-baked pecan shortbread cookies (drizzled in chocolate) about a half a dozen times before I gave up and ate the cookies myself.

Some of the neighborhood ladies thought it would be a good idea to have an adult mixer – that is, invite the men too – to supplement our weekly “Ladies’ Respite Hours” and I volunteered to host. Something about the Leap Year and Feb 29 captured my imagination, and I sent out a little invitation with a photo of someone leaping and the quote “Leap and the Net Will Appear” (this has been my motto for the last week – thanks Susan!)

Anyway, Pete and Margaret had dropped by to tell me they couldn’t come to the party, but they wanted to say thank you for the invitation. I herded them in out of the snow so I could hear their story. I had heard parts of it from neighbors and now wanted it from the horse’s mouth.

Pete (New Jersey, 50′s, divorced, 3 children in college and high school) and met Margaret (Mt Lebanon, 40′s, divorced, 2 children in middle school) through eHarmony.com on Sept 11, 2008. They emailed each other for about 10 days before Pete drove 7 hours from New Jersey to meet Margaret. A month later they had bought the beautiful stone house next door and were married. It was quick but they were both sure, and they were now enjoying getting to know each other better.

This was Margaret’s first attempt at online dating, but Pete had tried some of the other sites, and he hadn’t liked them. He enjoyed the guided email conversations of eHarmony, and felt that by the time he met Margaret he really knew her.

Pete told me that it was only after he met Margaret that he realized that he had never been in love before, and of course that made me really like him.

I am an hopeless romantic and I love happy endings.

Pete and Margaret – welcome to the neighborhood – we wish you all the best!

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Cathy Day writes about her experiences with Chemistry.com in this excerpt from her book, Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love:

My credit card bill drops through the mail slot, and there’s another $99 charge from Chemistry.com. How can this be? The last time I talked to them, I said I wouldn’t be renewing my membership. So I get on the horn with Chemistry.

“How may we help you today?”

“Yes, I’m calling about an incorrect charge.”

The customer service concierge looks up my account information. “I see that you were charged for another three-month membership.”

“Yes, well, I called you guys a few months ago to complain about the lack of response I was getting, and at that time, I told you I didn’t want to renew my membership.”

The concierge explains that this is not the proper procedure to cancel a membership.

I ask, “So calling customer service and saying, ‘I don’t want to renew,” isn’t the right procedure?”

No, it is not. Apparently, when I joined Chemistry in July, I agreed to their automatic renewal terms. Apparently, I was supposed to cancel my membership online, not over the phone. And I cannot cancel my membership now, today, and receive a pro-rated refund. There’s a deadline after which you’re locked in for the full three months, and that deadline came and went—two days ago.

The concierge says, “Also I see that, since the automatic renewal went into effect, you have used our services.”

I laugh. “No, I haven’t.”

“Yes ma’am, you have,” the matchmaking concierge insists. “I see here that you logged in a few weeks ago and communicated with a Robert?”

Robert the Gambler! I forgot about that. I wanted to ask him a dumb question: “When you say that a woman must love to gamble, do you mean that literally or figuratively?” The answer—literally—is going to cost me $99.

“Look,” I say, “I wouldn’t have logged in if I thought it was going to cost me anything. I assumed you were giving me free time on my membership, like you do for men.”

Silence. “Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I would like to ask you one question. How many male members do you have within a twenty mile radius of Pittsburgh?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have that—”

No! Strike that! How many ACTIVE male members do you have within a twenty mile radius of Pittsburgh?”

“We don’t have that information available.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you do! Somewhere in that computer of yours, I’ll bet you know exactly how many men use Chemistry in the Pittsburgh area. I’m a consumer, and I deserved to know that information so I could decide if I was going to get my money’s worth, because let me tell you, I did NOT get my money’s worth from your service.”

Pause. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, but we can’t make any guarantees. Basically, we only provide a means for people to communicate with each other.”

“Communicate…with…each…other,” I say, drawing those words out. “Exactly. Look in your computer there and see how many men actually responded to my profile.”

“I see a Rick…”

“Yes, Rick, who informed me that he hasn’t paid for his Chemistry membership in a long time. He told me that he thinks you guys don’t have enough men on your roll to satisfy female customers, so you just keep giving men like him free renewals!”

“No, ma’am. That is not our policy.”

“Aren’t you owned by the same company as Match.com?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Well, here’s what I think. You guys were sending me profiles of men who don’t actually subscribe to Chemistry. They subscribe to Match.com. You borrowed their information from Match to artificially inflate your rolls and keep women like me happy!”

“No, ma’am. That is not our policy.”

“Why should I have to pay $99…TWICE…when a man doesn’t have to pay anything? That is a discriminatory. You’re taking advantage of women.”

“No, ma’am. That is not our policy.”

I’m so mad, I don’t know what to do with myself. “You’re not going to do anything to help me, are you? You’re going to charge me another $99 and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it?”

The concierge maintains a neutral tone. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“Put this in your computer. When this three-month membership is over, it’s over. Got it?”

“Yes. I’ll take care of it.”

“Good!”

I hang up the phone and scream so loud that my cat jumps straight up in the air. Then I call my mom. “These people…these people!” I stammer.

“Cathy? What’s wrong?”

I tell her exactly what’s wrong.

Mom sighs. “You know, when you started doing this, I was afraid for you. I thought the men you met might turn out to be bad people. But so far, they’ve turned out to be pretty normal. Pretty nice.”

“I know! It’s these snake oil salesmen who’re driving me crazy!”

“They should be ashamed of themselves,” Mom says.

“I don’t think they give a shit,” I sigh. “You know what I’m going to do?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to prove I was right. I’ve seen guys on Match who I know I saw on Chemistry. I’m going to contact them and ask if they really joined Chemistry or not.”

“You go get ‘em!”

“Thanks, Mom.”

So Cathy – did you contact them? Were they paying for Chemistry.com? Other women I know form Pittsburgh who used the service reported that all their potential matches were from out of state.

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