Pittsburgh Internet Dating Stories

The day I was out buying new underwear and discovered that NYIF had been telling his other match dates to get breast enlargements, it was a Monday. Which meant that while I was shopping, Peggy was cleaning up after me and the kids.

When Gary still lived with us, we paid our teenagers to clean – which meant the house was usually filthy and the kids never had any money. But as soon as he moved out, I hired a cleaning lady. I really like Peggy – she is an astute business woman and has raised 3 girls on the proceeds of her business, and is now putting all 3 through college. I work out of my home, so often we’ll have a coffee together when one of us needs a break, and we’ve become good friends.

When I came home with my shopping bags, I had to show Peggy what I bought, and also how I found out from Gail Gross, the owner of the Pussycat in Squirrel Hill, that a local match “gentleman” had told other women besides me to get cosmetic surgery. Peggy asked if the guy’s real name was “Mike.” It wasn’t, but she told me her story.

Turns out Peggy had a similar experience after only a month of dating Mike. He started pressuring her, and offered to pay for half the cost of implants, and she liked him and wanted to please him so she went ahead with it. They moved in together for a few years, but it didn’t work out; he was very controlling and she couldn’t do enough to keep him happy.

Peggy is a very pretty lady in her early 40′s and has a beautiful figure, and she didn’t regret her decision to have the work done. She started telling me all the benefits, and encouraged me to do it while I was still separated and the money was coming out of joint funds. I was skeptical – didn’t fake boobs feel funny? She said she couldn’t sleep on her stomach anymore, and it hurt in the beginning but it felt just fine now. But I persisted, I meant didn’t they feel funny to your partner? She said no and took of her shirt so I could feel for myself.

I tried a little squeeze. It felt a bit like a water balloon. But I really had nothing to compare it to, having limited experience with other women’s breasts.

Peggy said she hadn’t had any complaints. But she was still a little ticked off with Mike. When they split up and divided their joint assets, he had deducted the entire cost of her operation from what he owed her. I thought that was rude – he had agreed to pay half.

But Peggy is a practical woman, and she said it didn’t really bother her, “Frankly, I didn’t want him still owning one of my breasts anyway. And I certainly didn’t want him coming back, demanding the right to see it. At least now I know they are all mine.”

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My friend Sue’s ex-in-laws from Queens NY are in Pittsburgh for the holidays, visiting their grandchildren and their son, and they are sleeping in her bed. Her Ex has the spare room. She’s got the cot in her home office for the next 10 days. But she’s happy – She’s got a house full of family again this Christmas, even if the family is a little unconventional.

Sue really likes her in-laws. When she was a young mother, struggling with 3 children under the age of 4 and a difficult marriage, she looked to her mother-in-law, Mary, for help. She and Stan’s father, Patrick, seemed to really love each other still, after almost 40 years of marriage, and she asked her what their secret was. Sue was having difficulty after only 6 years. Mary told me she was happy now, but that the first 30 years had been “pure hell.”

What had kept Mary in her marriage was her Catholic faith and time: eventually the children grew up, the money was less tight, there was less stress, and she and Patrick had time for each other. They finally worked on their relationship and sorted their differences out. They were now very happy, but it had not been an easy path.

Sue thought of Mary many times over the next 14 years, as she worked hard to make my marriage work, but it was like beating her head against a brick wall, and eventually she got tired of it. She decided she didn’t have the patience for 30 years of “pure hell” – 20 years had been enough. Stan agreed to a separation last fall, and they decided he would move out after the holidays. They didn’t want to ruins the kids’ Christmas.

As they have every year since Sue and Stan moved to Pittsburgh, last Christmas the in-laws came for 10 days to spend the holidays with them. They didn’t want to ruin the grandparent’s Christmas either, so they hadn’t told them about the upcoming divorce. But Mary noticed a difference in the mood of the house, and pulled Sue aside to ask me how things were going.

“You and Stan both seem so much happier and more relaxed,” she said. “I think things are really going better for you.” She had her theories why this might be – Stan’s new job, Sue’s new business, the kids getting older, etc., and Sue wasn’t about to tell her the truth – she left that to Stan.

Stan told them in the airport just before they disappeared behind security.

When Sue talked to them on the phone a week later, they reassured her that she would always be family – she was the mother of their grandchildren and would always be their daughter too. Mary was especially supportive, telling Sue that Stan would be lost without her, and that it was too bad he so so “thick” and couldn’t see what he had. (For the record, Stan seems to be doing just fine and is not lost at all – in fact he starting dating within weeks of moving out. It took Sue over a year and me almost 9 months to even think about dating)

Unlike a lot of divorcing couples, Stan and Sue kept most of their family traditions. They spent 2 weeks on the Jersey shore at a big family reunion this June with Stan’s brothers and sister, the grandparents and cousins. So when Sue thought about their Christmas traditions, she decided to invite Mary and Patrick back this year – to stay in her house with Sue and the kids. The children live with Sue full-time – Stan moved into a small bachelor pad at the WaterWorks which isn’t big enough for more than one child at a time.

This is Sue’s first Christmas as a single mom and she tells me that somehow it’s not feeling that much different from last year. She’s spending nights drinking wine talking to her in-laws, making them coffee in the morning, and making sure they feel comfortable. The kids are running in and out with their friends and they’ve had a lot of parties and sleep overs. So it feels like old times.

Except maybe a few hours Sue spent this afternoon in the company of “Jimmy” – under the guise of getting groceries for the big holiday dinners coming up. Sue tells me it’s hard enough to juggle dating with the kids – now she have the ex and the ex-in-laws to worry about as well. But she’d rather have a house full of family and ex-relatives than be alone for the holidays, and somehow Sue is lucky enough to be getting the best of both worlds right now.

Don’t know if I could do this!

Merry Christmas!

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I moved here 10 years ago form Washington DC, and moved not only to the Pittsburgh area, but into Pleasantville (otherwise known as Mt. Lebanon) a quaint old fashioned neighborhood where the kid walk to school, the moms are active in the PTA, and the neighbors get together for happy hours and block parties.

Having lived all over North America, and in much more transient places (DC, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Montreal) I quickly learned that everyone knows everyone in Pittsburgh, and you really didn’t have any secrets. Which is fine with me because I don’t have many – I try to live my life as an open book.

The first time I dated through Match.com (after I went off for a week or two to re-group after my first date he told me to get a boob job) I had about 8 coffees, picked the guy I liked the most, and informed him that I was going to see him exclusively. ZZUG was not sure this was a good idea – he suggested I shop around for a while, but I said that after 20 years of being with the same guy, I was barely up to dating at all, and certainly not capable of juggling multiple dates and I had picked him. Since his profile was impossible and he wasn’t getting a lot of activity himself, he didn’t complain. We dated for 6 weeks.

When that didn’t work out, and I went back up on Match, I decided to try another tactic. I decided to shop as he suggested, and met and went out with a lot of “prospects.” I was honest with all of them – explaining that I was not even divorced yet and not ready to settle down soon – no point jumping out of the frying pan right into another one. Might as well jump into the fire for a while and see if I could take the heat.

This has lead to a few interesting encounters. “Date A” picked me up one morning to take me out, and as soon as I sat down in his car, he asked me how “Date B” was doing. I looked at him in surprise – I did not know that he knew “B.” He didn’t, but he was good friends with “Girl C” a woman he had met on Match who had become a good friend. “C” had dated “B” and they were also good friends. So “B” told “C” about me, who told “A”, who confronted me in the car. It was all so delicious I had to laugh – not only is Pittsburgh already a “small town with tall buildings” (Jay Speyerer’s expression) but the Pittsburgh Match community turns out to be rather close knit.

This did not surprise me. Many of my girlfriends on Match have met, emailed or dated men who have winked or emailed me. We compare notes – we ARE women and we talk! I was warned to avoid this one because he had a substance abuse problem, and that one was sweet but appeared to be battling some inner demons.

Sometimes I feel like I am back in High School, when we all knew each other and who was seeing who. I have avoided dating across state lines, figuring there must be enough eligible men right here in Pittsburgh and I didn’t have to drive to Wheeling or Columbus to meet someone. Only now am I seeing the possible appeal!

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When I told my friend Sue that I was starting a blog about internet dating in Pittsburgh, she suggested I hook up with her ex-husband Stan’s ex-girlfriend’s best friend, Jane, who she referred to as “the Queen of Internet Dating.” Jane agreed to talk to me, and we met to Uptown Coffee in Mt. Lebanon.

It’s a small and tangled world – it turns out her ex-husband’s new wife was a friend of mine from St. Bernard. Our kids had gone to school together, and when I met her (I’ll call her “Liz”) at South Hills Villiage 6 months ago, I had asked her how she was dealing with her oldest going off the college soon. Liz said that since she now had 6 kids at home, having recently acquired 3 more through marriage, she thought she could handle it.

She told me how she had met her new husband through Match.com, even though he lived right in the neighborhood, and said, “When you are ready to date again, you need to be on Match. Everyone’s on it.”

It’s because of Liz that I went on Match, and here I was sitting across the table from her new husband’s ex-wife. She was very smart, very pretty, and very insightful – especially about divorced men in their 40′s and 50′s. She told me she had dated a lot of men and that they all complained about their ex-wives, that the complaints could be boiled down to the same one big complaint and it was that their ex-wives were women, acted like women and wanted what all women want.

We had to get back to our kids so we couldn’t talk as long as I would have liked, but she promised to talk again. I’m not sure how many stories she will tell me, because she is writing a book about dating herself. But I am looking for any wisdom I can find, and she seems like a good source, even if I found her through my friend’s ex’s ex.

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It was my first date with “New York IF” from Match, and I was nervous. I was recently separated from my husband of 20 years,, and this was my first “first date” in 22 years. We had emailed, talked a little on the phone, and he seemed fun, smart, and concerned about me. We agreed to meet at the Roxy in South Hills Village for a beer, and I made sure my hair and make-up looked good. NYIF, a nice looking man in his late 50′s, seemed happy to see me. He said, “You really are cute!” and we settled down to drink our Guinness and start the process of getting to know each other.

He started telling me about his ex-wife. He had made her who she was, and instead of being grateful, she had left him suddenly after 30 years. When he met her when she was a young, skinny, dirty-blond thing with bad teeth, but he had fixed her up over time, getting her the right clothes, haircuts, dental work, and eventually, a breast augmentation. He told me he had been very pleased with the results. It was at that point that he looked over at me with an appraising eye, took a good look at my chest, and told me, “Dear, if you have the money, that’s something you might consider yourself.”

I did not leave then. I actually stayed to hear how I should get my teeth filed (“I’m surprised your dentist hasn’t already recommended this to you.”) and how I needed to stop saying “yeah” and say “yes” instead (“It’s so much more sophisticated.”)

And then I went on one more date with him before I smartened up! But the story does not end there.

A few weeks later I met another man on Match who I hit it off with, and we started dating. A month later, things had progressed, and I decided it was time to shop for new underwear. I went to the Pussycat lingerie store in Squirrel Hill, and as I was admiring my profile in one of their sexy “contoured” bras, I remarked that I couldn’t believe my first date in 22 years had recommended I get a boob job.

Gail Gross, the owner, had been serving me. She stopped, looked up at me in surprise, and asked “You didn’t meet him on Match.com did you?”

I said I did, and she told me about another woman she had served a few weeks earlier from Fox Chapel who was thin and blond like me. The lady came in devastated – she had been told on the first date with a man she had met on Match that she should get breast implants.

“She was really shook up, not laughing about it like you. ” Gail said, “It really hurt her.”

So I decided to set up a blog so Pittsburgh singles could share Internet dating stories, lighten up and laugh about it. After all, this is supposed to be fun. This is what you were looking forward to when you were stuck in that unhappy marriage and wanted out so you could meet some interesting people. Let’s share the different versions of “interesting” we’ve found. Please join me and please feel free to post!

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