Divorce and Recovery
Marie Williams
Single again after eighteen years of marriage. Ugh! Basically, I'd been married my entire adult life. I got married at twenty-two, and I was now forty-one. How in the world does a woman in her forties date? Where would I even meet men? Pretty much everyone I knew was part of a couple. I wasn't in college anymore, which is where I had met my ex. I didn't want to do the bar scene. What to do? What to do?
A number of people told me I should try online dating. "It's just like shopping!" my girlfriend told me gleefully. "You just go on the website, browse through the photographs, and click on the one you want."
Well, that didn't seem too painful. Okay, I decided, I'll go for it. I figured I'd start with the site that I had heard the most about. A lot of people will be members. Might as well put the odds in my favor for meeting an eligible bachelor.
I signed up, answered all the questions, even wrote a little biography about myself. The only thing missing was a decent picture to post. I decided to have one of my friends take a digital photo of me. In the meantime, I went ahead and charged three months to my credit card and clicked "submit."
I signed on the next day, and to my delight had several e-mails waiting for me. Wow! And I had thought guys were so visual. I didn't even have a picture posted, but several guys were interested in me anyway. I replied to the e-mails, and a couple of days later finally had a picture taken to include in my profile. Once I uploaded my photograph, I decided to start my own search.
I kept it very generic. Didn't use the "advanced search;" just checked off the boxes for "female seeking male," "age range 35–45" (what can I say, I like younger guys) within "20 miles of my zip code." I clicked on "search" and sat back, anxiously waiting to see who the mighty match-making gods would fix me up with.
Take a wild guess. Who do you suppose turned up as the Number 1 match for me? Does the song "Escape" ring a bell with anyone? You know, the one about "If you like piña coladas ... " Yep ... of course—my ex-husband was the number one man who the match-making gods thought would be my perfect match. What kind of sick game is this? I leapt from my desk chair and paced around the house, mumbling "This is so wrong. This is so very, very wrong!"
I wasn't jealous, which I was glad about. It just seemed so icky and weird. So, even though I'd paid for a three-month membership and had only been a member for a few days, I decided to cancel.
Here's the rub. Even though you cancel your membership, your profile is still available for others to see unless you request that your profile be hidden. Something I didn't realize until the next day when I received an e-mail from my ex. "Fancy meeting you here," he wrote. A modern-day twist I suppose on that classic '70s song.
But my version doesn't end up with the guy and the girl realizing that they were really meant for each other all along. Instead, I realized that sometimes the match-making gods simply get it wrong.
(591 words)