The Story of Us - Part Three

I figure I'd better get this story moving along. November 5th is just around the corner.

The day I turned 30, I cried from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep. This may be ok if you work in a cubicle, but it's not such a great thing when you're a teacher. I'd be able to pull myself together for most of the teaching time, but if the students were working on an activity, I was stifling sniffles and wiping away tears.

It wasn't really the turning 30 part, but rather, the idea that I'd hoped to be married by then. For whatever reason, I'd always had it in my head that 28 was the ideal marrying age. When 28 came and went, I thought, well maybe if I'm married by 30...(then what? My life would have purpose? I'd be validated as a person? Everything would be okay?) I never knew how that sentence was supposed to end, but here I was at 30, and I had hardly even dated, let alone had any serious relationships.

It was around this time that I'd decided to start giving Internet dating a try.

But Internet dating, I found, is a very bizarre way to date.

People can, and do, put up a good facade online.

Or they don't and you're left wondering why, if someone only has a little blurb in which to convince a member of the opposite sex that they're worth getting to know better, they didn't try a little harder.

Here are some actual samples from the profiles of people who contacted me.

Describing himself and who he'd like to meet, this one said:

A girl that likes go away at spermont on the weekends or go long rides or walks. Would like meet a women that likes joke. Likes scary movies and a women likes sex. A women that can open up to me.Im very normal guy wonts same as all other guys.I love to maintonbike and play sports.I dont like games of any cond.I like to cook.Looking into buy a house.I like play at the park play frezby or thorl ball around or rollerblade.

His headline said "Don't Pass Me Up!" Really? Watch me.

I mentioned that I taught biology, physics and French, and one guy emailed me with the subject line "Newton was right..." The message:

Hi, Well for every reaction there is definitly an equal and opposite reaction, nes pas?
I enjoyed your profile.....Tell me more?

Totally corny.

Another guy described himself in this way:

I am a responsible,down to earth guy....intelligent,honest,caring,loving,generous,goal oriented,adventurous, a Leo,romantic,fun, occasional drinker,healthy mentally,physically,and dentally! (LOL!),opinionated,an excellant lover,with a great sense of humor,and own my own vehicle.

To which I thought, Dude, you're 42. You have to say you have a car? (And you can't spell "excellent"?)

Perhaps I was a bit too critical, but there were many others like this, and it just made me wonder why, at a minimum, someone didn't just take the 30 extra seconds required to do a spell check.

There were others, of course, that were much more interesting. A few times, I'd exchange a lot of emails with people and maybe some (or several) phone calls before meeting them in person. This was usually a recipe for disaster, as we each tended to romanticize what the person was actually going to be like and inevitably, we'd fail to live up to each other's expectations.

Frustrated with the whole process, and feeling relatively stagnant in life in general, I decided it was time for a change. I needed to shake things up a little bit.

I decided to move to Boston.