Turbo Dating--a year in review

I’m getting really tired of reading “bad date” stories. It seems like every woman’s magazine, every newspaper, every trendy “lifestyle” website has an article about memorably awful encounters, particularly for single women over thirty-five. Moaning artfully about meeting Mr. Wrong has turned into a cottage industry.

The stories themselves are uniformly arch, and funny, and full of razor sharp detail from the gleam on the rim of a martini glass in flickering candlelight to the click of a date’s false teeth and the barely concealed look of disappointment on a middle-aged guy who’d hoped for someone younger looking. The women in these modern dating chronicles are witty, plucky, resilient and cheerfully determined. And the tales are grounded in incompatibility and disappointment. If fairy tales end naturally in happy unions, these wickedly downbeat and sardonic narratives thrive on dissatisfaction and skepticism.

Here’s a different perspective, based on what I’m now quaintly calling “the year of Turbo Dating.” This would be the year of catching up I embarked on after my twenty-plus year marriage ended. In the final tally, I drank a lot of coffee, made a lot of small talk, had some bad dates, had some great dates, met some fellas who didn’t make it past the “sixty second rule” and met some guys who were really wonderful. But at the end of that action- packed twelve months—including “meet ‘n’ greets” with about three dozen guys—I’d learned that the best and most important relationship I had found was with myself.

The turbo dating year kicked off, naturally, with a divorce. I’d pulled the plug on a twenty five year marriage a month before the actual anniversary. It had been on life-support for a decade before that, though. While the general public was surprised, our children were not.

At the age of barely twenty four, with no dating experience to speak of behind me, I had married my first steady boyfriend. We met as he was finishing law school and I was finishing a journalism degree. Four children followed, and I immersed myself in both full-time motherhood and a freelance career as a magazine writer. Fifteen years later a horseback riding accident put me in a body cast for a few months, and I looked at life in a very new way. Law school followed, and then a career as a criminal prosecutor, and eventually the bonds of matrimony cracked and broke. Seven months later, after a civilized “collaborative divorce,” I was suddenly single.

The general rule of thumb, so I hear, is that the newly divorced should give themselves a couple of years to heal their emotional wounds before jumping into the dating pool. I, on the other hand, have always been something of a loose cannon, and so I waited all of four days after the ink was dry on the divorce decree before I signed up to try on-line dating. It was only a few hours before someone hit on my profile and tentatively suggested getting together. At that instant I recoiled from the keyboard as it was on fire, recognizing that “jeez, I am soooooooo not ready for this!!” But within a few weeks, I finally took the plunge and scheduled two coffee dates for a weekend. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Bachelor Number One turned out to be a walking object lesson for the fact that you can’t tell what someone looks like in a single long shot photo. And that well-written emails can mask the fact that English may only be your second language. I’m still not sure what his first language was…but we still spent an hour chatting with difficulty above the noise in a crowded coffee shop. I patted him on the shoulder as we parted company and said “I’m sure the right girl is out there for you!” and walked swiftly away…but not before he’d regaled me with tales of his own internet horror stories. And left me with a piece of advice which I still consider priceless. That you can talk all you want about compatibility points and shared interests and matching core values...but what it really still all comes down to is “chemistry.” How you answer the question, “do you want to get closer to this person?” I put that thought in the back of my mind and set out to meet Bachelor Number Two.

This turned out to be a good looking, articulate accountant who owned a sailboat. My passion for my work as a prosecutor appeared to captivate him, and an hour of animated conversation flew by. He asked me out again, this time to dinner at a romantic lakefront restaurant. He cleaned up quite nicely. So did I. Drinks, dinner, dress-up clothes instead of jeans and sweats, a little canoodling in the parking lot before parting…I couldn’t have asked for a better first “real date” to start me off. A third date, at an art museum, was calendared in. And halfway through it I had one of those “eureka moments” cartoonists illustrate with light bulbs floating overhead. I realized we didn’t get excited about any of the same stuff. And worse, I was dialing down most of my enthusiasm to match his cynicism and malaise. Wrong way to go here. I think he felt it too. A brisk hug and a peck in parting in the museum parking lot, and we both drove away and never looked back. The adventure continued, and so did the education of Mary.

I kept my dating life under the radar from my children for a very long time, but regaled my girlfriends at work with tales from the front. And the theme that always floated to the top was that with every conversation, with every meeting, with every disappointment or pleasant surprise, I came away knowing a little more about myself. I was finally getting to ask myself the questions I would have asked at the age of twenty if I’d had a social life back then. Preconceptions went right out the window as my coffee intake increased. Well I thought I liked that…but maybe not as much as I expected. Gee, didn’t know I liked that in a man! Who knew? Hmmm…guess I don’t really like that after all. And so it went.

Even the few memorably bad experiences taught me something. Such as…it’s okay to be impatient and even aggravated. One evening found me in a trendy restaurant sharing drinks and appetizers with a good looking guy who even described himself as an “angry white male.” After his first lengthy rant—about the press and its “contempt for the military”—I found myself wondering if I’d have the guts to slap a twenty on the counter and just walk out. I didn’t, and an excruciating evening ground on until his second rant—this time about illegal immigration—ran its course. As I drove home forty miles in the dark, I thought ruefully, “and I skipped sitting home in my pajamas and watching ‘Medium’ for this??” Next time, I vowed, I’d be quicker to leave and cut my losses.

And then there were the kinder, gentler encounters. A guy who showed up nervously with flowers to meet me for the first time. Turns out it was his first date in the year that had followed his divorce, and he was scared to death to start testing the waters. There was the blue-collar guy who drove a cement truck most of the year, and a snow plow in the winter months. He was cute and funny and wore a diamond earring, and while we didn’t technically call all the hanging out that we did actual “dating,” we laughed and talked about life and politics for months, did stuff, flew a kite into a tree, met for dinner when I was passing by. For a long time he was my “go to” guy for answers to all the manly questions I knew nothing about, such as how to use my new cordless drill and how to maintain the water heater. I told him that in a blizzard, given a choice between Brad Pitt coming up the driveway on a white horse with a dozen roses and the guy with a snowplow, every woman I know would pick the guy with the plow, feeling like the cavalry had arrived for a rescue. He liked that image a lot.

Then there was the draftsman who, when I warned him that some guys found dating a “chick with a badge” a bit scary, showed up for coffee sporting a toy badge of his own pinned to his flannel shirt. I felt charmed right out of my socks.

There was a perfectly wonderful widower in the mix, too. Our e-mails were great. Our phone calls were great. The two-hour brunch we shared as a first date was great, and we left the restaurant pleasantly committed to finding time for a second. But by the end of the day, we had both agreed to call it off. On the long drive home, I’d realized that his two little boys really needed a mother figure in their lives…and after raising four kids already, it wasn’t going to be me. And he’d noticed me unconsciously flinch when he brought out the pictures of his young sons, and realized that some gulfs can’t be bridged. And so I learned that sometimes you have to be a grownup right out of the gate, even when it hurts.

I kept a general rule of not going out with anyone farther away than 75 miles, but even that rule was meant to be broken. After months of charming and intriguing emails and phone conversations with a wildlife artist in another state, we finally agreed to meet half way to go birdwatching. We rendezvoused one morning at a wildlife refuge, with the goal of searching for whooping cranes. He turned out to be a little bit older looking than his picture, but still craggily handsome in a self-assured, outdoorsy way. I don’t think I passed his sixty second rule. But we still spent a glorious day outdoors, enveloped by sunlight and nature, trading stories of life and children and authorities flaunted and obstacles overcome. I’ll never forget staring, awestruck, at a quartet of juvenile bald eagles as they playfully soared and swooped together, snatching fish with their talons from the water below and then dive bombing each other to get the others’ prize. And at the tail end of the day, after hours of looking, we found a whooping crane, in splendid closeup, after all.

And I found myself irrevocably changed by an evening I spent with a former Navy pilot. He still flew on occasion, but had recently found himself grounded because of high blood pressure. This date was literally a “one night wonder.” We talked, we laughed, we teased, we flirted, we ate, we drank…and then we took in a movie so the evening could stretch even longer. We shared about our kids, our lives, our families, our marriages, our disappointments, our joys. And then he called it quits the next day by email. Go figure.

But the encounter had a profound effect on me in ways neither of us could have ever predicted. For years I have been a white-knuckle flyer. The older I got, the more afraid I became of flying. Shortly before the pilot and I met, in fact, I’d traveled to Germany to visit my son who was there as a foreign exchange student. And it was only the strength of maternal affection that got me on that plane, terror in my heart and dread in the pit of my stomach. Now I was in a plane again on the tarmac, this time flying to Phoenix to visit a friend from college. And as I sat, again terrified, in my window seat, I made a deliberate choice to try to see the act of flying through his eyes. Not as something to be endured and steeled against, but as a joy and a release. To trust the technology as proven, to embrace the thrust of liftoff, to see open horizon as something as inviting and welcoming and liberating as he did.

It worked. Flying hasn’t been the same for me since.

After a year of this, I figured it was finally about time to scale back and take stock. The year had been interesting, but it had been exhausting too. One memorable weekend had seen me meet up with four guys in three days…or three guys in four days. Details are fuzzy in a whirlwind. With only four days left on my Match.com membership, I spent a few hours one evening combing through photos and profiles, seeing if there was anyone interesting I’d somehow missed. I came up with a half dozen possibilities. Three wrote back. One was a professional sports photographer who was smart, and cute, and so much of a rolling stone we could never agree on a good time to meet. One was “Prince Charming” by email, and equally charming by telephone…and just didn’t hit the right notes in person.

I decided to break the mold with the third one, and after a flurry of emails and some phone calls, suggested skipping the traditional “coffee date” and meeting instead at a movie theater. He was there on time, and seemed nice and cautiously friendly. We got our popcorn and sodas, settled into our seats, and waited for the commercials to end.

As the start of the movie approached, I turned to him and announced that now was as good a time as any to fess up to the couple of little white lies I’d told in my online profile. He looked at my with a skeptical squint. First, I confessed, I wasn’t 48 as I’d claimed in my profile, but in fact was 50. He looked straight ahead again and nodded, then asked “and what’s the other?” “Well,” I replied, “I’m not slender either.”In profile, I could see the steady, somber features of his face instantly split wide open with a grin and he started to laugh. And as the lights dimmed and the opening credits came on, I settled comfortably back in my velvet seat and smiled, thinking, “I’ve got a really good feeling about this!”

I still do.