Starting to Take Charge

Registering my profile with a couple of dating sites turned out to be the easy part, although it didn't feel easy at the time. But it was merely a business transaction, done and done. I still have one of my receipts from the end of February 2011. That was four and a half years after my husband died.

Then I waited to be contacted, passively looking through the catalogues of pictures and statements. This one looks nice, I'd think. I wouldn't mind if that one wrote to me. But I didn't do anything more than that.

Little baby steps were all I could manage. What did I know about dating in the 21st century? The last time I'd been single was in the 1980s, when women like me were just beginning to offer a man their phone number without being asked. I met my late husband Al before I could get used to the idea. Too forward, my mother would have said in that judgmental voice I had accepted and internalized.

So I waited for the notifications, like a sleeping princess who had slept through her middle age without answering her wake-up calls.

Over the next month, some men wrote to me, although not necessarily the ones I would have chosen for myself. I corresponded with some and spoke on the phone with others. But I didn't get to the stage of face-to-face meetings with anyone. Baby steps.

 Early on, an intense writing fest with one man ended precipitously when he disappeared, not just from my inbox, but from the dating site entirely. I fretted about that. Was it something I wrote? I was tempted to take this personally as some kind of abandonment. I was looking for a sign that I should quit, but I guess I wasn't willing to abandon myself so easily.

Besides, with each encounter I was learning about the fragility of feelings and fantasies--my own as well as those of the men with whom I was corresponding. Many had good intentions and were feeling their way through this new method of meeting someone special. We were of an age where bereavement, divorce, or other kinds of disappointed hope had made us raw. Our first attempts were clumsy and regressive, but that was no reason to quit.

Another man, with whom I had set up a meeting, let me know the morning of our date that he had met and been seeing another woman  and wanted to give that budding relationship a chance. He must not have realized fully how he felt until that morning. At the time, I thought he was simply a man who was out of touch with his feelings, and maybe he was. But now I know that the whole process forces a focus on quantity and quick decisions.

 You can't wait for men to contact you! one of my friend Susan exclaimed when I told her about my minimal efforts. She had met her partner on the web and knew the ropes. You need to contact them! You need go through numbers--at least five a week!

I ran this by other friends who viewed my reluctance with surprise. When I could find no allies whose views on dating hadn't evolved beyond mid-century modern, I sat myself down, picked five profiles that didn't seem so bad and drafted a note that I could tweak and send to each one.

Like submitting work for publication or a resume for a job, I got into a rhythm that overrode my resistance. Did he write something counter to what I was seeking? Was his photograph out of focus? Tough, I needed to make my quota, and, besides, most of the profile fit my wishes. That was good enough for my list.