A brand-new dating game
The BlackBerry on the tabletop vibrates every few minutes, doing a little dance. Each time, without skipping a beat, Soul Man stills the device with his palm, blithely checks the display, and places it face down again, continuing our conversation.
Seated outdoors on a hot summer’s night, I am on my very first Internet date. Truth be told, I am on my very first date as a single person since 1980, when I met my husband. Back then, I tell my children, people tapped out notes on machines called typewriters and put them in red boxes located on the street. I feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.
I came to Internet dating the way many women over 40 do: reluctantly, skeptically. Never mind the litany of stories of happily-ever-after online couplings. “I felt like closing the blinds the first time I looked at a dating site,” confesses my friend Judy, 57, who has been living with her Internet love for the past two years.
I had the same hesitation. But when you’re widowed at 54, as I was, there comes a time when even the dog seems puzzled by your constant companionship on a Saturday night, the two of you spooned on the curfew couch waiting for a teenager who will probably stay over at a friend’s anyway. Well into my third year of solitude, I knew in my bones it was time to end the pity party. After six months of surfing the Net and just looking at dating sites, I picked one, screwed up the courage and logged on.
New meat
Soul Man is 22 years younger than me, a self-described “computer geek” with a “muscular” body type. He’d responded to my profile less than an hour after I’d posted it and I sent him a polite message, asking if he’d “glanced at my age.” He said yes.
Composing that online dating profile was an exhausting chore: drafting the smart little essay, listing my likes and dislikes from a drop-down menu, uploading the photo. Then the “smiles” — the sign that you have sparked someone’s interest — started pouring in, a dozen in the first few hours. I’d been warned about this. There is a rush to “new meat” on the relationship rotisserie. By agreeing so quickly to Soul Man’s suggestion that we dispense with this clunky tool called Instant Messaging and meet for coffee right away, I was essentially slathering myself in barbecue sauce and throwing myself onto the grill.
