match point ~ seeking romance & mr. right

Tags

Bob Dylan, first impressions, nora ephron, online dating, relationships, Rob Reiner, Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney, When Harry Met Sally

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and likes Bob Dylan and will open doors for me? Why not?

Between the time I met my husband and the time he died twenty-four years later, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online, a perfect place for me to spend time, my dearest friends told me. It would be fun, they said, a simple way to reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been in the days before smart phones and texting and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy, hiding behind pictures that only show my good side, dodging questions with cryptic clues about what I did for a living or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, it would be easy to filter out men who didn’t like my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who didn’t care if I was as comfortable in jeans as I was a little black dress but did care – thanks be to God – about when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having evolved (not really) from her Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I immigrated to the United States. Yes, my next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.

Fictional Sally was an extension of Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. And, while most of us remember her most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, for me she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who will still show up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she asserts, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right. When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday.”

Sally is barely thirty and sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride to tell you that I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a glossy magazine that featured Meg Ryan’s many haircuts. For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me a Meg Ryan haircut. Any Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50-ish, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless the late Nora Ephron is writing it.

Remember when 40 was an eternity away from 20? It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.” And, now I’m gonna be 60 . . . one day. One day soon. It’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself, the “alternative facts” if you will. Some are minor – I don’t have sensible hair, and until lately I have spent a fortune coloring it and trying to tame it. Then, there are fonts. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t – if I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I won’t shop there, and Comic Sans on homework assignments forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I recently found out that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the E (for empty) light comes on. Because I really don’t care any more, I can tell the world that I don’t like Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I don’t like Coldplay. A music major, I have to also admit that opera doesn’t do it for me either, and I only went to the ballet once because all the other mothers were taking their daughters to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas. I resent the aging process and the way it sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once upon a time, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle (in French and English). Now, I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at concerts over the past forty years than on something as graceless as aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much better today at finding my way around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. To be fair, if I have been somewhere at least eight times, I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I must lean on Google maps, Siri, my daughter reading directions from the phone that is smarter than both of us, and those friends and colleagues who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they are already waiting.

Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and more patient – with myself and others. Those who know me best will attest that I have yet to reach a level of proficiency in either area. You see the circumstances around my husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty and made me cautious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. At the end of the day, it’s all about survival and control.

But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? Even Nora Ephron would probably not have described herself the way her son’s documentary characterized her as having “a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your curriculum vitae – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés and divulging your home address. You have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.

Awkwardly, I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status while taking some liberties with other details like hair color and the frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was resume writing, right? My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.

About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not?

I took a chance.

I. Took. A. Chance.

#ITookAChance

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who would deem his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football (the American kind, for God’s sake) and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.

Box checked.

He said he worked out every day – of course he did. And, no religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention.

Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan (deal-breaker) and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. Why so cynical? Well, let me just tell you there are more than a few men in the land of online dating who claim to live in the Arizona desert – but also enjoy moonlight walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I’d gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name, anticipating instead the possibility of being number five or six in ‘the dating rotation.

It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 at a well-lit bar. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closest from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, my hairsylist, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beachy highlights (just in case a moonlight walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I’m probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley I’d seen in the photo was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was a good sign.

Onward.

He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.

Over beers and banter, we sized each other up and over-shared, checking off those boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – sorry, musicians, but you have a reputation to uphold – I was also smitten. The bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you anywhere.

Having read and committed to memory the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew this was another red flag. First dates that are too long (or turn into second dates on the same night) are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and most nights since. We’ll do it tonight too.

A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.

As for the rest of the story? The rest of the story is for me. And for him. As Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:

‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.

P.S. Because I know you want to know, I asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He says he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I tell him there’s a song in there. Let’s sing it.