(The next installment after "One Man's Adventures in Alcohol":
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1573898 . I hope this post in some way helps others seeking love and romance after Mormonism.)
After seventeen years of of marriage, and five solid years of trying to keep it together after leaving Mormonism, I finally separated from my wife in August of 2008.
As you can imagine, many different emotions, not all of them consistent, consumed me. I was shocked at some of the things that had occurred, hurt, frustrated, appalled, sad, disoriented, beyond exasperated, and disbelieving. Maybe strangest of all was a mixture of perfect clarity and resolution that the last last last straw had been broken and I could simply not go on, alongside a hope that somehow, a resolution could occur in the future, and our family could come back together.
I begged my ex to help me trust again, to recapture the magic we had once had, for both of us, for the kids...I set us up with a bunch of counselors, but in the end, shall we just say, it was not in the cards.
That left me a forty year old father of eight who was now single - and, still kind of torn: on the one hand, I still thought about my ex all the time, despite all that had happened; on the other, I was so frazzled over everything that had happened, that the other half of me yearned to just find someone new, someone I could just finally enjoy life with. She didn't need to be a knockout. She didn't need to be any particular age or race or religion or political persuasion. All I wanted (or at least, that half of me wanted) was someone kind, loyal, stable, and who could enjoy life.
So, I decided to start "getting out there". Dating, I mean. Maybe there was someone special out there for me.
One little problem was that I had never bumped around with girls, or hit on them, or lived with them or slept with them, or whatever, like most young guys do. So...I had no skills or experience. Yes, I'd had a few girlfriends in high school, but that was fairly light stuff. All I had really had was marriage to the same woman (who in many ways, was not like most women) for nearly two decades.
So at forty, I had had precisely one serious romantic relationship (and only one sexual partner) in my life, and I had zero experience in the rough-and-tumble world of non-Mormon love.
The first thing I did was put up a few profiles on dating websites. No one contacted me, and hardly anyone responded to my messages. It was disappointing - on an actual music tour, while I was still married, women green-lighted me all the time, and of course I would say no; but now that I was single and could say yes, it was crickets. (Sadly, a tour was not feasible at that time).
I looked at my profile again, and then an idea dawned on me: delete this stupid thing. I look "nice" in my picture, my bio is "nice", my hobbies are "nice", everything about this is "nice" to the point of being completely boring. "Nice" is a failure. What I need is: catchy; razzle-dazzle; striking; out of the ordinary; lunatic; funny; maybe even bitter or sarcastic; daring; ANYTHING except "nice". The proof was in the pudding: I had had virtually no responses. "Nice" was a loser.
Driven by evolutionary imperative, with one failed strategy behind me, I changed tack. I ran a Google search and found a hilarious picture that someone had created in Photoshop. It was of some Indian-looking guy screaming, but the eyes and mouth had been magnified. I created a new profile with an alias I no longer recall, but something completely insane, and then I wrote up the most off-putting bio I could. It included things like this:
"I enjoy spending time ALONE. As in, NOT WITH YOU, TALKING NON-STOP ABOUT YOUR LATEST FIGHT WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND."
"I live in my mommy's basement next to the furnace. I am 'between jobs'."
"Hobbies: being mean to animals, Solitaire, video gaming up to fourteen hours a day".
"I'm looking for someone who, after twelve years of public school and four years of university, still thinks that astrology gives her meaningful life guidance".
Etc.
Well (thanks Jesus, for creating this insane world) the results were entirely predictable: an array of attractive women began flooding my inbox with comments like, "ROTFLMAO too funny! What do you really look like?", "Ha ha we should chat", "I just peed myself, are you this funny in real life?", "Hit me back, I loooove sarcasm".
Bingo. Of course. It all seemed so obvious now.
Emboldened by the success of my new mating strategy, I then set about creating more profiles - many more profiles - all fake, all using different sorts of pictures, all either completely bitter, offensive, funny, or even baaaad. The positive comments kept on pouring in; and when I found a prospect, I no longer sent notes like, "hey, saw your profile. Looks like we have a lot in common. Would love to chat. How long have you lived in Victoria?". Instead, I kept them very short and wrong. I mentioned things like being out on parole, that she wasn't my type, that I was already down to only three hundred pounds, that she shouldn't bother getting back to me, etc.
Again, my response rate skyrocketed. Now with an embarrassment of womanly riches before me, and new, ever more offensive profiles going up every day and attracting more and more, I was able to sift through and see which seemed like they might be a good match. So, I started to go out.
I'd never really done this sort of thing, but then, I thought..."how tough can it be to go hang out for twenty minutes at Starbuck's?". I figured I could not do worse than the average guy out there, and I came up with a simple approach:
Be clean, show up on time, pay for the stuff, make 'em laugh, be honest, let them sense a raw animal vigour underneath the gentlemanly courtesy, and then let the chips fall. If it's on, move - cobra strike. If it's not on *yet*, move slowly, like a panther. If there's no future, be courteous, but move on. This is about enjoying our time together, and getting to know each other, so...no stress, no pressure...it's supposed to be fun, positive, shared experience for both of us.
With that in mind, I stepped out into the non-Mormon world of dating and romance for the first time, and...I had a lot of interesting experiences. Like the time I fell for a beautiful, modest, kind, cheerful young woman, had an amazing day-long date with her finished off by a trip to a club that night...only to find out that she was one of the world's most famous porn stars. But that is a story for later on in the series, I guess.
Feel free to post your own experiences below.
More to come.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2015 03:24AM by Tal Bachman.