The Big D & My Online Dating Gestation: at 35 weeks

I started dating this year. Recently I took stock of some of the phenomenons of my experience over the past eight months.
There are forgotten names, no names, an incredibly high percentage of J names.
Cheap beers, craft beers, cocktails made with ginger beer.
Top-shelf cocktails, living room whiskeys, new wines and fine dining.
Trifecta drink nights, tea dates, coffees in the park.
Meeting strangers with ADD, anxiety and a whole host of angry.
Accidental foraging (got an incredible nettle harvest on that one!), server hunting, lots of one and done.
Hospital chauffeuring, chance encounters, breakfasts at noon.
Games in crowds, games on tables, game for dinner.
Walks in the park, walks on the river, walks at midnight with the moon.
Rides in the rain, rides to avoid, rides to make it easy.
Flirty texts, confusing texts, mistaken texts, so many texts!
Tabs whisked away, bills shared, a tab with a dicker over a $2 beer.
Dinners for hours, dinner on the river - and just one first date invitation to dinner (apparently eating an essential meal isn't a common form of meeting a stranger).
I've encountered lost condoms, double condoms, fellas anti-condoms of any kind.
Hot tubs, hot dates, hot summer escapes to air conditioning.
Cool bars, cool men, plenty of cool like high school juvenile drama!
Gentlemen, teen-like boys, the curious and monogamous and poly charades galore!
Propositions, portentous suggestions, plenty of petty problems.
Divorce stories, divorce cover-ups, and a lot of divorces in the wings.....

I'm a 41 year old single woman, so it's not so surprising I've met a lot of divorced men of similar age.
More surprisingly, I'm a 41 year old single mom of teen girls and I've come to recognize that divorced men I know fit into a few common categories - only one of which makes them good candidates for dating!

The first divorced men I knew well were friends - at least one whose wedding I attended, one who became a dear friend by virtue of having friend daughters, and one whose emotional depth ran so deep we tangled in an intensely cathartic (but doomed) relationship. So my context for divorce was that I knew people experiencing it. I myself was never married, so my separation wasn't mangled with the legalities of Divorce. I've learned most of what I know about the horrors of divorce from men significantly wounded in the process.

My second phase of knowing divorced men was meeting them on occasion at the behest of mutual friends, as blind dates. By and large, those were men with emotional intelligence and decent remove from vitriol. In a sense, though, this also made them players - people who had no intention of cultivating relationship of any depth. Fine, but frustrating when if you actually like the fellas.

But dating - intentional dating - opened a whole new view on the stage of divorcee a man might be.
Here is where I regularly encountered the Activists and the Boxers, the ones actively awaiting their dates of legal freedom, and the ones who still regularly refer to their former wives, and often as wives vs. ex-wives.
I have failed to understand why men want to make their ex-wives characters in our budding/dating relations.
While it is helpful to have context about a man's divorce history, constantly renewing it with me with it is highly unattractive.

Thankfully, there are a few divorced, acclimated men out there who don their dating personas with decency. I find these are the men who extend invitations to dinner, stall on their text messaging, avoid neediness and all-around successfully balance all the facets of their lives.
It would be nice if online dating apps could find  a way to incorporate those filters into their algorithms.

Comparison is the Thief of Happiness

It happens to me throughout the day, every day - unconsciously comparing what I don't have to what I do.

In a formal context, it started with new furniture, years ago.
At the time I had acquired every piece of furniture in my possession for free or fewer than twenty dollars. That made me proud.

It evolved to yard-envy.
For the bulk of my children's lives, we haven't had one. I often wonder if it has contributed negatively to their personal senses of well-being and relaxation, but it has remained out of reach and we survive.

More recently, it reared when a friend asked me to sign as witness to his will.
I don't have a will, nor can I manage the legal fees that would make a smart one. It doesn't really matter if it's a one-time fee until my assets, uh, materialize - I just can't make myself pay for definitions of me.

I've never particularly cared about having a car younger than my children....
.....though I do fantasize that a newer car would need less service.

The real thief of my contending daily happiness, however, is something much more mundane, something that seemingly constantly changes on the faces of people I see.

That thief is glasses. Mostly, getting new glasses.

I've been wearing the same glasses for at least seven years (that's as far back as my Facebook goes, where photos of me are conveniently archived and reveal as such). Yes, my prescription has changed, and yes I have had it checked twice in that time. Glasses are expensive, like plane ticket expensive, or half a year of car insurance expensive, or two months of groceries expensive. I've opted for the lower-cost of contacts a couple of times, but then there's the more regular expense of those and the annual eye exams to keep them in stock.

When I acquired private pay health insurance a year ago, having a vision exam benefit was one of my most important criteria. Having needed glasses since the age of 7 informed that choice. Having children blessed with perfect vision made routine eye maintenance less visible. When it comes down to it, it's fairly easy to wear old glasses and not buy plane tickets. It's less easy to function without car insurance and groceries. Making do with the glasses one has perpetuates itself easily.

This is where the thief of happiness plot thickens. When you've spent hours navigating and comparing health insurance benefits, there's an additional thief of happiness on the horizon - it's the thief that makes you choose one aspect of wellness over another. It's the thief that reasons that less expensive specialist co-pays are an asset when you need to see a specialist on a regular basis.
And when health insurance premiums rise, it's the thief that comes back for more when it doesn't feel like there's more to be taken, just when you were happy you were affording health insurance at all.