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.
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