The Mystery and Misery of Dating (Deliberate Dating Part Two)

(This is part two of the Deliberate Dating Series. Read Part One here.)

In Which the Widow Navigates Dating Again

I had to figure out for myself that women have such valuable contributions to make. I grew up in a time when women were expected to act like men. Have you seen 1980s women’s office fashion, with the square silhouette and big shoulder pads? That was a visual attempt to make women more like men and it carried over from office life to our personal lives. I absorbed the message that a woman should be more like a man and it took half my life to unwind that idea and learn to understand and value femininity.

That brings me to the other story, a story of going from being the ordinary person I had become again in the ensuing years to an extraordinarily lucky one. You see, I had no idea how to go about dating after 12 years of marriage. Who would I date? Looking around on the street I saw men of all ages, what was the right age? How would I determine who was a good partner and who wasn’t? How would I even find men to date?

Allow me to explain that despite how it may look from the outside, I am not the sort of woman who would lose a beloved husband and then resign myself to a solitary life as a widow. My first concern was whether I would be alone for the rest of my life. From my early teenage years I had been “boy crazy”, as we called it. I began dating at the age of 14, perhaps a bit too young in retrospect, and had continuous love interests and boyfriends until I got married at the age of 27.

Like most people, I'm a product of the culture and so I had absorbed the prevailing cultural perspective that I should be open to a variety of types of relationships. I’m also a very warm and relationship-oriented person, so I found myself involved in all sorts of things that I prefer not to talk about.

I never meant to be the kind of woman who engaged in serial intimate relationships. I meant to find love and be monogamous, but it never seemed to work. I had married Dave after a series of failed relationships in my 20s. I would hang onto them long after it was clear that they weren’t going to work and it was such a relief to finally be married. With the committed relationship came energy and focus. I was able to finish graduate school and start a career in earnest.

But all that energy got diverted away from productive endeavors after Dave died, just as it had been before I married him. My temperament is one that seeks to be part of a couple. I started dating almost immediately after his death, not because I was making a rational decision, but rather because I was trying to escape the misery and shock of what had happened and rather than take up drinking I preferred to take up men. I refer to this as my “insane period” after being widowed. It was a kind of denial, where I attempted to replace Dave with someone else so I wouldn’t have to experience being bereft. For the record, it's no more effective than dating.

It was a disaster, as you can imagine. I don’t even need to go into the details. I took a long enough break from dating to move across the country and then picked it up again.

To sum up that time in my life, I had three major love interests in the first 5 years. I call them “love interests”, not boyfriends, because at least one could never make a commitment.

The first one would make a commitment, but only if I was willing to do things in the bedroom that I’m not comfortable with. That’s how I learned not to date men who use pornography.

The second one could not make a commitment and wasn’t in love with me anyway. I was in the position of pining for someone who wasn’t pining for me, like a country song. From this, I learned that some men will take full advantage of my intense interest in them and it was better to make them work for my attention. They also convinced that my desire to get married was a sign of weakness and something to hide.

And the third? I’ll get to him, but let’s just say that he’s the one who made me realize there had to be a better way.

After the third one, I changed tactics. I finally admitted to myself that I was dating to get married and that this was not something to be ashamed of, and made myself be clear about that on first dates. I turned the first date into an interview and learned how to eliminate bad prospects right away.

I’ll get to the details of this method, how it works and what made me think of it, but right now I just want to tell you that it produced the result I wanted. I met my husband, Rob, online. He was in Kansas City so we had six weeks to talk on the phone before meeting in person. Within three hours of meeting in person we realized we had quite a bit of chemistry. Two days later we decided to get married and six weeks after that, we stood under the chuppah (the Jewish marriage canopy) at his home synagogue in Kansas.

You would be amazed at how many people cautioned me against this seemingly rash behavior, but we knew what we were doing. It’s worked out beautifully and I have never been this happy in my life. (You can read the whole story of our short courtship in the blog post about our single wedding picture.)

“How,” you must be saying to yourselves, “could you possibly have known what you were doing in such a short period of time?” Right?

How could we make a life-altering decision so quickly without worrying that we would become a divorce statistic? We’ve all heard the stories. “They got married too quickly,” people say, “and then it was a mess.”

(To be continued...)

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