DATING: I DON'T HAVE THE ANSWER

We tell ourselves things and repeat them until we believe them. You know. I am trapped. My life is over. I am unlovable. I have become invisible.

I suppose that if I told myself the opposite with the same tenacity I would eventually believe it too. Your life is just beginning. Anything is possible. Inside you is everything you need.

After my divorce...it as the first time in more a couple of years that I am living alone again.. And I was pondering where exactly one goes from here.

But how does one go about doing that ? How could I meet people I wouldn't normally come across? How could I gain access into different walks of life?

The answer came to me suddenly. I swallowed. Online dating.

Up until now I had regarded online dating with disdain. I felt it zapped romance out of the equation, extracted serendipity and left you with something clinical and contrived and similar to a work interview.

Not to mention, I had not dated for over 8 years.

Right. So online dating would be the way to stop doing what I had always done, which might, if one follows logic, give me a shot at a different result.

On with it, then.

To keep things simple, I decided to focus on a single site and picked OK Cupid.

I found myself struggling with the most fundamental parts of the questionnaire, such as the ability to distinguish what I liked versus what “we” liked.  It occurred to me that defining myself to strangers would be an effective exercise in reconstituting who I was.

After a few days of tentative practice and a slow “waiting to be discovered” approach, I arrived at a notion that took precedence over the hard to get frame of mind I had grown up with. If I waited for people to notice my profile and contact me, the universe of those I could choose from would shrink considerably. I much preferred picking from anyone I wanted, even if it meant risking sometimes not getting a reply.

Another realization: My end game wasn’t finding love. What I yearned for was a new life, a fresh perspective. My criteria would have to change accordingly. Instead of asking myself "Is this person wife material?" I would remind myself to ask "would going out with her be interesting? Fun? Would I learn something?"

I met someone new every day for about a month. Because I was so fed up with being in a state of emotional paralysis. Because I knew that somewhere out there was a world too rich to warrant the delusion that I was finished. But mostly because I quickly learned that everyone was interesting, and that everyone had something to teach me.

I read a girl's profile which sounded less like she was looking for a date, more like she was trying to find religion. "Reach out" she wrote "if you think you have answers". Over tea I told her I had recently learned how futile it was to plan. “We can’t predict what we want, as it assumes we’re not going to change. The future has so many variables we can’t see that the most accurate way to live our life is to go by what would make us happy right now.”

She sat there looking at me. She then told me she had survived a terminal cancer diagnosis 8 years before, and had found out a couple of days ago that it was back. "I don't want chemo again" she said. "What should I do?" I stood and put my arms around her and we held each other there, in the middle of a café, two strangers who had the answers to nothing.