With the announcement of my engagement to the lovely Julie and with the curtain closing on my mid-singles life (and admittedly feeling a bit of survivor’s guilt – but that is for another post), I have naturally been reflecting on my nearly two-year Maze Runner ordeal in the singles scene. After deep contemplation and pondering I have arrived at a concise and clear conclusion as to the nature of the mid-singles dating world; if I may quote the great military commander Admiral Ackbar … “IT’S A TRAP!!!”
The singles scene has a gravity. It pulls you in and wants keep you there. It lures wary, haggard, and life beaten 30+ plus year olds like a bearded guy sitting in a windowless panel van handing out free candy to children. It pulls you in with enticements of granting you a midlife mulligan, only to find yourself chained to some rusty radiator in a basement in Magna with a panel van parked in the driveway. There are many aspects of this singles world that seem to trap those it ostensibly seeks to liberate. As I am leaving the scene with my prize, I think I see a few of these traps more clearly, so I figured I would share them and isn't social media all about oversharing anyway? (remind me to tell you about this chaffing rash later)
Destroy What You Have Built
A part of my job is branding. In the world of product branding, the goal is to create a reputation and goodwill associated with your name so you can sell what you have to offer to loads of customers. The better you deliver on products and services, the more valuable your name recognition will be (contrasting ROLEX with YUGO should give you an idea). As with marketing, in the mid-singles dating world you create a brand for yourself which is not surprising as you are selling yourself - in a very non-Pretty Woman kind of way. Your brand may be the super party host, the country dance king, the outdoor adventurer, the clown, the Lake Powell goddess, or the crappy blog writer. However it is you want to be viewed, you cultivate this persona among your friends and general dating world. If you build your brand correctly, you meet lots of people, who add you as friends on Facebook, who invite you to parties, who send you texts, Voxers, and Polos and who may even read your crappy little blog posts. And in all of this you are not only going for quality, but also quantity; the more “likes” and “friends” the better. It becomes this nice little singles eco-system.
But here is the catch and what many of us lose sight of, the goal is not to build up some huge long term customer base. It is in fact the exact opposite. Yes, the goal is to attract customers of the opposite sex, but from that pool choose just a single one, promptly kicking everyone else out the door and then burn the whole business down to the ground. Not always easy. I personally have made scores of amazing female friends during these years. We cruised the Caribbean together, we danced, we gifted beta fish, we laughed and cried, we rocked out to music, we fought moose, we biked dikes, we repossessed a scarecrow. Many of us took our first baby steps into recovery of failed marriages together. These are friends that will always have very special place in my heart. Yet, the necessity and the trap of the mid-singles world is that once you find your match, you need to turn your back on this life that you built and watch it wither and die.
An Endless Rolodex of Optimistic Options
Another trap of the mid-singles world is the modern consistent bombardment of dating options, an endless Rolodex as it were (like half of you even know what a Rolodex is). There are countless dating sites and social media tools that throw scores of prospective mates in front of you instantly. You have tons of Facebook “friends,” many of which you have never actually met in person. You go to parties and while talking to one dating prospect, all of the sudden... look who walked in? Wow! But wait, “Who is that one over there?” So cool. “Oh there is another good-looking person.” Beautiful. By the end of the night you have had 17.5 shallow conversations (counting that half conversation who excused herself to go to the bathroom and never came back). There is little chance for any degree of dialogical depth in these conversations because you’re sitting there like Doug the Dog yelling SQUIRREL at each pretty face that crosses your line of sight. It is complete sensory overload. There is no chance to fall in love because we have the romantic attention span of Wilt Chamberlain. Remember those good old days when you could go out with one woman and not have other dating prospects trying to text their way into your moment (and where you don't guiltily check these texts while in the safety of the bathroom)? But not these days. If you miss this trap, you end up with 37 relationships as shallow as a kiddie pool… oooooh, look over there… 38!
When I first trudged back into the dating world at 40, I told myself that wife 2.0 was going to be the absolute most perfect woman out there. I wasn’t going to skimp on any of the details. She would of course be gorgeous, be an amazing mother, like football and know the rules, have no baggage, be highly educated, know how to have loads of fun, be a natural interior designer, have no depression, like my typos, have perfect kids, we would never fight, she would go to church with me every Sunday, she would not have a dog, and most importantly, she would not be a Ute fan. It is almost like I designed her in a lab. Yet we engineers know all too well, laboratory results do not always reflect what will occur in the real world – Right Samsung Galaxy Note 7 owners?
I think some of us fall prey to these unachievable expectations of finding someone absolutely perfect and don’t pull the trigger on pursuing a 92% match in hopes of finding this unicorn of a mate out there which really doesn’t exist in nature (or is actually a tranny). I recall once while weighing whether or not to pursue a current relationship deeper, I did some dating option evaluation in my head (only because I didn’t have a spreadsheet at the time). I identified three other women that I thought might be a better match for my unobtainable goal of perfection. Then I stopped... I realized hadn’t actually ever met any of these three women in real life. We had chatted online and I had checked out the carefully choreographed personas pictures posted online (as they may have done with mine). By this limited view I had a perfect perception of these women because we had never even met to discover each other’s imperfections. So am I saying that my lovely fiancée is not perfect? Yes, she isn't perfect and I am not either. I fortunately recognized this trap before we arrived at the first look of each other’s imperfections, which happened pretty quickly. Yet, seeing the scale of pluses far far outweighed the few minuses in the relationship we decides to keep building on what we have. How sad it would have been if I had walked away from this most amazing find because she doesn't like football and wants me to learn to ballroom dance? (which is not going too well, "what is timing anyway"?)
The Buzz Hit of the Hunt
Yep, you’ve made it. You are a cool mid-singles dater. You may have women telling you that you are a “good one” or even a “rare catch.” You know loads of members of the opposite sex. You wake up in the morning and check your phone and often find new and interesting women have found you and sent you messages (albeit many of which were fake female profiles from West Africa looking for cash). Each message or activity brings the thrill of possibly meeting that perfect someone who can make your life perfect; the endless opportunities offered by a first date. It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, it’s exhilarating, it’s… it’s dopamine. As a good counselor once told me, the first steps in dating give you a drug like chemical buzz. The first meeting, the first text, the first date, the first kiss; it’s all excitement. And this quick and short-lived thrill is easier to get from this new mystery person than it is to get from the person that you have been dating for six months. Yet, this counselor also said that a good healthy relationship progresses past this temporary chemical thrill into a steadier and higher level feeling. This higher feeling may have fewer sudden spikes of excitement, but it will have an overall wavelength and magnitude of happiness that vastly exceeds this sudden dose of new love. The problem is that many of us get hooked on this rush and get trapped, like addicts, looking for the next hit while missing the long-term happiness that we just passed by. So rather than building something long-term (and that will get us out of this scene), we focus on this excitement and get rewarded by staying stuck in this painful loop until we OD on first dates and exit the dating world frustrated... until we crawl back in again to get that fix.
So how did I personally overcome these traps? I didn't, I just got over-the-top lucky to meet my fiancee the very day I decided to leave the dating world for while after OD-ing on too many first dates. Isn't that how it always seems to be? Yet I can say that having been warned of these traps by several friends stuck in the infinite loop of the singles scene, I had a good idea of where the tripwires were that would spring these traps on me again. So with a lot of luck and a little insight I feel like I am finally stepping out into the safety of real life. These traps hopefully behind me I can politely turn away the few remaining customers from the Brett-Dating-Emporium, douse the whole store in kerosene... and lite a glistening and glorious match.
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