Dating sites. Ugh. Creepy. Where the desperate and the truly deprived of social intercourse go… so there I was on a dating site gleefully creating my profile… la-de-da-de-da… and trying to make it say something like, “I’m a fun, interesting, captain of industry who wants to be your teddy bear”. You know, all the old conundrums but in a cocoon of subtlety. I call it the Barry White trap. I’m not sure how you can be a winner AND still need to beg for “companionship” but that’s the play. I have a friend who is strongly opposed to R&B for this very reason. Anyway, the honeys will flock to me like flies to… errrr honey? 😀

But how did I get here…
[if this were a sitcom the screen would get all wavy and my character would look off into space]

I went to a singles meetup one Friday night. Now, I’ve been to plenty of meetups that were related to my profession or my hobbies. I figure if you’re there for purely social reasons then you already have something in common and it’s easy to start a conversation. I really don’t have a plan or game other than to go out, drink, possibly make some new friends, and generally have a good time. Anything else is icing on the cake. This time around I went to a meetup explicitly for singles to mingle. I made that sound cheesier than it was. Well, maybe not. The official age range was from thirties to fifties but how many thirty year olds do you know that want to hang out with fifty year olds!? So, no, I don’t think I saw any thirty year olds.

The bar, man’s best friend
I got my hand stamped by the cute twenty-something hostess as a sign that I was too old for her but just right for the event’s discounted drinks. Cha-ching, $6 cocktails! Hmmm… thinking this was going to be a lame suburban event I had arrived late so I wouldn’t have to make an excuse to ditch early. With that obnoxious mindset firmly in place I made a beeline for the bar. I like bars. I like drinking. I would marry my fave cocktail if it were legal. Though I think the babies would be as messed up as a herd of Liza Minellis… I walked past some single people on the way but I only had eyes for the bar. Ordered my drink and struck up a conversation with a significantly older woman on my right (as a warmup, I assure you) who, come to find out, was not there for the meetup, was half in the bag, and was thoroughly confused by my asking.

“A what, what?”
“The meetup. You know, meetup.com?”
“Oh, I think they’re upstairs.” Cackle, cackle, cackle.

All right now, drunken grandma, stop eyeballing, I’m moving on. I walk back to the cute hostess, my liquid love in hand. My drink, that is. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and my next step is to get something going or bolt. Long story short, everyone at the bar except the woman I talked to was there for the event. She points out a couple of ladies sitting together and I can tell from twenty feet away that these women are definitely there to meet a guy like me. Like me but taller, better looking, and probably wealthier. I swaggered over (not too much swag, might spill ma’ drink).

Timeout: I’d like to state that I don’t go out wearing a silk shirt unbuttoned to my navel with a large gold chain. I dress kinda’ ok without wearing suit separates or khakis. I’m not trying to look like an anchorman or a cube farm dude. It’s a ‘burbs thing. I’m blowing my own horn but I’m not terribly ugly and I’ve been told that I look much younger than my age. Put some offbeat personality behind that and you’ve got a sexy recipe for… disaster? Yeah, that’s how I roll, dangerous baby, meow. I thought of swaggering right past ‘em so they could check out my caboose… but decided to play it a little close.

Nice and easy like I say, yo ladies, sup, sup and give ‘em the head nod and the pursed-lip-push. To them it may’ve sounded like, “Er, sooooo, you guys come out for the meetup?”, as they watched me nervously clutching my whisky pacifier. These chicks were hot! Not in a twenty year old clone-like supermodel sort of way, but in a forty year old, I got the skillz to pay my own bills and if you play your cards right I might teach you a few things, kinda’ way. I felt like a field mouse nibbling grass in the growing shadow of a hawk… sweat trickled down my ribs and a faint squeak escaped my lips… then, unlike almost every other time I go out to a local bar (versus NYC), we hung out, drank, and talked until closing time! Yup, Mr. Snooty was proved wrong! There are fun women, not just girls, out in the suburbs and I gotta’ find out where they’re all hiding real fast. The pool’s not so big and these chicks are getting snatched up real quick! 😀

And thus ends this cautionary tale.

Ok, it doesn’t. One of the ladies turned out to be suspiciously unavailable within days of me meeting her… hmmmmm… but turned me on to a dating site she’d used that had also advertised the meetup. A free dating site. She was rather insistent that I check it out so I let her boss me into it. Ok, ok, I liked her a lot and you know how that gets… The super neat thing is she gave a good critique of my profile, it was a little too Alan Alda so she suggested some Mr. T and Donald Trump nuances to punch it up. Tally ho! Let the games begin! 🙂