A Muse with a View

People often say age is just a number.  However, there are two things I know to be true about online dating: men often lie about their height and women often lie about their age. And when you get into the 50-55 age bracket the men start lying about their age as often as the women do.

So if age is really just a number, why do so many people lie about it?

Middle aged women lie about their age because most middle aged men won’t date someone their age or older. Period.

Men lie so the younger women will find them when they search the dating sites. We all know the big 5-0 is the death knell in all online dating search engines. It’s rare to see a 50-year old man who’s dating range includes women 50 and over. In general the only men searching in the over-50 range are the ones who are over 60.

To all of the men and women out there who are lying about their age on their profiles, know this: if there’s one thing most people are looking for in a relationship it’s honesty and integrity, and you just blew it. If you lie about your age it makes your potential match wonder what else you may be lying about.

I list my true age on my online profile, and if the men my age don’t find me in a search it’s their loss.

And guess what, not everyone who’s near 50 looks like the Crypt Keeper or your Grandma Celia.

My dear friend over at The London Leprechaun once wrote a blog of letters to himself at various ages, so I thought I would do the same. If I could give myself advice…

Dear Kelly (Age 3),

Yes, that toy Tonka Jeep is sturdy, but it’s not meant to be ridden down the driveway like a luge sled. Especially not face first. So now you’ve got this big scab on your face for your fourth birthday thanks to the small pebble halfway down the driveway that stopped that Tonka truck cold and launched you into the concrete like a missile. But don’t worry, there won’t be scar.

Dear Kelly (Age 4),

The Monkees are never going to drive up to your house just because you love their show so much, so stop staring out the window and watching for them. The show is taped Kelly. When you see them drive away at the end of the show they are not driving to your house. They are probably in some bar having a Scotch.

Dear Kelly (Age 5),

Uhm, you forgot to take your pajama shorts off before you left for Kindergarten this morning. They’re still there under your dress.
Dear Kelly (Age 12),

You’re lying there with your arm in a cast. It’s summer. I know it sucks. You’re lucky you didn’t land on your head when you fell into that empty swimming pool. And just so you know, your wrist is going to heal just fine and you’re going to be a fabulous volleyball player for the next 20 years. What? You’ve never tried volleyball? You will.

Dear Kelly (Age 13),

You and your best friend Cathy, whom you’ve known since you were 4 years old, have gone your separate ways. I know you are heartbroken, but let me tell you something. You two will reconcile and stay the best of friends until the day you die. Just give it some time.

Dear Kelly (Age 16),

I know that your original plan was to escape to a foreign country for a year just because you were sick of living at home. I know you’re homesick in Finland, but resist the urge to pack up and go home. Stick it out. This experience will shape the rest of your life. And that family you’re living with has a heart of gold, and you will keep in touch with them for the rest of your life.

Dear Kelly (Age 17),

When the guards at the Russian border tell you to stay in your seat on the bus and not take any pictures at the border crossing they mean it! Did you really think they wouldn’t see the camera flash as you took the picture while the bus was pulling away? Tsk tsk. You’re lucky that all they took was your film.

Dear Kelly (Age 18),

The fact that you were Homecoming Queen will have no value whatsoever later in life. No, I’m not kidding.  Sorry, but it’s not something you can put on your resume.

Dear Kelly (Age 21),

I know you went to San Diego State because you wanted to be a news reader and a reporter, but it’s going to take a while. You’ll graduate in a year and become a cocktail waitress because there are no jobs in 1980. Eventually you’ll decide enough is enough and you’ll get your first corporate job at Sun Microsystems. You will have this incredibly awesome boss who will push you into Engineering. I know it sounds really far fetched, but it’s true. You’ll love it. Don’t worry. Oh, and that news reader thing? You’ll eventually have your own political talk show. You’ll write it, co-produce it and host it. Yes, really.

Dear Kelly (Age 22),

For future reference, you’re not supposed to touch royalty. I’m sure Prince Andrew will get over it but the Mayor of San Diego will never forgive you.

Dear Kelly (Age 23),

Did you really think that buying a one-way ticket around the world and traveling by yourself was going to be without incident? You are too trusting. Leave Madrid as soon as you can and stay in India for a while. You’ll like the Shah family. Did you know that Mrs. Shah thinks you are her daughter from a past life? They will love you like a daughter. Go.

Dear Kelly (Age 29),

I know you’re wondering if you’ll ever get any sleep again. That little baby who’s waking you up at all hours will grow up to be a young man you can be proud of. He will have written two novels by the time he’s 20 years old. Oh, and he will stop spitting up eventually.

Dear Kelly (Age 41),

I know, I know, this is not where you thought you’d be at this age. Being a single mom with three kids is rough. No doubt about it. But Kelly, this time in your life is going to teach you so many good life lessons so make sure you pay attention.

Dear Kelly (Age 42),

You are a Survivor. Remember that.

Dear Kelly (Age 47)

This too shall pass.

Dear Kelly (Age 48),

The teenage years don’t last forever. You’re not the first to have an angsty teenage daughter.

Dear Kelly (Age 50),

I warned you! Be careful what you wish for. You got it. Now what?

In the prehistoric dating world we dated people at work, in the neighborhood, or in the same zip code. If we were really adventurous we might venture to a neighboring zip code for a date. Well online dating has expanded that dating radius to every zip code, area code, postal code and country code in the world.

That’s great, right? Sure, if you have unlimited vacation time and a bottomless bank account.

What happens when a guy in area code 503 (Portland) meets a gal in area 206 (Seattle)? They exchange a few emails, maybe a phone call, and then one of them offers to make the 3-hour drive to meet for coffee (more likely dinner because it’s such a long drive). They meet and immediately realize there’s no chemistry. She thinks he looks 10 years older than his profile picture. He thinks she looks 30 pounds heavier. And they are both right. They could have saved themselves a lot of time and money if they would have done one thing: had a Skype coffee date.

All of the emails and phone calls in the world won’t show you what Skype will.  Skype adds the dimension of body language that you can’t get via email or phone. I highly suggest you skip the lengthy emails and phone calls and go straight to Skype.

The First Skype Date

Do yourself a favor and treat the first Skype date like you would any other first date. That is, take a shower, put some clean clothes on, brush your teeth, and pretend you’re actually meeting in person. I suggest “meeting” for coffee first, and following the suggestions below:

1. Pick an area in your home that is free of clutter, and doesn’t have any personally identifying information in it.
2. Set your computer on the table facing where you plan to sit, and then walk around to the back of the computer and take a look at what your date will see. Is there some hideous art in the background? Pictures of your kids? Your ex? Take them down or pick another spot.
3. Check that the light is flattering. Fluorescent lights and overhead spotlights are the worst.
4. Take a picture of yourself with your webcam so you can see the environment and the lighting before your date.
5. Make yourself a cup of coffee or tea before the date, and off you go!

The Second Skype Date

If you’re still not quite sure if you want to drive the three hours to meet your date in person, or fly 5000 miles as was the case with my first Skype coffee date, have a second date. In fact, make it a lunch or dinner date. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.

Have you ever been annoyed by the way someone eats a salad, munches their popcorn, or slurps their soup? Yep. Have a date that inlcludes food. Set your laptop on the kitchen table and have a meal with your date.

Once you have had a couple of Skype dates you’ll know if you actually want to make the effort to meet in person. You will also get the added bonus of not having first-date jitters when you have your first real date, because you’ve basically already met.

Happy Skyping!

As I was sitting around the table at Starbucks this morning with my running buddies of 15 years, there was a common theme in the conversation. We were all more than happy to kiss the last decade goodbye.

When I look back at the last 10 years I realize that I have been through every major life crisis imaginable. I went through a divorce. I lost my mom. I had cancer not once but twice (I’m five years clear now, knock wood).  I had to short sale a house I owned in L.A. I had to take a business partner to court. I was underemployed, and then unemployed. I ended the decade with a very destructive relationship.

We all watched our 401k plans shrink by half.

But even with all of that adversity I still saw the glass as half full. Every time I wanted to have a pity party I thought about the people who were worse off than me. I had a roof over my head. I wasn’t sleeping in my car or under a bridge. I survived cancer.  In 2008 I won my court battle. And in 2009 I sold that house in L.A. and landed an awesome job. And in the Spring of this year I vowed to never again accept anything less than integrity, honesty and mutual respect in a relationship.

We all change over time, but I feel like I had a major life makeover. I truly believe that if you never know adversity and sorrow you can’t really appreciate joy.

May this decade bring us all an abundance of friends, family, love and joy. Happy new year everyone.

I am a registered member of a dating site called OKCupid. One of the unique features of the site is you can write Journal entries, which I occasionally do. I posted the entry below a few days ago and I couldn’t believe how defensive some of the guys got. It was like I had personally attacked their masculinity with my simple tips on how to choose the right main profile photo.

Here’s the post:

Okay guys, listen up. I’m going to let you in on a couple of secrets about what goes through the mind of a woman when she looks at your profile and decides whether or not to read it or click the dreaded Hide button.

You have less than five seconds to catch our interest. This is the order in which most woman I know would notice things in your profile:

1. The first thing we look at is your MAIN photo.

2. The second thing is your screen name. Screen names like “PatheticLonelyGuy” and “Just4Sex” say a lot about who you are, how you feel about yourself, and what you’re looking for.

3. The three adjectives.

4. The first sentence in your profile (if we get that far).

Lesson 1: The Profile Picture

This is all about that very first picture we see. The rest of the photos shouldn’t follow all of these suggestions.

These are the DOs for your MAIN profile photo:

1. Headshot that clearly shows you from the shoulders up.

2. Smiling please. No one wants to date a sour puss.

3. Face the camera. No profiles.

4. Make sure the shot is in focus.

5. Recent photo.

6. Look directly into the camera. I realize I violated this with my original profile shot I had up, but there are exceptions to every rule.

These are the DON’Ts:

1. No hats. We want to see your hair or your chrome dome, as the case may be.

2. No sunglasses. We don’t trust you if we can’t see your eyes. How would you feel if you met a woman for a date and she never took off her sunglasses? Would you trust her.

3. Shot of you from far far away. Save that for the second or third photo.

4. No dead animals land or sea. A shot of you in a fishing hat and sunglasses holding up a dead fish does absolutely nothing to ignite the passions in a woman.

5. No photos of yourself in the bathroom. I take self shots a lot, but you’ll never see a bathroom mirror, shower stall or toilet in the background!

To be cont’d…

Originally published on MySpace on December 19, 2008.

Is all really fair in love and war?

I got an email from a good friend the other day. I’ll call him Mitch. The email started out on a very positive note. It started out with, Karma is shining her face on me I guess. The subject: Match.com.

But as always, there are interesting twists and turns when you are speaking of the online dating world.

Mitch’s email to me went on to say that he had just been thinking it was time to cancel his Match.com membership and give it all a rest for a while, because he just wasn’t meeting anyone worthwhile. Then he got an email from Cindy. She winked on a Monday morning, and they exchanged a few emails that day. It seemed she liked “nerdy, shy, intelligent types” (Mitch is), they enjoyed traveling to the same places, and even had the same favorite restaurant.

They arranged to meet for dinner on Wednesday. It all seemed too good to be true.

And it was…

He received an email from Cindy late Monday night, after they had traded emails all day and had planned to meet for dinner.

I would love to post the email verbatim here, but I don’t have permission from Mitch to do that. But here’s my version of it (grammatical errors and all!).

Mitch,

Hey, I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but don’t bother going to our
favorite restaurant on Wednesday – I won’t be there. In fact, I was really never planning to be there.

CONFESSION TIME: I put this profile up on Match and started emailing around to get my boyfriend jealous so that he’d get off his duff after 3 years and propose already, and it worked beautifully.

Sorry you got caught in the crossfires, but the emails had to look real. I guess your radar about my profile being to-good-to-be-true, was dead on. But hey, sometimes a gal’s gotta due what a gal’s gotta due.

If it makes you feel any better, you weren’t the only one I was emailing. Just one of the few I didn’t have to stand up. Happy Holidays!

Cindy <– Her real name because she deserves to be publicly flogged!

WTF Cindy? You used my good friend and a few other innocent bystanders to get your boyfriend to propose to you? And he actually walked right into your trap and proposed? Let me tell you something Cindy, people don’t like to be cornered and given ultimatums. Your boyfriend proposed to you under duress because he thought it was the only way he could keep you. Well guess what, if he’s not a dumbass he’ll wake up one day soon and kick you to the curb. Who wants to spend the rest of their life with a manipulative woman who acts like she’s still in high school? Or maybe you’re both dumbasses and you just saved my friend Mitch from a disaster. Good riddance.

The moral of the story? People misrepresent themselves online all the time to get what they want. And they don’t give a shit about you, because you’re just a fictitious persona they came across on Match.com.

P.S. My friend Mitch is not curled up in a fetal position because of this little incident. It’s just one of the many landmines of online dating. He was suspicious from the beginning.

Originally published on October 19, 2008.

I had one of those totally surreal experiences right out of a Meg Ryan movie on Wednesday. First of all I was having very good parking karma that day, being that I had run over my 90-minute meter by 57 minutes by the time I left work, and there was no yellow envelope to be found on my window when I got back to my car. Sweet!

I had finished work a little early and I decided to stop by Cabana Boy’s loft before heading home to pick up the kids from school. I drove the short distance from work to his loft in The Pearl and found a parking space right in front of his building. I fed the meter and fished in my purse for the keys to the front door of the building. Let me just say that my keys only work about 50% of the time because the lock on the front door seems to be stripped, and I usually struggle for a few minutes before someone with an electronic keycard comes or goes, and I slip through the door behind them.

Today was no different.

I put the shiny silver key into the lock and started jiggling it to see if I could get it to catch the pins. I’ve figured out that if I pull the key back just a hair it sometimes works, but not today.

I heard a voice behind me say, “You have an envelope stuck to your purse.”

I turned and looked and sure enough, one of the many sticky parking meter stickers floating around my car had found its way to an envelope and then my purse. Lovely.

I looked at the guy and thanked him as I pulled the envelope and parking sticker from my purse.

“Oh my God!” he said, with a huge smile on his face. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

I immediately started scrolling through the list of faces from my 50 first dates of Match.com, eHarmony, craigslist, etc. Nothing registered.

“No, I’m sorry I don’t recognize you,” I said, just waiting for the embarrassing part that was bound to come next. “Who are you?”

“Sam S*****!”

“No way!” I screamed, as I immediately recognized this slightly older version of this guy I once knew. “But, wait, what? You live in Portland?” I said, completely flabbergasted. Was I on an episode of Punk’d?

“I live in the building,” he said.

“No way!” I said in disbelief. “I don’t believe this. Hey, can you let me in? My key never works.”

We walked in together. He told me about his wife who is expecting twins in January. We exchanged business cards. He got off on the 4^th floor, I on the 5^th. When I arrived at Cabana Boy’s loft I walked into the kitchen with my mouth hanging open and said, “You are never going to believe what just happened to me in front of your building.”

You see Sam was my boyfriend when I went to University of New Hampshire in 1983! I haven’t seen or been in touch with him since about 1988!

This has to be the most unbelievable case of “small world” that I have ever experienced. Second runner up is when I was walking out into the surf in Puerto Vallarta, turned to my left, and saw my next-door neighbor from my childhood neighborhood.

Have you ever had an incredible small world experience like this?

Sidenote: I was a senior and 21 when I exchanged to New Hampshire for a semester, and Sam was a freshman (save the cradle robber jokes!). We met ..-in day at the dorm. I got written up on my very first day in the dorm because I was drinking in his room with he and his roommates and they were all minors!

A blog for Jim, who requested the topic of “Emotional Monogamy,” in my Blogging for Dollars (fundraising for Relay for Life) challenge.

When I was 10 years old my mom used to drive my sisters and I up to San Francisco to visit my grandparents. We often drove through the Haight & Ashbury area, and I would press my hands and nose against the car window with wide-eyed wonder and plead, “Please let me get out and walk with them! Please!”

It was 1972.

Then the ’80′s came and the hippies were replaced by Madonna wannabes.

I dressed the part: the torn shirts, wild hair, and dramatic eye makeup, but on the inside I was still thinking about those hippies on Haight & Ashbury. I identified with them and their free loving attitudes, and surmised I had been born 10 years too late.

1980-1984: I attended San Diego State University, the complete antithesis of Haight & Ashbury, and felt like a child looking through the plastic packaging at the land of Barbie and Ken.

When I graduated from college I moved back to the Bay Area and shared a house with three of my high school friends, and we created the closest thing to commune living as you can in the suburbs of sophisticated Saratoga, California. We not only shared a house, but we shared a common belief, that openly loving each other was the only way to live.

I have been married twice since that time in Saratoga, and both times I had no problem being sexually monogamous. However, I constantly struggled with the concept of emotional monogamy, that is, being restricted to only having a deep and meaningful emotional connection with one person at a time. It seemed so unnatural to me. But jealousy rears its ugly head when people are insecure.

I am an openly loving person, and my friendships run deep. I have intense emotional connections with my core group of friends, and I’m not about to give that up. I have an equal number of male and female friends, and each one of them satisfies something in my soul.

So, the real question for me is, is there someone out there who can meet all of my emotional needs? I doubt it. Problem is, that’s what we all expect from our partners. We expect that person to be our everything. It’s unrealistic.

We are a nation of posers if you ask me. Everyone’s trying to give the outward appearance of being monogamous, but statistics say that 80% of those claiming to be sexually and/or emotionally monogamous are actually sneaking around behind their partner’s backs. Why? Because monogamy is a choice not a natural predication.

It is hard to choose emotional monogamy with the Internet at your finger tips 24 hours a day. We exchange emails and text messages like handshakes. The line has been eternally blurred.

We all try so hard to fit into this pre-defined society we live in, and wonder why we fail. The world is changing my friend. Look around you. People are redefining relationships every day.

When I die I want my obituary to say, “She loved.”