Allow me to share a rather lengthy story, which I hope will be a real page turner for you and not a big old sleeping pill. First off, I actually have no spine whatsoever, so it was absolutely impossible for me to ask someone out. And I’m also socially retarded, so the ladies who may have sent me signals (I know of one for sure that is painfully obvious to me now that I have the gift of hindsight and some experience in dealing with the opposite sex) would have needed to have been FAR more aggressive to get me to make a move.
So, I was 22 the first time I found a girlfriend per se, and I’ll warn you right now, this is not about her…she and I did not get married and I haven’t seen her in well over 15 years, I doubt I will ever see her again, and if I do it will be too soon, but I must mention her to set up the story of how I met my wife. I met this first gf on the internet (this was 1993, so there wasn’t even WWW, just IRC, a precursor to chatrooms). I didn’t start out looking for love, just having fun chatting with people in the few places I could even find people to chat with online at the time. We found we had a tremendous amount in common, and whereas I was doing my normal thang…she was aggressive enough to look up my phone # and give me a call. My heart was easy to steal at the time, and that phone call, which lasted all night, pretty much did the trick.
Only problem was, she lived 1,000 miles away, and turned out that she wasn’t exactly “my type” physically (not hideous, but just not what I was looking for), which I found out once we decided to exchange pictures…which was AFTER the phone call. At the advice of my friends who HAD dated and who assured me there was a lot more to chemistry than the physical, on graduation from college I travelled to meet her, and just went with it. However, when about 1/2 way through my 3 week trip she went from incredibly nice to sullen, detatched and at times outright psychotic, I was desperate (and inexperienced enough) that I actually tried to save it, even though I should have known she wasn’t “the one”...I tried to make the pieces fit, but they did not, and she knew it before I did, either that or she was crazy.
I went back home, lost touch with her, and about 6 months later when I was actually ready to join the workforce with my college degree fresh in hand, I decided I was going to try to meet someone. But how? I now had a little bit of experience, but it was dysfunctional at best and misguided at worst, and I had moved to a new city with a greater population and a greater chance to get a job, but where I only knew a couple people. That made it both easier and harder in some ways. On the one hand, there was not the worry that I would have to see someone who rejected me every day if it wasn’t someone I knew. On the other hand I didn’t really have anyone to introduce me to anyone new, and now not only would I have to approach a woman…which maybe having taken the edge of off over 2 decades of celibacy I might have been able to do, but I would also have to find a woman TO approach.
Well now, I was not only still too shy to do or say anything, but I no longer had the benefit of being in a forced social setting (school), and the place I was working was too small to have even a single available bachelorette. I was certainly not the type to approach a stranger, and in nearly 23 years now, the closest I’d ever come to something “just happening” had happened almost a year before and I was doubtful it would just happen again, plus as I said, I’m socially retarded, and have no idea how to read cues.
I resolved that I was going to write a singles ad, and in those days (this was early to mid 1994), there really STILL was no WWW, so it was all in newspapers. Now we had two local regular newspapers, and two local alternative weekly free newspapers, and of the 4, I found that the one I was most interested in reading was the one local alternative weekly that focuses on local happenings, music, etc. So, I decided to start reading the ads, you know, just to get a feel for the language and abbreviations, so I knew how to craft an ad.
After about 3 weeks, I was ready, but, hark…what is this? I saw an ad. A woman, my age, in my neighborhood, looking for a guy, my age, someone about my build, someone with interests similar to mine, someone who liked a lot of the same things she did. It was like reading a mini bio of myself, both the parts describing her and the parts describing what she was looking for.
So, as you can tell if you’ve read this far, I like to write. And so that’s what I did. I wrote a letter to respond to her ad, I described myself honestly, I pointed out all the things she mentioned, and I mentioned the other things about my personality, my tastes, etc. She now knew more about me than I knew about her. What I didn’t know about her was that her love life had been similarly messed up, though for a time perhaps a lot more fun.
She was in a long term relationship with a guy for about a year and a half after she turned 16, but he pulled the old “think we should see other people” on her. Now many would bounce back, but my wife had a HORRIBLE childhood…rejected by her father when he left at an early age, bounced from house to house by an alcoholic mother who had a penchant for abusive men. One time, one of Mom’s boyfriends passed out from doing H while cooking some shrimp, burning the house down…my wife almost didn’t make it out, but Mom freaked out and ran in and a firefighter risked his life to save them both…Mom had been pregnant before the fire, but lost the baby due to injuries sustained. You could say this is when Mom lost any luster she had for life. Dad comes back into her life right around the time when Mom is essentially tortured (while she is locked in a closet) to the point where the police arrest Mom’s boyfriend, hospitalize Mom, and remove my wife from the home, leaving Dad to man up and take custody. Fortunately, at the time, he was clean, even though he had abused a # of substances himself (he’d been a tailgunner in Nam and it kinda fucked him up).
So my wife moves in with Dad and Stepmom, they have a couple kids, but Dad gets back on the Heroin BECAUSE of stepmom, who insisted he start selling to make extra money, and of course a former addict can’t sell and not fall back into his old ways. Stepmom wanted no part of H (she was more into speed, but a family friend was more of a “party gal”, so eventually he moves on to greener pastures again, leaving my wife to live with a resentful, petty stepmom who worked her like a slave and barely gave her the essentials. But she had her much younger siblings now to take care of (and since stepmom wasn’m much of a “mom” to her kids, she had her hands pretty full). So, when her ex comes into her life, he was her salvation, he was her ticket out of this terrible life. Then a year and a half later, he abandons her (kinda like her dad had done twice).
She goes on to college with a friend, who wasn’t college material herself, but they essentially lived like a married couple (well, no sex…which come to think of it, really IS like a married couple)...but in a very unhealthy way…co-dependent on each other as each was emotionally crippled in a different way. They spend 5+ years in college, my wife got her degree, her friend did not, and in her first year of college, Mom died of pneumonia at age 39 due to a lifetime of self abuse. It didn’t help matters that my wife, who still felt VERY close to her mom and had been trying to “save” her, had gotten in a fight with her a month before and never spoke with her again, even missing a call the day before she died.
Hence, my wife was pretty messed up when I met her, and she had spent 6 years almost afraid to go outdoors. Everyone she’d ever known, save for her kid brother and sister, had let her down or used her or hurt her or someone she’d loved or abandoned her in some way. She had her friend/roommate, her siblings and her cats, and that was all she would let in. So she too missed out on college romance, which is supposedly where the vast majority of people meet their mates.
But she got fed up of the co-dependency. She got fed up of being afraid of the world. She got fed up of feeling sorry for herself about her high school sweetheart. And she put an ad in the paper…the ad I saw. It took a couple months for her to trust me enough to meet me, and it took a couple years of me being patient and her being in the real world, living life on her own terms, before she didn’t feel the subconcious need to test me in some borederline emotionally abusive way that perhaps someone more confident in their dating prowess would have used as an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and seek out greener pastures. But we stuck by each other…and yes, she’s had heartbreak and letdowns since…both her siblings experimented heavily with drugs, her brother took a long time to pull his act together, her father passed away a year before we got married (cancer, probably from Agent Orange), found out about another half-sister to whom she tried to get close and only got burned. But through it all, she’s had a small, but growing circle of friends, she’s found a career that suits her, and we will have been together for 15 years in June and we have a very happy, well adjusted 7 1/2 year old son.
So, I COULD have just told you, “we met through a singles ad,” but I didn’t, and here’s why. Because I’ve learned a number of lessons from this. One is to keep your eyes and your ears open. Two is to not be afraid (if you can help it) to put yourself out there, you know…the people I was afraid would reject me haven’t been a regular part of my life for 15–20 years, it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run if I HAD asked someone out and she’d rejected me, so if I could go back, I wouldn’t be so afraid. Three is don’t disregard any idea…want ads might seem seedy and desperate, but you just never know, the person writing that ad (or reading yours) may be perfectly compatible with you. Four is to use what you have…if friends can set you up, go for it. Five is to seek out places where people would be doing the things you would like to do, if you don’t have some interests in common, you don’t have the seeds to sow to make it a successful relationship. And sixth, it may not work the first time out, but don’t give up, there is a person out there whose perfections AND flaws compliment yours. Bottom line is, there are a million ways to meet, just make sure you know how to communicate, and you will eventually find what you seek as long as you’re willing to just put yourself out there, however YOU feel comfortable doing it and be receptive to any opportunity, you can tell from the variety of stories here that there is no “wrong” way to meet somebody.
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