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Online Dating Divorce and Separation

Saturday, December 8th, 2007 |

Anyone who ever went through a relationship breakdown will know that in one way or another it’s a tough thing to deal with.

At some point in our lives we are going to want to move on and start anew with someone else, we will all deal with it in different ways too.

I look back at some of my early dating experiences a while after my ex and I had split, some 6 months down the line around about the time when I began to accept that a reconciliation was very unlikely. I remember pulling myself together and saying to myself that life goes on, I just had to pick up the bits and pieces and get out there and meet women. My dad, bless him, had a simple theory for me, he said that all I had to do was ‘pull a bird’ and I’d start to feel better again. Heh, I wish that it was a simple as that as I’d obviously had done that a long time ago, eh dad?

The truth of the matter was that dating was a big pain in the arse! It felt weird as hell. I felt like a fish out of water as I fumbled my way through various flings with all sorts of ill suited people. I look back and laugh at my various online dating encounters and my various efforts at trying to find Mrs right through a process of box ticking via various online dating profiles. After a period of time I realised that there are a lot of desperate people out there running round like headless chickens trying to pair up with this romantic ideal. I included myself amongst this number , employing some standardised internet dating process of dating site to email, to msn conversations, to phone calls, to eventual meet up.

When you’ve been married for a few years you kind of forget how the rules work. Christ I wasn’t that great at the dating game the 1st time around, so I was kind of like a fish out of water. On the one hand I just wanted to get out and have fun, meeting people, having a woman to hang with and do BF and GF stuff, yet on the other I wanted a lot more too. I think I missed the security that marriage once gave, that whole family thing. Waking up or going to bed and knowing my kids were safe asleep in their beds, seeing their sleepy little faces when they came downstairs, reading them a bedtime story. In other words ,I hadn’t really moved on and I think that this showed in the new relationships I tried. Very few people be they men or women want to feel like they are a secondary consideration, we all want to feel that in our special relationships that we are the most important players in it, so to see or learn that someone is still stuck elsewhere can be a little off putting.

Of course, all of this is just my experience, I wasn’t at all light hearted or carefree about it, I wanted someone in my life and was determined to try and find them, not a good approach at all.

Still thankfully for most, not everyone will be like me, not everyone will have experienced their marital breakdown in the way I did, some I guess can just pick up and start off again with minimal effort, free from the constraints of a once restrictive setup happy to embrace what new things and experiences life has to offer them, I’d imagine though that these people are the exception rather than the rule.

Would I date a recently separated person? To be honest, probably not. My last stab at a relationship was with a woman who’d been separated for about 6 months. Whilst we got on well and had a lot of fun, she couldn’t but help relating to her marriage and her kids, she had difficulty playing it cool taking it all one step at a time, she’d ask me to park up the road away from her home, she’d try to get me to interact with her kids as if I was their father, I was acutely aware of all the machinations of her divorce proceedings and the various nasty behaviors of her ex and her in laws, it was like being reminded all over again of an experience I wanted to put behind me!

I think anyone who comes out of a long marriage or relationship needs a period of calm and reflection whereby they can have a look at themselves and their lives and see where they want to be and go. Some of us will get lucky and hook up with someone who really does it for them and blows them away but most of us will not, especially if we are looking online through some random catalog of photos and descriptions, at least that’s what I think today.

I’m certainly done with online dating, it’s far too tiresome and ultimately disappointing. I’m taking a view that the best places to meet people are outside in the real world, through clubs, jobs, bars, gyms, friends and family, places where you’ve met people through some real world experience of eye contact and pleasant exchange, something concrete and substantial, rather than this pixelated screen introduction. Online dating just doesn’t give you that whole 3D thing, in many ways it can set you up for a huge letdown too. You’ll ‘click’ in the virtual world only to find that the physical is a big disappointment, be it through attraction, lack of chemistry or both. Don’t get me wrong, it can and does work for lots of people, I certainly had my share of pleasant experiences and made some nice new friends as a result and wouldn’t change any of those for the world, yet the process can end up seeming like a bit of a merry go round, especially if you have some huge set of romantic expectation around it all. I think it’s fair to conclude that people who come out of long term relationships can often feel a little lost and isolated, maybe looking to replace what is no longer there in their lives. Whilst there’s no harm in wanting that special something or someone, experience has taught me that maybe there’s a right time and a wrong time for such things and that there may well be some truth in the idea that you can look too hard for that special somebody. In my humble opinion of course

p.s some excellent perspectives here

Posted in moving on, Divorce, online dating | 2 Comments »

Your kids and their new siblings, a possible fact of life post divorce

Saturday, October 6th, 2007 |

Ive blogged about all aspects of my divorce. I’ve ranted about my anger , I’ve ranted about how isolated and out of my shell I’ve felt, I’ve blogged on the practicalities of it all, how to get divorced, how to do it yourself and all that kinda thing.

What continues to surprise me though is how even when you think you’ve covered all of the bases that something somewhere will still hit you and leave you pondering what and why it is that’s ended up bothering you all over again.

My ex had a little boy recently, by her bf, the one who was once my friend. During her pregnancy my own children didn’t say too much on the topic. I didn’t either, to my shame I was kind of bothered by it all and couldn’t really deal with it too well. It felt weird, I was concerned about how it would impact my kids yet was troubled by my own feelings on the topic so couldn’t entirely talk with them about it in any objective way. I tried, but on most occassions I fucked up. I think they saw through my attempts at being all hey, this is perfectly cool.

And heck of course, it should be, I’m getting that now - people split up all the time, yet when you’ve had kids with a person and raised a family and it all turns to shit, then you can end up feeling like something was stripped away from you, like a part of you died, like something that really mattered to you had been unreasonably taken. It seems illogical of course and being a silly man, who at times is incapable of really appreciating what is happening emotionally, or even accepting that its normal and perfectly ok to feel disjointed and wronged and all that stuff.

Maybe its a depressive thing, but you find yourself thinking in terms of how everyone else seems to be playing new happy families whilst (if you are still single perhaps) you find yourself no further forward. You are the one who has the kids stay over every now and then, you are the one who hears about their ‘family’ holidays and days out, you are the one who is called the name of your ex’s bf by mistake, you are the one who quite often has to deal with the emotional problems your kids are experiencing, the one who can’t really discipline or offer proper guidance to, simply because you just aren’t in their lives enough or there is no really constructive dialogue with your ex. So you drift from week to week, just trying to make the best of it all and do what at least feels right by your children; yet it isn’t ideal because meantime your ex is busy building her new life with her new partner which happens to include your children, your flesh and blood.

Yes of course, to take this view really sucks I know that. And it’s not one of those thought patterns that hangs around too long. Yet when it does, it can really bite; especially on the back of a big life event that impacts your kids.

The right thing to do is to do every little thing you can to help your children see a thing (in this case a new family member) as a positive. Get them to talk about him or her, put a smile on your face as you hear them talk about it.Make it feel as normal and as right as possible, for at the end of it all, that’s exactly what it is. Remember that life is tough enough as it is without having to process all manner of dysfunctionalities later on in life.

If you do the wrong thing, your conscience will tell you. Listen to that conscience and try to redress your selfish behaviour. Be the adult, however tough, however difficult, be that person, you’ll reap the dividends down the road.

Posted in kids, emotions, moving on, Divorce, extended families | 13 Comments »