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
