I’m no good at dating. This is a plus, seeing as how my husband frowns on dating during marriage. Just ask his first wife.
Just relationships. Even so, when I was single I didn’t really date either. Somehow, I just ended up in “relationships.” Dating the same person for a few years until we had “grown apart” or “needed space” and would break up with promises to remain friends and then promptly never speak to each other ever again – the way nature intended.
This includes one spectacularly inappropriate fellow that I stayed with for years just to prove I could (all of you ladies out there know the one I’m talking about, the “I’ll show you I can change him!” guy).
Me date? No thank you. Better to partner up with a carnival side show barker for half a decade than risk the dating scene.
Serial dating. Today dating is trendy. A sort of serial dating disorder has seized the masses. The bizarre thing about this is that it is being pathetic at dating that really drives the trend.
It’s about dating so horrible it’s like intimate involvement in a train wreck just being around it. A sort of dating without anesthetic theorem.
The pinnacle of disatrous-dating-du-jour occurs in the wildly popular HBO sitcom Sex in the City. For those of you currently in a coma and thus unaware of this program, it features four unbelievably chic and attractive women with seemingly limitless clothing allowances and endless free time to waft around Manhattan in search of potential mates to inflict courtship upon.
These gorgeous gals are inexplicably incapable of sustaining a real relationship and disastrous dates are the crux of the show.
Reality check. If reality is more your bag, there are also a host of programs such as Elimi-date, Blind Date and Third Wheel.
In these programs, contestants are paired sight unseen and sent on dates while being filmed the entire time. Following the rendezvous they face the cameras solo to criticize each other for the enjoyment of the viewers.
It’s great fun to watch, if only to remind yourself why being married and/or living alone with a herd of rabid free range hamsters is a far better choice than dating.
In one episode of Blind Date an otherwise lovely young lady belched loudly throughout the entire evening and then expressed disbelief that the handsome doctor they had hooked her up with was less than interested in a second date.
“His loss,” she blithely insisted. Uh, sure, keep telling yourself that honey.
In another heartbreaking episode, our young Lothario invited his date, with whom he had a deep and meaningful 40-minute acquaintance at best, back to his apartment.
He is undoubtedly still out there somewhere, convinced women would really dig him if they would just look past that swizzle stick from her daiquiri still embedded in his skull.
Disasters. Acted or actual, television dating inevitably features impossibly attractive people doing wildly fun things like going to grand openings of happening places (and I don’t mean the long-awaited addition of a tire center to the Super Wal-Mart).
Yet, despite their superior settings and $1,200 shoes, TV daters totally flub it. And let’s face it folks, if Sarah Jessica Parker and her size zero fashions and 28 pounds of hair cannot date successfully, how could mere mortals possibly hold out any hope at all?
The last thing that opened in my neck of the woods was a farm implement dealership. How stupid would I look standing around a thresher in a cocktail dress?
Thanks, but no thanks. Nothing can make you feel as positive about marriage as watching these real life dating games. My husband, bless his heart, thinks I shout “Drive safe and buckle up!” at him on his way out the door, and snatch artery clogging french fries out of his hands, purely because I love him.
It’s true, I do love him, but I want my sweetie to survive the next 60 years or so purely for my own selfish means. I, for one, do not ever want to have to date again.
(Kymberly Foster Seabolt asks all readers who see her spouse to caution him to be very careful. She welcomes reader suggestions c/o kseabolt@epohi.com or P.O. Box 38, Salem, OH 44460.)
