Month: August 2015

Man Purse

Posted on by akiwifreund

This week I received my results from 23&Me; specifically they provided the raw data to me, and I opted to have another company interpret it for $5. Some things I already knew about, including my green eyes, inability to do anything except burn in the sun, and my dislike of bitter foods. The tests also confirmed I’m three times more likely than the general public to get lupus, rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma. The kicker was the gene that makes me unable to learn from my mistakes repeatedly showed up. I was like, “Hey, 23&Me, get outta my dating life!”

Back in 2006 I was using Plenty of Fish for dating. As per the usual, I was getting messages from men who did not seem to be matches at all – they were just looking for a piece of ass and they couldn’t write a complete sentence to save their lives. Then I got a message from a guy that was an entire paragraph, showcasing his correct use of punctuation and grammar.

All of the advice columns I read about internet dating now suggest that before you trade too many messages, make a date and meet each other – that way you’re not entirely emotionally invested, and there is still a lot to learn about the other person through face-to-face interaction. Well, I did not adhere to that rule at all. I replied, then he replied, then I replied, then he replied, and so on, each message getting longer and longer. Then we talked on the phone a few times, and it seemed like it was an easy flow of conversation. Then we made the date.

I was  kind of excited because he was a bit of a traveler like me, he told me he was a massage therapist, and he looked handsome in his pictures, with surfer curly hair and big blue eyes. I mean, c’mon – a massage therapist, AND tall (6’1″) AND cute? It sounded like I hit the internet dating jackpot.

I picked my favorite place, The Blue Nile, one of the only Ethiopian restaurants in the Phoenix area, now permanently shuttered. I figured it wasn’t expensive and we’d be able to eat with our hands. I was salivating at the idea that he would actually pass the exotic food test, and I was mentally picking out curtains for when we moved in together.

So I was waiting in the parking lot for a few minutes and I got a text message from him that he was running late, but he would be there in about 20 minutes. This was at a time when everyone was using a flip phone and texting took forever because we all had to use the number keypads to choose the letters we wanted, and there were no shortcuts. I told him it was okay, and to stop texting and concentrate on driving.

When he arrived, he confessed he was late because his bus was late. If you don’t already know it, no one in Phoenix rides the bus. It’s a very spread out city and no one wants to transfer four times just to get to a location. So I was quite startled to find out that he didn’t have a car. The first thing that crossed my mind was, “Great, it’s all up to me to haul him around.” His attire for the date was less than impressive. He told me that he had spent time in Hawaii, so his attire matched that story, but the Hawaiian-print shirt had a 10″ slice across the front, and he was wearing a cross-body purse that was red cloth printed with black batik flowers. It was definitely a purse and not a messenger bag.

We went in to the restaurant and started learning more about each other while waiting for the food. My style is to make jokes because I dearly like to laugh. However, every time I said something witty, instead of playing along, he would stop, stare at me intensely and ask me what I meant. Every time I joked, I would have to explain it. Do you know how NOT funny that is? Also, he admitted he wasn’t actually currently employed and had just graduated from massage therapy school, so he wanted to pick up clients just by word of mouth. Oh, and he was sleeping on someone’s couch. Oh, and when he lived in Hawaii, his chest was temporarily pierced so that he could do the body suspension until either the cords broke or his skin ripped. Oh, and he walked over hot coals. (Okay, that last bit was cool, but it wasn’t enough to cancel out the rest.) So to recap: no car, no job, no place to live, no sense of humor, a cut up shirt and a man purse.

By the time dinner ended, it felt like the longest date ever. When the server dropped the check, Man Purse stared at it and said over and over, “Gosh, I wonder what my half is?” The entire meal for the two of us was $20. I took pity on him and grabbed the tray and slapped down $25 in cash and said it was my treat. He got a hug from me in the parking lot. I didn’t even offer to give him a ride home.

Side Eyes

Posted on by akiwifreund

Internet dating takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of patience, a sense of humor, a filter, a hard candy coating, and a take no prisoners attitude.

I have had many forays into internet dating, though the concept is a lot more organized than when I first dipped my big toe into it. See, kids, first there was instant messaging on AOL. Then MSN messenger became popular. Then Yahoo messenger joined the fray. Any other programs after those big three were copycats and fleeting.

The internet used to be very difficult to navigate and very boring. I remember poking around on it circa 1991 and thinking it wasn’t at all interesting – it moved painfully slowly, and it was like reading a 102-page term paper. But only a few years later, when these messenger programs were becoming popular, pop-up ads and porn were running amok like children who only ate sugar for all of their meals. So it didn’t take long for sex and porn to work their way into conversations happening on messenger windows.

By 1996, the internet was evolving quickly. I remember how exciting it was to join chat rooms to talk about a topic and actually connect with other people in real time. From my profile, other users could tell that I was a single woman in my 20s, and within a few minutes, I would be trying to juggle upwards of 25 windows of private chats – specifically, men who were trying to hit on me. Sometimes there would be bots in the room who would automatically start a chat when someone new would join, and they would include a link for you to click; but being the savvy users that we were, the other members of the chat would send out a general warning to ignore “STACIA69” or some similar screen name because it was a bot that would send your machine a virus. Decades before textspeak, we all had to learn cute codes and acronyms. There was no DTF (down to fuck), but I’m pretty sure the original was BRB, which, depending on who you ask, either stands for “be right back” or “bathroom break.” The chat rooms I chose to enter would be based on my location; at that time, I lived in Albuquerque, so I would enter a chat for that city or state. I hadn’t dated much before moving to New Mexico, so I wasn’t exactly confident in my ability to catch anyone’s attention. Suddenly, hoards of men wanted me! They all thought I sounded cute – blonde hair, green eyes, not too tall or short. If I felt like we could have conversations lasting more than two minutes before a guy started talking about banging, I’d go out with him. BAM! Internet dating.

Fast forward to 2003, after two live-in boyfriends: I relocated to a city where I didn’t know one single person. By this time, there were a few very popular sites set up specifically for dating, including eHarmony (which was heavily running ads on TV) and LavaLife. I tried to take the free eHarmony quiz, and at the very end of it, I wasn’t completely turned down, but I did get a message saying “Only 3% of the male population would be interested in dating you. Bear with us, it may take a few weeks to find someone who would be a match.” I joined LavaLife instead. I think they had categories available for people to choose broken down into “Dating,” “Long-Term Relationship” and “Just Sex” or something like that. I quickly found out that it didn’t matter which category you designated – the men would hunt you down for just sex. I remember that I went on a few dates with a guy who was a chauffeur, and I wasn’t feeling especially connected or attracted to him, but we were having an okay time – or so I thought. At the end of our third date, he turned to me, exasperated, and said, “So are we going to fuck or what?” I chose the “or what” and that was the end of that. Another guy that I started talking to through the site was in Italy (Yay! Very exciting!), and we started talking on Yahoo messenger. I think it was only five minutes into the conversation when he started sending me buzzes to try to get my attention because I wasn’t answering fast enough, then he told me he didn’t want me talking to any other men. To clarify, I wasn’t allowed to smile at or even look at other men, even if it was a guy ringing up my groceries. BAM! Internet stalker.

Around 2005, Match.com and PlentyofFish.com entered the picture. At that time, both were very rudimentary; Match considered you a “match” if your height/weight/age/eye color fell within the other person’s parameters, and Plenty of Fish allowed users to send emails, but that was it. It was around this time that I started singing to myself, “Shopping for men! Shopping for men!” every time I’d log on. I had become a lot more specific about what I was looking for in men, starting with their grammar – if they couldn’t formulate a complete sentence, I’d write them off and move on. I also noticed that the messages from the men on Plenty of Fish were getting more and more outrageous, so I didn’t really take anything on that site seriously, because I think all of the guys were DTF and crazy to boot.

OKCupid entered the scene around 2008 or 2009. Their contribution to the now-crowded internet dating scene was the questions. The questions ranged from “Are you looking to settle down and have children?” to “If you caught your husband looking at animal porn, what would you do?” You could answer as few as five questions or as many as a thousand, but the more questions you answer, the better the picture prospective dates could compile from your answers. (Of course, everyone is expected to be on the honor system and answer truthfully. You should always answer “No” if you are asked if you would do something immoral and/or hurtful, even if your instincts say that you should answer “Yes” to screwing that turtle if no one would ever find out.)

In 2011, after many starts and stops with internet dating, I was giving it another go, but sticking to the free sites – OKCupid and PlentyofFish. Surprisingly, on PlentyofFish, I had a decent conversation with a guy. We were talking about traveling and road trips and seemed to like some of the same things, but had enough diverse interests from each other that I would be able to look forward to new adventures. We talked about where to meet up in the next week. So upon waking up the next morning, imagine my surprise when I opened a message from him that was sent at 3 a.m. and it was a folder of dick and cum pictures. I replied back asking what in the hell he was thinking, because we hadn’t been talking about sex at all. He gave some lame excuse about not meaning to send them to me. I told him that shit would not fly with me, and he apologized. The next morning I woke up, and there were more dick and cum pictures, sent around 2 a.m.! I replied and asked what the fuck was going on, and he said he was a recovering alcoholic and had impulse control problems. I didn’t feel the need to stay in touch with him. (Also, just as a side note, if your dick is smaller than a thumb when it’s hard, I don’t advise sending unsolicited pictures. Warn a girl first.)

A lot of the messages I was receiving on OKCupid weren’t going anywhere either. I think I went on a handful of random dates, but nothing made it past the initial meeting. The way that I was being approached was pretty trite – almost every guy said, “What’s up?” or the bad grammar version thereof. At least when I approached men, I would find something in their profiles to talk about. One guy immediately asked me out for dinner, so I looked at his profile, which didn’t contain any information, so I next looked at the questions he answered. One theme that kept coming up was his dabbling with hard drugs, including meth, coke and heroin. I replied that I wasn’t interested and I wouldn’t date a user. His reply was, “C’mon, it’s not like I’m going to do blow off your tits. Big deal if we go out to dinner.” Yeah, buddy, still not interested in wasting an evening with you.

I swore off internet dating forever after having some bad experiences. However, now that I have relocated and reconnected with my uncle, I discovered that HE is doing internet dating. (He is also texting on a regular basis, which I blame on him having a 16-year-old son.) He found an age-appropriate girlfriend for the first time in his life – he’s in his early 60s. So of course I irrationally think, “Well, if he can do it, maybe I can try again.” Never mind the fact that I walk with a cane and have a droopy face, and most days I can’t be bothered to wear my wigs because they’re uncomfortable to lay down in…someone has to be okay with dating Quasimodo, right???

On second thought, no. I don’t want to be someone else’s internet dating story.

You Look Just Like My Dead Wife

Posted on by akiwifreund

In 2012, I was doing relatively well. Abdominal pains that plagued me for 8 months suddenly became a lot less frequent, and the shunt seemed to be doing its job, so I was actually able to work out and lose weight.

I got a message from a friend, S., telling me that she met a guy who seemed to be right up my alley. I’ll nickname him Take a Hike. He was widowed with two kids, had a foul mouth, and seemed to have the same sense of humor as me, so she suggested that we meet. We texted and talked and set up our first date, which included his two young children; I certainly didn’t mind if he didn’t. Take a Hike was a good friend of a female friend of S., Eye Cabbage, who had been in a relationship with another woman for 16 years, so I knew that he would be open-minded about my friends and beliefs.

We seemed to get along fairly well and I loved his kids. We’d see each other a few times a week, sometimes including the kids and sometimes not. We were having lots of dirty, dirty sex, the kind that my mother should never know about. Take a Hike would always tell me to trust him and to get out of my head while poking me between the eyes, because I would tense up and tend to over-analyze certain things that were bothering me in general life, which would lead to less successful romps. He very much appreciated my hard work on the working out as he was always telling me I had a beautiful body.

There were some things I found out later, like the deceased wife had the same name as my oldest sister and our first date was on the first anniversary of her death. I was a little upset that he didn’t tell me about it being the anniversary. I mean, we could have made it ANY day, it didn’t have to be that day.

After about three to four months of dating and being in constant contact, I went away to Europe for a few weeks because I had promised my friends I would come back to see them if I was well enough. We had tried to work it out so that Take a Hike could come with me for at least a week while the kids stayed with his in-laws, but couldn’t find a viable solution, so he stayed home and instead asked me for souvenirs. I emailed him regularly and relayed my adventures.

When I returned from Europe, everything changed. He was not returning my calls or emails. I conspired with S. and Eye Cabbage to meet up with him at a restaurant they were going to, just to try to talk to him face-to-face. He and I took the kids back to his house, put them to bed, we banged, and he told me he would be better about staying in touch – it was just that I looked so much like his deceased wife with my green eyes and bald head (which he had never seen)/red wig that he was starting to feel weird about dating me. When I left to go home, we kissed and made out, and his Newfoundland dog tried to tackle me to the ground like she always did – nothing was different.

But again, after that night, he wouldn’t answer my emails, calls or texts. I felt absolutely rotten about my appearance; it was nothing I could help, but obviously he didn’t want any reminders.

I really despise chasing a man down and begging him to treat me like I matter. I finally said “Fuck it” and wrote him off.

Not long after – maybe a week or two – I found out that he decided to shack up with Eye Cabbage. The lesbian friend. The woman who had been with her woman for 16 years. I was their “cover” while she worked out her plan to leave her girlfriend. I felt like the biggest kind of idiot – for being used, for being duped, for trusting ANYONE. They could have done all of this without him sticking his dick in me. She acted like she was concerned and wanted to help us connect, but really, I was just helping to propel her plan.

As far as I’m concerned, Take a Hike and Eye Cabbage deserve each other.

P.S. to Eye Cabbage: Be prepared to be the bread winner for the rest of your life. That lazy slug has never had a job and never will. Ha ha.

Dumb and Angry

Posted on by akiwifreund

With perfect timing, “Elastic Heart” by Sia came up on my Pandora just as I finished writing this title. She sings, “You did not break me.” I know, I know, so angst-y, like a teenager!

Out of everyone, I have the longest history with Dumb and Angry. When I was in the fifth grade, my family relocated from a suburb of Minneapolis to the smallest town imaginable – 300 people. It was the beginning of the awkward years for me. Almost immediately, though, I started getting love letters from this boy. Eventually I made plans with one of the girls from my class to stay at her house, which happened to be near his, and the boy and I were able to hang out a few times to play on the neighborhood merry-go-round and swings. All I really knew about him was that he hated his step-dad and that he was a year older than me because he had to repeat a grade. After a half a year I dumped him unceremoniously because I had a crush on another boy.

When we were in 10th grade, without knowing the other had done it, we auditioned to get into the public arts high school that had just started accepting students the year before in Minneapolis (and is currently in operation). One day in the middle of winter we were both called into the principal’s office of this school out in the middle of farm country to receive our certified letters telling us we accepted and were going to be living at the “Fame” school the next year. Heading back to our classrooms we were so excited, doing that mix of whispering and screaming and throwing out “I can’t believe it!” every few steps. I was thrilled to be going back to the big city, and he was happy to leave his horrible home life.

We had vastly different lives at the Fame school. He was a straight male in a school that had a ratio of 4 girls for every boy, and he fucked around a lot. A LOT. Dumb and Angry also did a lot of drugs, including weed, acid and huffing. I was at the other end of the spectrum and didn’t date or do anything except follow the rules. I held a lot of hair back while drunk girls barfed, but I was never one of them. I kept my distance from him except for attending one party together where we kissed once. I knew he had always had feelings for me, but I never really encouraged him.

The day after we graduated from high school I left to live on Mackinac Island in Michigan. I know that he had started dating a girl from the class behind ours; years later I found out that she used to say to a friend of ours every day, “What can I do to make Dumb and Angry like me???” Apparently she was finally successful, and they moved to Seattle and had a kid.

In 2007, when MySpace and Classmates.com were still being used, I received a message on one of those sites from Dumb and Angry indicating he wanted to reconnect. For about six months we talked on the phone, emailed, shared pictures, sent packages through the mail, made plans for him to visit and basically had a long-distance relationship. I was definitely flattered that he was still interested in me romantically and I was unsatisfied with my dating life, so it was easy to get into a situation with a familiar person with whom I shared history. However, as the months went on, it became glaringly obvious that he was angry ALL OF THE TIME. He was not making a lot of money and he was living with roommates, and the woman he had married and had a kid with cheated on him, so they had divorced. He constantly complained about how everyone was out to get him and he was a huge conspiracy theorist. I called it quits when he kicked in a door at the house where he was living. It was extremely depressing to talk to him and the violence scared me.

In 2013, I received a message on Facebook from his ex-wife, who just happened to be living in Arizona with the guy whom she cheated on Dumb and Angry with, along with the son with Dumb and Angry and another son with the live-in. She began a campaign to convince me to give it another try with Dumb and Angry; he didn’t understand why I broke it off with him, he was a completely changed person and very passive, he had been under duress when he kicked in that door. I caved. Dumb and Angry and I resumed a long distance relationship. It turned out that we just missed each other when we were in Minnesota at the same time – me for a vacation, and him because his mother passed away. His mother bequeathed him her car and a lump sum of cash from her life insurance.

We started having serious talks about him relocating to Arizona to be with me and be closer to his son, who by that time was 15. At first he was looking into buying a trailer for $10k, but I knew that was not a great option in AZ – he’d have to cool it down in that 117 degree heat, and he would probably end up repairing the trailer so much that he would end up doubling the money he put into it. Eventually we settled on buying a house. He had the cash for the down payment but horrible credit, so we agreed that the house and loan would be set up under my name.

The day he arrived in AZ was the day I closed on the house. He had asked for me to find help for him to get his motorcycle off of the moving truck, so a good friend who was also a motorcyclist arrived to assist. I told Dumb and Angry that I didn’t know if we could start unloading the truck because I hadn’t received word that the deed had recorded, and he threw a fit. This was my first indicator that he had indeed not changed. I was embarrassed that my friend had to witness the meltdown.

I was still renting a place and so couldn’t move in until a month later. Dumb and Angry didn’t lift a finger to help me even though I had helped him with cleaning the house, getting set up with a bank account, finding stores for staples and revamping his resume. He had actually driven his motorcycle to my old place to pick something up while the moving crew was loading me up, and even though he told me previously he would help, when I asked him to vacuum, he refused and took off. The moving men called him a dick.

Three weeks after I moved into the house my shunt went into failure. He refused to visit me at the hospital – including on my birthday – even though he wasn’t working. When I got home from the hospital after I had two back-to-back surgeries, I asked him if he could get me a glass of water while I changed into pajamas, and he told me to stop being lazy and get it myself. Ten days after those two surgeries I asked him to drive me to the grocery store because we had run out of everything, and he was swearing, swerving and flipping other drivers off, all because I had asked him to help. I was in a lot of pain in both my back and abdomen where the surgeries had taken place and being thrown around in the car did not help. He deliberately tried to run into people with the grocery cart in the store. A couple of weeks later he moved into the spare bedroom, saying he was doing it so I could rest – but he had never, ever been concerned about my well-being before, and the way he could not meet my eyes told me he was lying. We fought about his refusal to help me in any way, he pushed me, I called the cops. I didn’t press charges but instead gave him another chance. I had to have two more surgeries and be in the hospital a total of three additional weeks by the end of August, and still he wouldn’t lift a finger. If I wanted food, I had to go to the grocery store – and I had to make sure I made his dinner or he would lose his mind. He refused to cut the grass, saying stupid things like, “But I like the grass knee high.” I reminded him that the city would fine us if it wasn’t done.  He didn’t clean anything in the house either, because that was “women’s work.” Over and over he would tell me that if women would just stay home, there would be more jobs for men and they would be able to support their families. At that time, I made more than twice his salary, but I always told him that it was OUR money, not MY money. I was constantly walking on eggshells waiting for him to blow. To add to my stress, I was also working two jobs from home and finishing my bachelor’s degree online.

Finally, after yet another fight about him refusing to mow the lawn (which took 1.5 hours every two weeks, as opposed to the 15 hours I put in weekly doing all of the cooking and cleaning and other miscellaneous chores and repairs), I had had enough. I sat down and worked up an entire spreadsheet of the expenses each of us contributed to the house while we were together for the five months and tallied what I owed him, as his investment was larger because of the down payment. I proposed that we become official roommates and sign an agreement, and he could continue to stay in the house rent-free; for every month he stayed, a dollar amount would be deducted from what I owed him. I specifically entered a clause twice that stated that if he threatened me or physically harmed me, he would forfeit the entire dollar amount.

For a short time, we were able to be civil. I took on all of the duties around the house – which, honestly, was not different from what I had been doing before. His son still came to visit whenever he could be bothered to drive down to get him. Dumb and Angry was still very much dumb and angry, though. He still ranted and raved about women taking all of the jobs, and p.s. – he also hates all minorities and homosexuals. However, he did hang out more with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, and Dumb and Angry claimed to be best buds with the boyfriend. I think that was because the boyfriend was beating his ex-wife, and he fully endorsed that behavior. Dumb and Angry would always yell at his son that he would never become anything after graduating high school; I imagine it’s what he always heard from his step-dad when he was growing up. Dumb and Angry lacked common sense as well. A story that sticks out in my mind was a day that I was doing trimming and cleanup all around the yard and I had just purchased a chain saw. He kept pestering me to let him use it, so I finally said, “Okay, cut off all of those suckers around the base of the olive tree.” Instead of cutting around the base of the tree, he put the chain saw at the tips so they just kind of waved around, and he said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” So I took the chain saw from him and cut them all off at the base. All he said was, “Oh.” I said, “Okay, if you really want to cut something, why don’t you cut off the dead arm of that cactus?” He went over to a cactus that was about as tall as him, and instead of cutting off the arm, he cut the cactus off at the ground so he killed the whole thing. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “I didn’t know the cactus was growing out of the ground.”

I guess that Dumb and Angry was complaining to the ex-wife that he was unsuccessful with dating because women were just looking for money (not the real reason, which was that he hated women and we could smell it), because she encouraged him to get in touch with a woman he had dated in high school around 9th grade. He followed his usual MO with her, emailing her and carrying on a long distance relationship and telling her how great he was and how everyone was picking on him and conspiring against him. At the same time he became more and more hostile to me. Eventually he started threatening to shoot me and I took to hiding in my room so I could reduce my interactions with him completely.

When I had had enough of that business, I wrote up a formal letter asking him to move out within 30 days, as it was clear we should no longer be in the same house. I indicated I would continue making payments to him to pay back the amount owed. At first he was making an effort to find a new place to live, but then at the fourth week, he served me with papers telling me he was suing me for the house and that he was going to force me to put his name on the deed. I quickly found an attorney who replied that Dumb and Angry was obviously in violation of our agreement with his death threats AND that it was against the law to try to force someone to put a name on a deed.

After another month and more letters back and forth between the attorneys, Dumb and Angry moved out. I found out that the old girlfriend from ninth grade flew down from Minnesota and married him two days later after seeing him for the first time in about 20 years. They did not intend to live together (which was probably a good thing because she has two pre-teen daughters whom Dumb and Angry would have made miserable) – and the only reason I found this out was because I received a tax notice saying that the house they purchased together in another part of the city had been fraudulently classified as owner occupied since the wife wasn’t going to live there. The marriage itself made me chuckle – he had to go that far back to find someone who would take him??? I can assure you that his dating problem was not money-grubbing women, but rather the large chip he proudly carries around on his shoulder.