Decoding Dating

by Angela Treese-Landis

“Uh, when I suggested you just be honest, I didn’t mean this honest!” my well-meaning lunch companion shouted, “You sound really salty.”

“I am really salty,” I countered. It had only been a few months since I’d split from my soon-to-be ex-husband. “I’m not ready to date. My emotions are everywhere. I can go from bitter to hurt to angry in ten minutes. That is not ‘ready to date’.”

“I believe in jumping back on the horse, but it’s your life,” she said, resigned.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, I realized it was just that—my life. And that was a new and exciting concept.

That weekend, my daughter and I lingered over breakfast while we caught up on each other’s news. She had just started community college and we chatted happily about her classes. I told her about my failed attempt at a personal ad and my hesitancy to date again so soon. She let me ramble on about the subject for few minutes, then spoke.

“You’ve got a broken picker” acted as both pronouncement and warning from my daughter. She always was wise beyond her years and had thought long on this assessment. She’d had a front-row seat to my ill-suited marriage to her father and endured the collateral damage during the fallout. But even before him, my relationship history had shown I tended to pick poorly. My former dating lineup consisted of guys who epitomized complicated and brooding challenges, exciting but unreliable arm candy, or useful for a short-term fix. Quality young men who would have been good partners felt too agreeable to keep my interest in my mid-twenties. I had confused the dramatic highs and lows of passion with love at the expense of my own happiness time and again.

Her words rocked me in their truth. I determined to be smarter this time around. I’d grown wise enough to have learned more than few things about relationships the hard way. I’d discovered that shared interests proved incredibly important and needed to be present from the start. I’d surmised that men with a history of irresponsible spending or serial unfaithfulness will usually remain broke-ass cheaters. Most of all, I had experienced that while I could have empathy for someone’s emotional baggage, I did not want to play psychologist for fifty years’ worth of anyone’s mommy issues.

I determined to take at least a year before I waded back out into that dating pool. I emerged full of anger after the ugly final years of my marriage, and I needed to deal with that bitterness. After nearly two decades of constantly working to make others happy, I desperately needed to focus my attention on myself. I spent a lot of quality time with friends, rekindling relationships that I had let fall away. I started running, not because I liked it, but I found the physical exertion acted as a great outlet for all that anger. I expanded my love of cooking to my own diverse palate and became quite the foodie. I expanded my herb and vegetable gardens, finding immense joy in turning my morning harvest into my evening meal. I tried new things and went new places, often with my college-aged daughter or a dear friend. I read daily and broadly and binged watched years of sitcoms I had missed when I had given up control of the remote control. And I got not just one cat, but two.

After my yearlong self-imposed sabbatical from men, I emerged as a woman transformed. I built up my business and pursued training for a career as a dyslexia specialist. I finally uncovered the things that made me happy and embraced them greedily. That included repainting almost every room of my house in colors that I loved and hanging up my sneakers because I hated running once I’d lost that anger. I gained control of that awful tendency to want to fix things for anyone other than my daughter, which I will hopefully never get over. Most of all, I loved myself and enjoyed being by myself more than ever before.

I epitomized ‘ready to date’; everyone told me so. Yet something in me remained unconvinced. My friends assured me the feelings of apprehension were just anxious nerves, so I took their advice. Several divorcees I’d known growing up had learned of my new status and had asked me out over the past months. I reasoned that dating someone I knew already probably the easiest way to start, as there would already be a wealth of shared memories we could use as a starting point. The first two dates proved quite disappointing. I had not realized any one person, let alone two, could have fallen into a freakish time warp where neither guy had matured at all since 1984. After the third candidate looked great on paper: MBA, long divorced, grown kids, and a successful career. Unfortunately, he continually referred to himself in the third person while offering creepy, backhanded compliments, “‘High School Ken’ wouldn’t believe he was actually on a date with Angie. ‘High School Ken’ laid awake many nights thinking about her, if you know what I mean.” Gross.

I did not feel much about these misadventures other than a little frustration, because at least I had come away with some funny stories to share over drinks. My friend, Julie, recommended I might have better luck with online dating. She had met a great guy that way, as had a few other friends. Over drinks, we revised my personal ad.

Personal ads, I quickly learned, are not easy to decode. I had assumed they would contain a bit of “tell it slant” in true Dickinson fashion. What I discovered was a challenging double-speak that required the skills of a Navajo Codebreaker to decipher. I read through only a page before my head hurt. By the end of the second bottle of wine and Julie’s wise tutelage, I eventually learned to read between the lines.

For instance, Mark clearly isn’t very picky, as long as any potential partners aren’t taller than he is and feel comfortable becoming a live-in nanny and housekeeper fairly quickly. That ad was a hard “no” for me.

Hal, on the other hand, is a classic example of personal ad double talk. Hal is not the kind of guy that’s searching for an unrealistic ideal. He’s so easygoing, as long as you fit his unrealistic ideal.

Occasionally, the ad writer is quite transparent about their goals. Ned is quite simply a guy who does not like to be alone. He may try to paint a romantic picture, but that level of needy clearly bleeds through. I suffocated just reading that one.

By the end of the night, I had settled on three potential candidates to contact. All seemed to be decent guys with good jobs and adult kids. I communicated with each through email for a few weeks and then arranged my first set of dates with two of the guys. Both seemed nicer than their personal ads, and their writing happily revealed the ability to use the correct “their/they’re/there” in a sentence. The third, unfortunately, had cleverly described himself as having “a secure career that requires a lot of travel” turned out to be a homeless circus clown who traveled with Ringling Brothers who used his mother’s address for mail. I declined to meet him in person, although I will be eternally curious if he would have arrived at the date wearing gigantic shoes and carrying a horn.

Coffee dates, I’d been told, proved the safest choice for first-time meet-ups, so I selected a local café that would offer the chance to walk around downtown Bethlehem after, if all went well. Frank turned out to be a friendly guy, and we did the dance of awkward small talk while trying to get to know a little more about each other. He was so earnest. He liked the same authors, same foods, and same movies that I did; that is, at least, what he told me after EVERY comment I made. My spidey-sense tingled warnings of caution, but I tried hard to not jump to the wrong conclusions. We had a nice banter going and he had a happy disposition. After our second coffees, I excused myself to go to the restroom and came back to the table now covered with what appeared to be the contents of his briefcase.

“What’s all this, Frank? I queried with confusion. He motioned for me to sit down.

“Well, I think you are just swell. I think we could really get along great,” he said, so rapidly that his words seemed to bunch together nervously.

I remained baffled. “Thanks, Frank. I think you’re really nice, too.” I felt a tickle of anxiety creep up my spine, immediately regretful of adding in that “really.” I’m not sure if he took that as encouragement, or if he had a plan strung on a crossbow, ready to shoot.

“I figure neither of us is getting any younger. I brought along my paystubs, investment portfolio, and medical records, so you know what you’re getting,” he said, shuffling each item into my hands for me to review. I opened my mouth to assure him that none of this classified as necessary for a first, or even fifth date, but he cut me off with a hand wave. He wasn’t finished.

“So,” he took a deep breath and gave me a big smile, “my lease is up at the end of the month and I think we should just go for it.” I declared with certainty at that moment the acronym “DWM” must equate to “WTF” in personal ad code.

That experience proved enough for me to put the whole online dating thing on the back burner. I happily returned to mornings in my gardens and evenings curled up with a book. I vacationed with friends and alone, hiked with my dog, and started hosting dinner parties and book clubs. As the parent of a college student, I enjoyed frequent trips to our local diner to brainstorm her projects, support her career goals, and remain connected in our busy lives. I took classes in art, yoga, genealogy, and photography. I decided to go back to school to get a degree in English and I joined an online writing community. I built a life that gave me joy.

Last summer, years after this whole idea began, I invited the same friend, Julie, over for dinner and drinks on the patio so we could catch up. After lazily exploring the new garden beds and projects, we shared a delicious dinner of caprese chicken and salad made from fresh-picked greens. We laughed long and hard about my personal ad mishaps. Her relationship had ended up fizzling over time, as they realized their expectations of each other turned out too different. I could commiserate. I had gone on several dates with lovely guys I’d met through friends, and genuinely enjoyed a few of them. But every time things got to the point of commitment, I walked away. Just as Julie had discovered, once your kids are grown, it is really hard to imagine willfully entering a relationship where expectations include moving from my beloved home to end up folding someone else’s socks.

We opened a second bottle of wine and lit the outdoor candles, as deep discussion would warrant. The more we discussed gender roles, society, and our new philosophy of what “a good life” looked like, an idea began to bloom. This epiphany may or may not have been inspired by the Malbec, but I ran inside and brought out paper and pens, almost tripping over the dog. We needed to write completely honest yet positive personal ads for our truest selves. When I set my pen to rest, I realized I wouldn’t be needing a personal ad after all.

Angela Treese-Landis, Class of ‘23, is a SAGE student who has returned to college after many decades. She loves her work as a dyslexia specialist and ESL tutor and hopes that she can instill her love of reading and writing in others.