Giving Up… For Now

Dearest Rachel –

It’s official; my subscription to eHarmony ran out at the end of October, and I’ve decided not to renew it. Not for lack of trying on their part, to be sure; I was getting emails from them throughout the last month – and in the last week, they were arriving almost every day – telling me about the new wonderful matches that were out there for me, and the deals they could offer me if I would renew right now, with discounts that might even have you considering it for the bargain that they appeared to be.

But just like that Monty Python sketch where the two pepperpots banter over the purchase of a piston engine for just such a reason (“It was a bargain!”), there comes a point at which you have to determine whether a purchase is worth it at any price. And while I’ve gotten plenty of material for stories to tell you out of my experiences with this site (and Christian Mingle before it – yes, I think I’m going to stop being oblique about this and name names. It’s not as if my experience would be any different on any other site, I’ve concluded), that wasn’t the purpose of my enrolling, and as far as that purpose goes – that of finding a female friend that might develop into ‘Megumi’ – I can definitively say that I haven’t gotten my money’s worth. Indeed, I don’t think I would have gotten my money’s worth if I had been able to subscribe for free.

It’s not as if this comes as any great surprise, really. Even Daniel, as terminally online as he is, has been suspicious of such sites from the get-go. Considering that the matches you find are much like Momma Gump’s box of chocolates, he’s got a point in that. But it runs deeper than that. A business needs customers to survive and grow, but if this particular business succeeds too well, it will run itself out of customers in short order. A happily married couple will never use the site, for obvious reasons. So dating sites, in their heart of hearts (which is giving them a lot of credit here, assuming that they have a heart), don’t really want those kind of connections to be made. They want us coming back for more, thinking that there’s someone better out there, if we just keep looking. That’s why I didn’t pursue that first woman I dated; oh, we might have been able to make something out of that, but we were both new to the site, and assumed that we could both do better, seeing that our chemistry was lackluster, at best. For her sake, I hope she found someone, anyway.

To be fair, when you’re looking for a life partner, as opposed to a one-night hookup, you want to be as picky as you can get away with. You want as many boxes on your mental list to be checked as possible, because ideally, you’ll be spending the rest of your life with this person. Too many men, the saying goes, fall in love with a dimple, and end up making the mistake of marrying the whole girl; I need to take into account the ‘whole girl’ first, and while I’ve been able to converse with a few, nothing really goes anywhere.

To be honest, it’s not as if I’ve found a lot of dimples to fall in love with, either. I wouldn’t say that the picking are slim at my age, honey, but you had me so accustomed to a younger woman (and one whose looks and spirit were so far below your chronological age as to make our match that much more so) that I look at the suggestions the site offers, and keep finding myself going “no… no… ew, no!” I realize that I’m no great prize myself – which is why I’m working to change that – but even the fact that I’m making that effort makes me feel as if I shouldn’t have to settle for the options I’m being presented with. And yes, I realize I’m judging books based on their covers, but some covers are such that you just don’t want to waste the time to pick them up and read the pages in the first place.

Indeed, there’s more to the profiles than the pictures, too. When the lady in question talks about their children being the most important thing in their life, I have to back away. I don’t deny that it’s a noble thing to put children first, but if I’m to compete with then for her attention, I’m already at a disadvantage. These are her flesh and blood, and I’m an interloper in that dynamic; I know better than to think I can fit into those circumstances. And it’s that much more of an issue when her ‘children’ are her pets; I endured Chompers, yes, but I think I preferred it when it was just us humans. And please don’t get me started on cats; I survived an evening recently in a home with several, but I still don’t think I could make a lifetime out of it. The less said about politics, the better; it is discouraging that the divide between red and blue (especially here, where the red of the hinterlands blurs into the deep blue of the city) is essentially the divide between male and female.

And then, there’s the stuff that comes out of nowhere. One girl sounded like a perfect match – even the algorithm seemed to agree! – but in the same sentence in which she was describing her walk with God, she added something else about herself: “after all, I am a Leo!” I thought “what’s your sign?” as a pickup line died out in the seventies! Yeah, never mind.

Again, it may be that I’m too picky, but there seems to be too many out there who, once you dig into their profile, you can find something that makes you go “oh, never mind.” It’s possible, too, that the fact that you left me with your friends to serve as benchmarks (I actually have found myself thinking “would I rather be with this girl, or would I rather be out with the girls?” and my date suffers from the comparison) causes me to walk away from one possibility or another. I don’t know.

All of which hasn’t even taken into account that it’s not always my call as to whether a relationship proceeds further. There was a girl I’d thought I’d made a connection with over the last month or two, but she wanted to take things slow (which was fine by me). She even took off on vacation to Munich to attend Oktoberfest – a bucket list item for her that I suppose I’d be just as happy she got out of the way, not having any great affinity for beer (which is another thing; it’s amazing how many profile pictures have someone hoisting a drink, even those who consider themselves Christian. Not that I have a problem with that, necessary, but if it’s such a part of your life that you include it as a representation of yourself, then that becomes another red flag) – at which point I sent her my contact information, hoping she’d send a picture or two of her trip, although she made no promises that she’d be able to in the moment, which was fair enough. When she returned, we chatted about the fun she’d had, and I thought things were going well. But it was at this point that I got my first notification that my subscription was going to run out. So I let her know about this, and asked her if she could send her contact information, so that we could continue to stay in touch, and maybe even finally arrange to meet together.

Silence. I never heard back from her, and since I can’t reach her by any other way, that path has been closed off to me. Sometimes, it’s just not up to me whether a relationship continues; and given that she stopped communicating for three weeks before time ran out on me, investing a few hundred bucks for another year just to try to reach out to her seems pointless.

The money aside, there’s also the time and emotional commitment involved. Given the returns thus far, the stories I’ve been able to tell you have been one thing, but they’re just not worth dealing with. Besides, what with being out of the country for a quarter of the coming year, why bother paying for time I won’t be able to take advantage of? No, it’s best to walk away… at least, for now. Maybe this isn’t even the road to Megumi in the first place.

With all that having been said, honey, all I can ask is that you keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.