Not since the 80s

Just learned that according to www.urbandictionary.com, sss also means “shit, shower and shave,” as well as “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” and a women’s underwear fabric called “second skin satin.”

Here’s my promised guide to middle-aged online dating....

Lesson #1: if it looks too good to be true, then oh yes it is. Why do some faces just make your eyes pop—what is that?! The shot may not be glamorous or even sexy, maybe just girl-next-door sweet. But the scammers somehow got our number. This happened to me when I first tried match.com, and hit me again just last week, despite my now having seen this kind of thing before. Most recently, on Zoosk, I got several flirts in one day from a variety of pretty women, all of whom had interesting profiles, until I looked past the different hairdos, makeup, fashions, camera angles, ages, bios and locations and realized it was all the same person! I’m pretty visually attuned, and have already learned the tell-tale signs of the glamour gal who likes to fish and hunt, but I had responded to two or three of these realistic profiles before I caught on!

Lesson #2: the real potion is to love thyself. Despite being as much a bedrock of Eastern and Western religions (e.g., Mark 12:31 and Buddhist metta) as “know thyself,” it sounds so narcissistic and is so easy to tune out that it can take a lifetime to learn how true it is. The first time I was scammed was several months ago on jdate, when, after a bunch of messages back and forth, I felt a passion like I hadn’t felt in decades! What’s really strange is that even after her story about her upbringing in Birmingham UK and her French mother, and her not wanting to talk anymore about her parents (may they rest in peace), and not caring about politics while she was emailing me from a delayed beauty pageant in Cairo on the eve of Egypt’s first national election, all started to NOT add up, and I realized she was a total fiction—who knows, probably even a scruffy old toothless Arab guy—I STILL felt this incredible, almost life-changing sense of love. What a revelation: the “other” is not an essential ingredient! It was like my first glimpse or taste of enlightenment, and of all people, I can thank a scam artist for that!

Lesson #3: check references. After a long and wonderful telephone conversation with a thoughtful and attractive lady, and a time and place set for my first date since the 1980s (yeah, I’ve been married too damn long), I decided to reverse search her phone and do a little Google research, and found her conviction for passport fraud and time in federal prison where her brother tried to get her medical treatment for being abused by the guards. That might not have stopped me, because even ex-cons need love, and there might be a plausible explanation for why she absconded to Israel with her daughter and was declared an unfit mother, but then I saw the Village Voice article calling her a “serial evictee” and one of NYC’s “10 worst tenants,” and the quote of a former roommate saying she made the woman in Single White Female look like Snow White in comparison. So I called her to say that unless she had some kind of explanation, I think I’d have to cancel our date.

Lesson #4: a “no” is the next best thing to a “yes”. Shortly after the near miss with the immigration felon, my first actual date was with an immigration judge! She wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, or quite as pretty, but I wasn’t in the mood to close doors, so I texted her afterwards saying “really lovely meeting you,” “thank you for making my first date in 25 years such fun,” and “hope to see you again.” The next day she sent me an email essentially saying good luck but no thanks. What I didn’t realize at the time was how rare it is nowadays to get a “no”—that it takes the decisiveness of a judge to deliver one! I’ve decided since then to basically stop paying for dinner, because the new norm apparently is to not even respond. I mean really, how hard is it to write back: “nice to meet you, thanks for dinner, not interested”?!

Lesson #5: the three sss eliminate 90% of the ladies. So should I just lie? I asked one who said not interested after seeing “sabbatical”: how do you know I’m not able to take time off because I’m independently wealthy and own an oil well and waterfront property? No answer. I offered to take a ferry and bicycle to another on Martha’s Vineyard, but she declined after she reread my profile and saw I was separated. Hey, even my separation agreement says I can date! You’re that afraid of heartbreak that you won’t have coffee with a fellow willing to cross the ocean to see you? Mentioning screenwriting just seals the deal. The quick translation, I suppose, is: deadbeat dad.

And then there was the perfectly nice and attractive woman who had dinner with me at the perfectly nice and attractive suburban restaurant who said she liked to watch The Newsroom on Sunday nights, and I swear I tried to like it, but I get cold sweats just thinking about a show that tries to make old news sound exciting. Lesson #6: it shouldn’t feel like work.