god help me

Hello again! I hope you all enjoyed your turkey and pumpkin pie and Black Friday shopping and Thanksgiving Eve bar-hopping.  I spent a relaxing weekend with my family up in NEPA, chasing around my nephew, doing all my Christmas shopping on Amazon, and generally avoiding leaving my house or doing work, so now I’m all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to get back to work – oh, who I am kidding?  I’m tired and unmotivated as usual, and eagerly anticipating my next vacation.

You may think that a weekend spent hunkered down in my house with my family would leave me with no new material for this blog, but you would be mistaken.  On Thursday night, thanks to the incredible tongue-loosening powers of wine and tryptophan, my parents and I had a deep, heart-to-heart conversation about relationships in general and the state of my love life in particular.

If I had to make a list of the main bullet points of the conversation, it would look something like this:

• Dating in 2009 is nothing like dating in the 1970s, therefore rendering my parents well-intended advice useless.
• The Sexual Revolution fucked us all, figuratively speaking.
• According to my fahter, if I want to meet a mature, decent guy, I have to go to church.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that, while I respect others’ religious views and right to practice and worship as much or as little as they choose, I am not really the church-going type.  I could write a whole other blog about my issues with organized religion, but suffice it to say that, while I believe in a higher power and an afterlife, that’s about as far as my relationship with religion goes.

That being said, as for my father’s assertion…I’m actually kind of thinking about it.  Not necessarily the specific application, but the theory behind my father’s suggestion.

“There’s a certain type of guy you meet in bars, and they’re only looking for one thing, which I’m sure you know by now,” my dad said. “The guys you meet in bars are just looking to have fun, they’re not looking for someone they can get to know and maybe be serious about.  You want the kind of guy who is mature, who has his life together, and is looking for something with a little more substance. And those are the kind of guys you find in church or doing volunteer work.”

After I swallowed down a comment about how that’s also where you find guys who think evolution is a liberal conspiracy and who don’t believe in pre-marital sex, it occurred to me that he might actually have a point. After all, I’ve been going to bars for nearly four years, with disappointingly little success in the relationship department. Online dating didn’t work out much better. So maybe it is time to try a different path.

Since I would feel a little hypocritical rolling into a church (all those issues with organized religion, you know), I think my dad’s suggestion about volunteering might be a feasible avenue.

“You pick a cause or an organization that you’re passionate about, and you go spend some time helping them out, and you’ll meet people – and guys – who have similar interests to you,” Dad said.  “The bottom line is, do what you enjoy, and meet people through that, rather than trying to meet people and then figure out if you have similar interests.”

Wise words from a wise man. It’s something worth looking into. After all, it can’t hurt to have God on my side – as a single lady in today’s world, I need all the help I can get.

match point

As I’ve mentioned before, for almost a year now, I’ve been subscribing to Match.com in hopes of finding Mr. Right (or a decent Mr. Right Now, as it were), with varying degrees of success.  At present, my stats are: two guys who were quite awesome and were worthy of  pursuing relationships with (not like that actually happened in either instance, but still); a handful of guys who were just awesomely bad, and then dozens more who fell somewhere in between.  Overall, I’d say that my decision to plunge into the world of online dating was a good one.  Regardless of how terrible the date was or how mismatched the guy and I were, I learned a lot about myself and what I want from a man and a relationship (I also learned the value of positive thinking.  Ha.)

My Match subscription expires at the end of this week, and I’m still on the fence about whether to renew it or not.  My mind seems to change by the hour (I guess I am finally living up to that aspect of femininity.)  On one hand, no amount of positive thinking can convince me that I will meet my soulmate on a dating Web site, no matter what those cheesy TV testimonials tell me.  It just ain’t gonna happen.  Anyone who has ever done a dating Web site knows that those kind of fairy tale happy endings are a crock of shite.  There are still too many variables that can kill a match that on paper (or a computer screen, as it were) looks perfect.  You don’t really need to look any further than my own experiences for proof of that – one year, at least two dozen matches, two guys worth pursuing something with, and even that didn’t translate into more than a few weeks of casual dating.  Now, I’ll admit, I’m pretty picky, and some matches fell through because of my haphazard handling of the situation.  But for a concept that is supposed to remove a lot of the guesswork from dating…well, there’s still quite a bit of uncertaintly involved.

But still…but still.  It is an avenue through which to meet men (which I definitely still want to do) and, I’ll be honest, I’m kind of out of ideas of where else to do that.  I mean, let’s be real here – where do people go to meet members of the opposite sex these days?  I’m not the only one asking this question.  Ang and I had this very conversation Sunday night, while we were talking about her getting back out on the dating scene after breaking up with her boyfriend.

“My parents always tell me that I have to go out and meet people,” she said . “But I honestly don’t know where they want me to go.  Things are not the way they were when our parents were dating.  People don’t ‘go out’ to meet people anymore.”

And how. Dating’s most historically prolific meat market, the bar scene, is about as used up and overdone as Paris Hilton’s vagina.  I spend my fair share of time in bars these days, and let me tell you, people are not mixing and mingling like they were back in my parents’ day, or even like they did at the local bars when I was in college.  You don’t believe me?  Go to any bar anywhere in Philly (or any other city) and you’ll find lots of people – but they will all be in little nuclear groups, talking only to each other, and nobody from the “outside.”  The easy flow of interaction between individuals and groups that I remember from the college bar scene seems to have ceased in the real world.  Everyone keeps to themselves.  It may be because half the people in the bars (at least to my single eyes) seem to already be paired up, which actually makes me paranoid sometimes.  I feel as if one day, a few years ago, there was a big, important, worldwide meeting where everybody sat down and decided who they were going to spend the rest of their lives with, and somehow I missed it.  Like I slept through it or something.

Anyway, even in the event that I do find a single guy in a bar who is willing to a complete stranger, chances are he’s not looking at me as girlfriend material, if you know what I’m saying.  Nowadays, if there are people in a bar mingling with the opposite sex, it’s for one reason and one reason only – to hit it and quit it, as the kids say.  It’s such common knowledge, I don’t even know why I’m repeating it.  People nowadays go to bars looking for someone they can spend a night with – not the rest of their lives.  Which, you know, principle-wise I don’t have a problem with; it just crosses out one big feeding ground for potential mates, and when you don’t have that many options to begin with, that kind of sucks.

I guess I can let my subscription lapse, and see what happens out in the ‘real world.’  I mean, it is true that you never know what will happen or who you will meet on any given day, and things always fall into your lap when you least expect it.  Or maybe I’m just telling myself that.  Lord know, I look for that silver lining on every cloud.