You've Gotta Kiss a Lot of Frogs

At the urging of several friends and family members, I’ve decided to write about my experiences in the trenches of online dating.  This would be the preface if it were in book form. I'll be adding postings about the men I met every few days for a while.

I am a 30-year-old teacher from a small town in Texas.  Growing up, my family was very traditional.  I led a pretty sheltered middle class, small town life.  My parents have been married for 37 years and raised me to believe that love is always possible.  My mother used to tell me, “Someday you will find someone as wonderful as your daddy and it will all work out.”

This sentence has been driving me since grade school.  In my daily life, I am a strong, intelligent, independent woman.  But, as soon as a man enters the picture romantically, I become a complete and total idiot.  I lose all logic and the ability to think for myself.  I become a love obsessed, neurotic mess. 

A little of my background information should shed some light on this.  I dated the same guy in my small town during high school and the first part of college.  We broke up every few months, but always ended up back together.  When I went to college, he stayed home.  I came home on weekends.  This was the man I knew I was going to marry.  After four years, he called and said he thought we should just be friends.  At the time I didn’t know he had actually started dating one of my best friends.  What a way to start a friendship! 

Soon after this crushing break-up, I met a wonderfully nice, sweet guy.  He incidentally lived right around the corner, from my ex-boyfriend.  This new guy and I dated for TWO months.  He said he loved me and I was on top of the world.  Someone loved me!  Someone was kind, caring, and considerate.  My family and friends liked him just as much as I did.  After those TWO blissful months, he asked if I wanted to get married.  YES!  Of course I wanted to marry him.  It wasn’t everyday someone suggested marriage and what if I never got asked again?  This was going to be the marriage I’d always dreamed of.  This man loved me!  We were married six months after the engagement. 

We lived in my small town, around the corner from my ex-boyfriend and former friend (they got married and then divorced after she cheated on him) for two years.  I graduated from college and convinced my husband he needed to go to back to school.  We moved five hours away from our family and friends so he could go to the university his uncles and cousin had attended.  I worked full-time teaching school for two years while he finished his degree and worked part-time. 

Finally it was time for him to graduate!  At the urging of his mother, we decided we should live in his hometown, which is larger and would have more job opportunities than my hometown.  It was only 45 minutes from my family, so I felt this would be an acceptable compromise.   We bought the house his parents built and he grew up in.  He went to work with his family after a long and exhausting job search.  I continued to teach school.  I joined the local Junior Service League at the urging of his mother.  We attended the family church at the urging of his mother.  We attended various local charity and social functions at the urging of his mother.  You seeing a trend here?  We hung out with his friends from high school and spent most weekends with his family.  We drove the 45 minutes to see my family about once a month.

In year six of our marriage we decided to start a family.  After two miscarriages, that dream was put on hold.  I was extremely depressed and he became engrossed in his many hobbies.   I went to counseling because I just knew I was the problem.  I was absolutely sure of it.  After quite a bit of counseling and many late nights of thinking, I realized I had married the rebound guy.  I married a man because he was in love with me, but had I taken the time to know if I was in love with him?  No, I hadn’t.  We tried marriage counseling for a while, but after almost eight years, we separated and filed for divorce.  In the words of our counselor, “Sometimes things are just broken and you can’t put them back together.”

I moved back to my hometown and commuted to work.  I was renting a room from some friends and having terrible headaches everyday.  I attributed the headaches to stress from the divorce, but after several months of headaches and a trip to the doctor I found out otherwise.  Two months after I separated from my husband, I was diagnosed with a very odd medical condition that causes swelling in the brain.  At the urging of my parents, I moved home.  Yep, back to my old bedroom and back to my childhood. 

People from a large city might not realize how humbling it is to come back to your hometown after a divorce.  On top of that, I was living with my parents.  Can we say loser?  That was how I felt.  From that driving sentence in my childhood, I knew I just needed to find my great love and everything would work out.  My divorce would be final soon.  I wouldn’t be sick forever and living in my parents’ house was only temporary. 

Because I live in a small town, I decided the internet was the best place to start.  I knew most of the single men in my hometown and I assumed if we were going to date we would have in high school or maybe we actually did.  For that reason, local men were scratched off my list of possible dates.  There was a whole world of people online that I’d never met, so I entered into the world of internet dating.  I joined at least four dating sites to ensure the highest number of possible dates.  Some were free sites and some were paid sites.  I’d find love even if it cost a monthly subscription.  Yes, quantity over quality wasn’t my best idea. 

I am a firm believer that honesty is the best policy, which meant explaining to potential suitors that I was very newly divorced, ill, and living with my parents didn’t exactly bring out the best men.  Most never got past a second or third chat or email without running for the hills.  But what about the ones who did? 

This is where my story begins.  I am going to share my experiences with the various bachelors I met.  I met each of these men online and crashed and burned in some way or another.  After each failed attempt at a real relationship, I would dust myself off, and get back on the net.  After all, they say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so I continued on.  However, in this case it seemed like a plague of frogs similar to the one in Moses’s time!