culture | Bertram's Blog

Online Dating: Shopping For Men

December 30, 2013 — Pat Bertram

You can shop for anything on the internet nowadays, even a relationship. In the pre-electronic days, you met someone, fell in love, and hoped that your lifestyles, wants, and needs would somehow mesh or that you’d be able to compromise enough to find a mutually satisfying life. With online dating, you can bypass all that and look for someone to fit your lifestyle.

The problem with shopping for a relationship when you are no longer young is that not only do you already have a lifestyle that works for you, you also have a lot of baggage — family, children, pets, and especially highly individual and possibly eccentric opinions or preferences. These things are a problem even if you’re not looking for a serious relationship.

In my case, I don’t have much baggage except for my 97-year-old father, but I do have a lot of crotchets. I cannot tolerate smokers (I am allergic to smoke.) Unpleasant odors make me nauseous. I have never owned either a pair of high heels or jeans. (This normally wouldn’t be an issue, but a surprising number of men want women who are as comfortable in heels as they are in jeans.) And I’m not fond of dogs. (There, I said it. It’s probably un-American, but it’s the truth.)

Even more problematic are all my dichotomies. Like most women, I appreciate men who make me laugh, but I seldom find self-professed funny guys to be funny. I have no interest in discussing politics — most men who discuss such things seem naïve at best, boring at worst — and yet I like people who look beyond themselves. I like people who can write or at least express themselves well, but I don’t necessarily like writers. (But of course, I would never correct bad grammar. A friend once sent a love letter to her fiancé oversees, and he returned it with corrections in red. They still got married, but it didn’t last long.) I like people who are intelligent and think of more than their motorcycles or other toys, but I don’t particularly want to have deep conversations with them. I don’t like perfectly toned people (I actually find six-packs unattractive, which isn’t a problem since so few men of my age — or any age — have them), but I don’t like huge bellies, either.

Worst of all, when I am with someone, I like to be the center of their attention (and make them the center of my attention). I don’t like competing with pets and children, phones and televisions. This might seem selfish of me, but it’s not much of a relationship if one of the people can’t find time to pay attention to the other. The problem is that it’s almost impossible any more to find people who can focus their attention, and I don’t want to waste a minute of my life dumbly watching my companion having a relationship with a smartphone.

I suppose it’s no surprise that I’m sitting here alone tonight, but the truth is, I’m way past the stage of wanting to compromise. One woman I know who joined a dating site at an advanced aged could only get dates if she downplayed her intelligence, lopped a few years off her age, and posted a younger photo of herself. (Sheesh. We haven’t come far at all if women still have to play the “stupid” game to keep from intimidating the men.)

I suppose, if I really wanted to meet someone, I could fudge my statistics, but I am what I am, or rather, what I am becoming, and there’s no reason to hide it.

Besides, I don’t particularly like shopping for anything on the internet.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, internet, relationships. Tags: compromise in a relationship, crotchets, emotional baggage, online dating, playing studid, shopping for men. 3 Comments »

Online dating sites: Truth and Surmise

December 29, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I signed up for an online dating site, not to look for a lifetime partner or even a serious relationship, but to see if I could meet people and maybe make friends. Although I am doing well 45 months after the death of my life mate/soul mate, I am still plagued by loneliness, and I thought it would be fun to have someone to go out with. There are so many things I haven’t done. During the early years with my deceased mate, we concentrated on building a business, and during the later years, we had to contend with ill his health and the ensuing financial restraints.

My wants are minor — maybe go bowling or dancing, play miniature golf, go on a picnic or for a drive to the beach (after we get to know each other! I’m not about to get in a car with someone I recently met online). I’m not looking for a deep thinker, a romantic partner, or someone to pamper me. Nor am I looking for someone whose lifestyle will mesh with mine — after all, I’m still looking after my almost 97-year-old father, and have an early curfew. (He doesn’t mind being alone during the day but is nervous about being alone at night.)

I went into the experience planning to do whatever I could to meet people. To that end, I sent about 50 charming messages to local men around my age who said interesting things on their profiles. I got two monosyllabic responses and one argumentative one. (I didn’t understand that. I only mentioned what was on his profile. How can he argue with what he himself had said?)

Even the men who posted on their profiles that they would respond to anyone who messaged them didn’t respond.

When I mentioned this experience to a friend, she sheepishly admitted that she too had joined a dating site, and even before she posted a photo or filled out any of the information, she was inundated with messages — from women. Turns out that she’d somehow signed up as a male.

This made me wonder about the ratio of women to men on such sites. By my lack of connections and my friend’s great number of messages and flirts (flirts are like “like”s on Facebook, but if you click “send a flirt,” the site sends messages that say you’re interested in that person), I assumed the ratio would be 10:1. Ten women to one man. In fact, the sites are fairly even in their numbers, with men slightly outnumbering women. At least that’s what the various sites profess. According to one comment I found on the article What Is the Ratio of Men to Women on Dating Sites?, the real ratio of men to women is 4:1, which is a closely guarded secret, because if men knew how much the dice is loaded against them they would not bother signing up. To keep the numbers balanced, some sites kept women on the books after their subscription had run out.

Further research indicates that some of the best-looking folks on the site are generated by the site itself, which makes sense, especially on the sites for older people. In their forties and fifties, men tend to look better than women, but after sixty, men seem to age much more quickly. I realize this is an unfair assessment, and might be false, but the truth is, the men who look as if they were around my age turn out to be ten to fifteen years younger. The ones my age look ten to fifteen years older, perhaps because of all that wind in their face because of motorcycle riding. (Almost all of the men whose profiles I checked out had a photo of themselves posed by a motorcycle. Figuring that turn about was fair play, I posted a photo of me and my car.)

Since men tend to be the ones to initiate a contact, supposedly women’s inboxes generally have more messages than men’s do. If this were true, you’d think the men would see my messages. But here’s another kicker: Most of the paid subscription sites let you sign up for free. You can set up a profile and even look at photos, but anything more than that, you have to pay for. Another friend signed up for the free version of the same site I am on to help me look for possible matches, and even with a blank profile (except for my age and location), she has several messages and flirts. We can only figure that these messages are generated by the site to pique her curiosity and get her to sign up.

The truth is, the sites do not indicate whether the people you see even subscribe to the site. I could be sending messages to a) people who don’t exist or b) people who can never see the messages since they didn’t pay.

Online dating is big business. As of June 18, 2013, online dating generates revenues of $1,049,000,000 each year. Yep. All those zeros. More than a billion dollars every year.

There are 54 million singles in the USA, and 40 million who have tried online dating. (40,000,001 if you include me.)

And here’s another truth according to Statistic Brain:

A woman’s desirability online peaks at 21
At 26, Women have more online pursuers than men
By 48, Men have twice as many online pursuers as Women

Which is probably why, on a site geared to people older than 50, you can sign up as young as 18.

To be honest, I don’t know what all this means. Some people do find love online. Most people probably don’t but won’t admit it. Who (besides me) is willing to tell the world that she signed up for a dating site and got not a single date? (I know four women my age who signed up. One went on a date, had fun, but the guy shied away afterward. Another woman got one date after six months, but when she talked to him on the phone, she ended up cancelling their date because she couldn’t stand him. Two others didn’t get any dates at all.)

I still have 158 days left on my paid subscription, so I’ll let you know what if anything happens in the next 5 months.

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Posted in culture, internet, life. Tags: online dating, online dating as big business, online dating sites, ratio of men to women on dating sites, sending a flirt, the truth about online dating sites. 12 Comments »

Grief and Imagining the Unimaginable

December 28, 2013 — Pat Bertram

My grief upsurge on Christmas took me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. I already knew that grief doesn’t stay gone. I can be fine, even happy, ready to take charge of my life, but sometimes when I embrace the future I suddenly find myself falling back into grief because every step forward takes me further away from the one I love. And each of those steps has to be mourned.

I thought signing up for a dating site would be one of those steps, but although the decision was hard — it took one entire sleepless night — it didn’t bring me grief, perhaps because I’m not looking for a serious relationship. I did think it would be fun to meet people, maybe go on a few dates, but the site turned out to be anticlimactic. Nothing has come of my fishing in the online dating pool. Not a single date. Not even a real message or connection, which I find strange. I frequently make connections over the internet. All sorts of interesting people find their way to me online. Many of my offline friends were once solely online friends. Many other online friends will one day become offline friends when we finally meet in person. And yet, on a site geared to bringing people together, I can’t make a single connection.

Still, I don’t feel bad about spending the money. The important thing for me was to make the decision. I could never imagine myself doing such a thing as online dating, and that is why, in the end, I signed up. As William Arthur Ward wrote, “If you can imagine it, you can dream it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” It’s not so much that I want to dream about meeting someone. I just need to practice imagining the unimaginable so that perhaps someday I can dream a wondrous future for myself, or maybe even dream a better me.

I thought making the decision to join would be the tough part, but the most difficult thing has been making an effort to answer the site’s questions about what I am looking for in a friend/date. The questions remind me that I once had what I was looking for. Remind me that I’m taking one more step away from him and our life together. Remind me that I am alone.

And so it should have come as no surprise that grief visited me once again.

Eventually, perhaps, I will be so far away from him that any additional steps will cease to be a cause for mourning. But there will always be things to mourn. I talked to a woman today whose husband died eight years ago, and though she has a fulfilling life, she still has times of grief, especially around Christmas, his birthday, their anniversary.

I don’t mind anymore that grief doesn’t stay gone. In fact, I welcome the tears when they come because they connect me to a time that is rapidly receding from me. I worry that I’m forgetting him and our life together, forgetting the sound of his voice, forgetting even what he looked like, and grief helps me remember that once I loved immeasurably.

Even though we want to hurry through grief as fast as possible, grief is important. It helps us grow beyond who we are, helps stretch us beyond what we can accept. Maybe even helps us imagine the unimaginable.

Grief took me somewhere deep inside that I didn’t know existed. I never imagined there could be such pain. If there is something so awesomely painful as grief hiding in us, ready for the right catalyst to bring it to the surface, it seems to me there could be other unimaginable states — wondrous states — that need a catalyst to bring them out. This is the thought I hold on to, and who knows — it might even be true.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: giref at three years, grief and dating, grief keeps coming back, if you can dream it, if you can imagine it you can dream it, imagining the unimaginable, online dating. 13 Comments »

Resuming My Lonely March Into the Future

December 27, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes the hardest thing we have to do is keep marching into the future, especially when the person who connected us to the world lives in our past.

My life mate/soul mate meant more to me than anything or anyone else for almost thirty-four years. His death forty-five months ago brought me more pain than I could ever have imagined, and it still brings me pain, particularly when
I remember the reason he’s out of my life — that he’s dead. Death is incomprehensible to me, and maybe always will be. Even more incomprehensibly, he died relatively young. 63. That’s hardly any age at all in a time when so many live into their nineties.

I do well most of the time. I know I can’t live in the past, especially not the past where we were happy. (A lot of the time during the last decade or so as his health declined, we weren’t happy, but it didn’t matter as long as we were together.) I try to concentrate on today, make what plans I can for the future, add new people to my life in an attempt to combat my loneliness. Mostly, I try to become a person who can survive such a tragic loss, maybe even one who can thrive.

And yet, on Christmas afternoon, I couldn’t stop crying.

It’s odd — Christmas didn’t mean much to us. We weren’t big on celebrations or traditions, but by default, we created our own traditions. Since we couldn’t work or run errands or do any of our other usual tasks when the world was shut down, we spent the day watching movies and nibbling on finger foods — cheese, meats, crackers, fruit, vegetables.

I spent a quiet day this Christmas. I fixed a festive meal for my father, went for a walk, then watched a movie with a plate of food in my lap. And that’s when my forward thinking collapsed, and all I could think of was the past.

I’ve signed up for an online dating service, and even have been trying to connect with people, but today I remembered why I’m trying to move on with my life, and something inside of me rebelled. I don’t want to move on. I want what I had. I want to go home to him, ask his forgiveness for whatever I did that made him leave me, see if we can reconnect. But he didn’t leave me, at least not voluntarily. He died.

I’m tired. I’m tired of his being dead. I’m tired of trying to move forward alone. Tired of trying to fill a void that seems endlessly deep.

But what other choice do I have? I allowed myself that time of sadness on Christmas, but now that it has run its course, I’ll steadfastly resume my lonely march into the future.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: death of a soul mate, grief at christmas, grief at four years, living with grief. 18 Comments »

Holiday Greetings

December 25, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, Peace and Joy, Warmest Wishes, Happy Solstice, Good Yule, Noel, Good Cheer, Good Tidings, Merry Xmas, Happy Holy Holidays, Warm Greetings, Holly Jolly Holidays, Let it Snow, Ho Ho Ho, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Mele Kalikimaka, Buon Natale, Buone Feste Natalizie, Feliz Natal, Nollaig Shona, Fröhliche Weihnachten, God Jul, and all the other greetings of this day from those of us out here in the desert!

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: alternative ways to say Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Holiday Greetings, Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings. 1 Comment »

Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

December 23, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Jeff, my deceased life mate/soul mate used to love Christmas lights, so now every year as the holiday draws near, I take him for a walk to show him the lights. That’s not as crazy as it sounds. If, as people say, he still lives in my heart, he goes wherever I go.

The lights in this town are fantastic. Since there is no snow, few trees except palm trees, no real natural signs of Christmas, people seem to fill in the seasonal void with huge displays of lights. One house I saw a few days ago must have had ten thousand lights. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I don’t have a photo. And anyway, the poor little camera has a hard time figuring out how to make images of lights.

Still, I got a couple of pictures of small lighting displays within walking distance of where I am staying. I’m posting them here in the hopes Jeff might see them. (It’s possible. The photos exist as energy, and so does he.)

Wishing you all a happy and light-filled Christmas Eve Eve.

Christmas lights

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Posted in culture, life, photography. Tags: Christmas Eve Eve, Christmas lights, lighting displays, Merry Christmas. 2 Comments »

My Salad Day

December 22, 2013 — Pat Bertram

People who live alone, especially those who have such a state thrust on them because of the death of a spouse or life partner, often have trouble with meals. It seems silly to fix a meal for just one person — it’s so much easier to get take-out, heat frozen meals, or simply snack.

In my case, I usually choose to snack, eating finger foods such as cheese, ham without nitrates or nitrites, fruit, vegetables with dips, in addition to all the tasty non-nutritional foods that are so readily available. It took me a full year before I could fix some of our recipes. (“Our” recipes because we created the recipes.) We used to cook together, usually some sort of entrée and salads. Since our salads were large, elaborate affairs with all sorts of colorful vegetables, it took two of us — one to wash the produce and one to cut it up.

During the past three-and-a-half years, I have often made salads. For some reason, salads were one of the few foods that we prepared together that I could eat — instead of making me feel sad, it made me feel closer to him. Still, it’s hard to fix meals. I just don’t want the fuss, so I revert to snacking.

Deciding to put an end to snacking, at least temporarily, I spent the morning making enough salads to last for several days. It was a great morning — just me and all those colorful vegetables. Now I need to make sure I eat them.

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: fixing meals after the death of a spouse, salads, snacking. 8 Comments »

Wishing You A Day Filled With Light And Lightness Of Being

December 21, 2013 — Pat Bertram

The internet, especially the social networks, has made me aware of the entire world, not just my local hemisphere. (That’s a phrase you don’t hear everyday — “my local hemisphere”. ) I used to think today, the winter solstice, was a natural day of celebration since it signifies the end of the creeping darkness. For the past six months, ever since the summer solstice, darkness has been creeping into our days and stealing our light. Today we have reached the end. Tomorrow the light begins to grow, but only in the northern hemisphere. Down under, they begin a time of creeping darkness.

Still, since I live in the northern hemisphere, this is a day to celebrate the growing of the light.

Wishing you a day filled with light and lightness of being.

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Posted in culture, internet, life. Tags: growing light, northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, winter solstice. 4 Comments »

Happy 100th Anniversary of the Crossword Puzzle

December 20, 2013 — Pat Bertram

To honor the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle:

Down
1. Name of Pat Bertram’s blog (2 words)
2. Prose that describes imaginary events and people
5. Author of A Spark of Heavenly Fire, More Deaths Than One, Light Bringer, and Daughter Am I (2 words)
8. Pat Bertram’s publisher (2 words)
10. The country where Bob Stark from More Deaths Than One lived for eighteen years
12. The treasure that Mary Stuart searched for in Daughter Am I
16. A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers

Across
3. A formal assessment of a work
4. A person who has written a particular work
6. A fictional person
7. Death notice; the piece in the newspaper that catapulted Bob Stark onto his journey for self-discovery in More Deaths Than One
9. The interrelated sequence of events in a work of fiction
11. Category of a novel
13. The state that was quarantined in A Spark of Heavenly Fire
14. Archaic word processing instrument with delete capabilities
15. A book-length work of fiction
17. A person who uses penned or typed words to communicate ideas or tell stories
18. An electronic version of a book
19. Relationship of James Angus Stuart to Mary Stuart in Daughter Am I

Anyone who solves this puzzle will receive a coupon for a free ecopy of one of my books at Smashwords.com. Your choice of title! Send your responses to secondwindpublishing@gmail.com. Offer expires December 31, 2013.

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Posted in culture, writing. Tags: crossword puzzle, Pat Bertram's crossword puzzle. 3 Comments »

Agonizing Decisions that Take Us Nowhere

December 19, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes the most agonizing decisions — decisions that are supposed to take us in a new direction — end up taking us nowhere at all, and we wonder why the decision was so difficult.

As I mentioned before, a friend talked me into joining an online dating site. I didn’t want to do it — I’m not ready for any sort of serious relationship, and maybe never will be. I’m still getting to know this new “alone” me. She pointed out that I didn’t have to sign up to meet a new life mate, but could specify “friendship.” That seemed reasonable. I am always interested in making new friends. And since I spend so much time alone, I especially appreciate having people to do things with.

Still, it took an entire sleepless night three weeks ago to make the decision. And it was the sleeplessness that in the end made me realize I should take the step. If the decision was so unimaginable that I couldn’t get my mind around it, I figured it would be good for me to make that leap. I know what is imaginable. I’ve imagined it. But a whole world lies beyond my imaginings, and to get where I need to go (a place that is as yet undefined since it lies in the realm of the unimagined), I need to do the unimaginable.

So, I signed up. Spent a lot of time working on my profile. Told my current truth as well as I knew it and as charmingly as I could. In one of the sections I wrote:

I am happy, kind, confident, intelligent. I smile a lot, laugh easily, seldom get angry, and appreciate those same qualities in others. More than anything, I love learning, meeting new people, sampling new foods, trying new activities. The desert fascinates me, so I spend a lot of time hiking in the nearby knolls.

I’ve lived a quiet life — mostly reading, crafts, watching movies, writing. Now I’m interested in being more active and trying out all the things I haven’t had a chance to do before — dancing, bowling, miniature golf, hiking, archery, whatever comes to mind. I’d like to lead a more adventuresome life in a non-perilous sort of way. Even going to lunch somewhere I’ve never been could be such an adventure. What would make all this more fun is to have someone to be adventuresome with.

I’d planned to blog about my encounters, both online and offline, in case there were other older people out there taking a hesitant dip into the dating pool, but there have been no encounters. I figured the site would be like a social networking site, where people messaged each other, trying to get a dialogue going, but nothing is going on except that several dozen people have checked out my profile. Like a middle school dance, the boys seem to be milling around, checking out the girls, while the girls just stand there, trying not to be caught checking out the boys but hoping someone will notice them.

Since I’m not one to just stand around and wait (at least, not anymore), I’ve written dozens of messages, but no one responded. It’s possible the men on the site aren’t computer savvy and don’t know how to respond. It’s possible they aren’t interested. It’s possible they are waiting for inspiration or waiting to fall in love with a photo. I have no idea since no one is talking.

To be honest, I’m okay with this. I don’t particularly want to date, don’t want to flirt with the possibility of falling in love. I do feel silly, though, about spending a sleepless night, steeling myself to make what turned out to be such a non-momentous decision, but perhaps the decision was the important step, and what has come after is trivial.

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