Am I Ready to Date? Snooping Online Dating Sites to Find Out

I’ve been thinking about dating more lately. I don’t think I’m ready for anything serious, but I think I’m ready to go on some dates. I want to practice picking what to wear, making conversation with a stranger, asking date-appropriate questions. I also want to learn how to graciously turn him down and get turned down. I think it all sounds fun and interesting, and potentially some great fodder for my blog! And as we've clearly established, I need to get myself on track to have sex sometime this century.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, living with my ex-husband doesn’t exactly set me up for much dating success. Can’t you picture it? The guy asks where I live, and I say, “In G-town with my ex-husband. That’s not weird for you though, right?”)

Every weekend I have a  brunch date with 1990.
Don't you want to go out with me?

Since it’s 2013 and I have dating on the brain, I ended up checking out some online dating sites this week. Plenty of Fish and OK Cupid are both free, so I started there. (If I were ready to date for real, I’d be willing to pay for a service. But I’m not, so I’m OK with the freebies for now.)

You might be wondering how I was able to do this when I live with Max. Over the past few months I’ve gotten good at sitting next to him on the couch while blogging and tweeting things he would never, ever want to read. I tip the screen and position myself just so that it doesn’t look like I’m hiding anything but I know he can’t see. (By the way, he is fully aware this blog and my Twitter account exist, but he has no desire to read them. You have to hand it to him, he’s got willpower. If I knew he were writing stuff about me I would’ve read it all a long time ago!) So, with my laptop tipped just so, I started poking around OK Cupid.

I looked up guys looking for girls, age range 30-43, within 25 miles. There were thousands of returns.

Thousands!?

I started reading profiles and looking at photos. I was heartened that plenty of guys were attractive and some even had some witty stuff in their profiles. But then some stuff was so generic or lame I felt like I was a contestant on The Bachelor. I mean, seriously, EVERYONE said Family and Friends as two of the six things they can’t live without. Duh, I love my family and friends too and could not function without them, but that doesn’t change that it’s a really boring answer. Or for your taste in music or movies to be “a little bit of everything” actually means that you don’t have an opinion or you are too timid to share it, so you probably should’ve just left that question blank. Curiously, one guy wrote that one of his hobbies is spending a lot of time thinking about peace in the Middle East. Good for you man, but, um, I just wonder if that helps you land dates? But hey, what the hell do I know? I’m 33, divorced, and my hot date these days is battery operated.

Browsing the photos has been an experience in itself. The photos in some ways were very much like what my friends post on Facebook:

• Guy at a Yankees game. 
• Guy at the bar on St. Patrick’s Day. 
• Guy about to run a road race. 

But then there were the ones that aren’t so Facebook-ish:

• Guy at a wedding but with the ex-girlfriend clearly cropped out. 
• Selfie taken IN THE BATHROOM where you can see the TOILET in the background (do you really want to associate yourself with crap?). 
• Guy shirtless (one shirtless photo is appreciated, five seems a little excessive, no?).

As I nosed around looking at these men and judging their grammar or admiring their abs or whatever, I had yet another one of those post-divorce moments where I had polar opposite feelings at the same time: super excited and totally bummed about dating.

As I looked at these men, these strangers, it hit me: Not one of these thousands of men is Max. Not one of them loves me the way Max has. (Fine, none of these men have broken my heart the way Max has, but just go with it for a sec.)

Then I thought, holy shit, I have to start all over. I have to go back to being on my best behavior and remembering to shave my legs and not peeing with the door open. For eight years, he knew everything about me.

Confession: I'm not actually sleeping alone.

Max accepts that I sleep with a Winnie the Pooh, something I kept under wraps for about a year. He knows that The Hunger Games gave me nightmares but that I kind of love The Exorcist. On a road trip, when I tell him I need to use the restroom, he would never ask me if I can wait another 50 miles (because no, I cannot). He respects that I’m a strict vegetarian even though he’s a meat eater. Max started dating me three years after my mom’s stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis and two months after my brother-in-law died of lymphoma, so he knows how cancer haunts me. He hates that every weekend morning, I watch reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 while I have a bagel, eggs, and coffee, but he knows better than to tell me to watch something else. 

Most of all, Max knows just how hard I tried to save our marriage and that I stayed faithful even when he refused to touch me. 

None of those thousands of men staring back at me on OK Cupid know any of these things, those small things came together to create intimacy between Max and me. I closed my laptop and sighed.

Being single again means a clean slate, a fresh chance to present myself in a new way, work on being a better partner, and finding a better romantic match for me. But dating also means being vulnerable all over again and hiding my stuffed animal. Am I ready for that? I'm just not sure yet, so my profiles remain empty.

I cannot decide if dating sounds like a total blast or a total drag. Have you started dating after your divorce? What were those first dates like? Were you able to have fun or did you cry in the bathroom?

Related reading: 10 Tips For Successful Online Dating, 5 Online Dating Profile Turnoffs.