Dating Lesson Number 1

I promised a new friend, whom I met through work and who has a website dedicated to the concerns of single women (http://singlemindedwomen.com), that I would occasionally pollute my blog with some of my dating experiences. Bear in mind that most of these were in the 80’s, after my second marriage collapsed. I was in my late 30’s-early 40’s, working at first, then in grad school for two years, then working again. This was in Buffalo, and I have named no names (to protect the guilty).

If you’re one of my sons reading this, it might be in your best interest to suddenly remember that you have something really important to do and won’t get back to my blogs for the next month or so.

I have no intention of turning this into a tell-all kind of thing, because I know that my boys think I’m as pure as the driven snow, so I do need to keep it neat. That being said...

Without a doubt, the sleaziest man I dated was a guy I’d met from my downstairs neighbors at a party they had. He sounded intelligent when I talked with him, and he wasn’t an Adonis by any stretch, but not hard on the eyes either. I liked him, but of course this was before I knew him! Around this time I bought my very first answering machine, taped my greeting, and waited for all the calls from potential suitors. The very first message was from Sleazeman, and I was so excited! I called him back and he invited me for dinner and I accepted.

There is one cardinal rule in the sisterhood. You never break a date with girlfriends to go out with a guy. But my mother never taught me that rule, and she could have taught me better to play a little hard to get. She may have tried, but I was so eager for male attention from the age of 11 that I paid little attention to what my mother said. What did she know? She was from another generation if not from another planet!

So, after I said yes to Sleazeman’s dinner invitation, I called one of the girlfriends I had a date with the same night as the dinner invitation, and when I told her why I was cancelling out of the girlfriends’ date, she read me the riot act over the phone. I’d never even heard her yell at her kids, and you should have heard her language and her volume! I felt terrible. I don’t deal well with friends yelling at me. I’d been used to a husband yelling at me, but my girlfriends? This wasn’t fun yelling. This was real. She was livid!

I went to dinner with Sleazeman. Wasn’t a fancy place, but good food. (It was a German restaurant in Buffalo, so of course it was good food.) We sat at the bar, and he recited poetry to me. One poem after another. Good poetry. Literature. Shakespeare sonnet kind of poems. Oh, I was such a patsy!

After that date, we got together a few times, and on each date he had increasingly nothing of any interest or depth to say. He was coarse, boring, and bordered on rude. He had no money and less ambition. To think that I had almost destroyed a friendship because of this boor!

My girlfriend, the one who yelled at me, came by my house to apologize a couple of days later, but I was so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t let go of the shame for a long time. Not days or weeks, but a few years! From time to time, I’d run into her at a grocery store near where I lived and she worked, and we’d chat a bit. I couldn’t believe she’d forgiven me; I hadn’t forgiven myself. All that angst and wasted time with a dear, dear friend for the possibility of a relationship with a man.

He wasn’t the last sleazy guy (I’m a slow learner), but I did learn that unless your husband, father, fiancée, or son is in a life-threatening situation, you should never choose a date with a man over a commitment to your girlfriends.