Dr. Dawn: On line dating rules and Boundaries

Boundaries.

Rule number one.  The most sacred rule of all: boundaries.  You need boundaries.  Without them you compromise yourself, values and worse you send out the signal of DESPERATION.

Women appear to have much more desperation when looking for love than men.  If there is any cue that can bite you, it's being desperate.  Nothing men like more than a desperate woman and a woman with low self-esteem.  It attracts the worst. There are blog sites that train men how to find a desperate woman out there. 

Desperation can bring out the worst.  It leads us to wear the too tight dress, revealing too much cleavage, coming off to sexual and nixing the chance to find that commitment switch.  Being the girl next-door is probably the most powerful tactic you can take in finding Mr. Right.  One of the biggest mistakes women make is in amping up their sexuability too soon.  Good men want wholesome women who will be fabulously sexual with them and only them. If you don't agree go into therapy or become an escort.   

Let me tell you about what my friend Tara did.  She is probably one of the most beautiful women I know.  She had one goal: to find love. For the next year I watched her fumble and bumble her quest with at least twenty different guys.  For the sake of parsimony I'll narrow them down—I want you to see how attachment style feeds off of desperation.  It you looked up that word in the dictionary her face would have been plastered to it. 

            At the time of her divorce I was a teaching at a small college and I introduced her to Rob, a clam handsome divorced father of two.  I knew him well, he came from a wonderful family and had strong values and was looking for exactly what she was; a loving partner to spend the rest of his life with.  He was secure, came from a close knit family and they hit it off.  She'd call me each day and tell me of their wonderful conversations and how quickly they found shared interests and that connection.  But a months into their connection I sensed something was wrong.  

            Driving some 60 miles each way to his house, she was there every day and had practically moved in. "Don't you think you're moving too fast," I asked her.  She thought nothing of it and waylaid my fears.  But soon after he called me to tell me that he had to cool it all off.  "She's a great woman, but she is too over powering.  I think she needs time to figure out what she wants," he said to me.   The next weeks were spent weeping into my pillows and accidentally texting him.

            Her next plan was on-line dating.  After hundreds of profiles she found Barry, he looked good, had a great job and relayed that he was seeking a long-term relationship.  Barry however was our dismissive type; he was already forty and had never been married. All his vibes told me he lived to fly solo and had little need for a real relationhip—one that required real interaction—because for the next weeks they texted compulsively, chatted on the phone all night and there was still no meeting.  I had no doubt he was a pretexter- my term for those people who form on-line attachments and never move beyond the surreal world of texting and sexting because it satisfies them.  Finally she wrangled a meeting out of him.  When she stopped over before her date I was shocked.  She stood in a revealing dress, too blond, too overdone and raged desperateness. So can you guess what happened?  His picture didn't say that his head was far too puny for his body, that he had a weak chin and small female-like hands.  Nor did it say I hate desperate women.  Before they even ordered the entrée he fled the scene.  We had another week of crying and self-loathing. 

            Even approaching that desperation thing was impossible.  Next was Mr. Preoccupied—Nate. The desperate meets the desperate.  Nate was handsome and giving and soon I named him Mr. Velcro.  That name—preoccupied—it means they are preoccupied with getting dumped. When you are afraid to lose in the game of love, you tend to do one thing; wind your way into that target's  life.  He whined and wined her—practically moving into her house. He had no career to speak of other than worshiping the various women he had loved, or professed to have love.  I listened to his syrupy sweet anthems each night, and watched her walks around my house like a deranged Fellini character, in a bra and thong. I wanted to vomit.  

       Way too fast is how these relationships work because desperation feeds off other desperation.  It took some shocking realities to lift the veil; he was an alcoholic, had a criminal record, was living off his mother's credit card, had no real job aspirations and the house he supposedly lived in?  At forty, he had 8 college aged roommates.  Her puppy dog turned into a monster. 

            Now that we've described it, my next blog will detail the signs.

In the meantime tell yourself you are worthy, he needs to prove himself- not the other way around.  Men need to compete, to woo and to work for our love.  THAT IS SCIENCE my dears.

Anything worth having is worth working for- the principle of effort justification.  Google that !     

Are MAN-TIED? Manti T'eo and Lennya Kekua—it's not so unusual . . . In online dating? Are you kidding?

Are You MAN-TIED?  Manti T'eo and Lennya Kekua—it's not so unusual . . . In online dating?  Are you kidding? 

"Manti Te'o acknowledged to ABC's Katie Couric that he maintained the illusion of his dead girlfriend in the weeks after he received a call claiming that Lennay Kekua and her death were hoaxes,"

according to a CNN article.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/23/us/teo-hoax-abc/index.html"

Of course, this could never happen to you, right? WRONG!  Every time you are ONLINE led on by someone who's connecting with you, texting, calling, and causing you to move into high hopes and big expectations, you're re MAN-TIED.  Oh how our imagination works! It's supposed to when we want to fall in love.

Take Kate.  Educated, good-looking, independent woman friend.  Mr. X responds to her profile.  They appear to hit it off.   Kate has been looking for MR. #1 for a while. Lots of dead ends, goofballs, idiots, liars and some rebuffs. Some desperation.  She's quite happy when this one seems on be on track.  But Logical Kate knows logically it's nothing more than a connection.  What she doesn't know that she'd more delighted than she may know. Her brain is in need of a good boost of happy neurotransmitters. They rush out and make her happy but they are not done with her.  Her reward center, the one that is connected to love, sex and desire is switching on.   

Kate and Mr. X begin texting one another.  Back and forth they bat cute comments and quips.  "We're so much alike," she says to me at dinner.  While she is thinking she might have just discovered her other half, I want to bleat, "What do you except?  Do you think he'll tell you he doesn’t like romantic flicks? 

He's in Panama digging the canal and they can't yet meet.  He's collecting insects for a research project.  He doesn't like the phone.  Her comment, "He's an intellect." My thoughts?  Can't make himself available, travels a lot and bugs, the bug thing is a turn off.  "Does he know that you call the exterminator for fruit flies?"

               

Three weeks go by and she has callouses on the finger tips. X is wonderful, considerate, and funny.  She's imagining his home, the smell of the blueberry pancakes she knows he's cooking.  She pulls up his profile and tells me to read a line she's intrigued by.

               

"I like the ordinary, I find consolation in the ordinary events of the day, a butterfly on a flower, the morning dew on a blade of grass—oh war is not me!"

"He's deep; he doesn't seem to need a lot to make him happy." Here is what I hear.  Ordinary.  Who doesn't appreciate the simple things?  And who the hell would say "I like the complicated things in life.  And that war thing?  Where did that come from?  Day by day imaginary boyfriend grows larger than life and they're imaginarily traipsing through her mind and imagination. Suddenly Walt Whitman-Alan Ginsburg is going on hikes with her; she'll bring brie and wine.  He likes Pinot Noir.  "I'm going to take X to the nature conservatory, what do you think?  "There's the new art exhibit in town, German Expressionism.  I felt like Munch's The Scream, and I did.  "This guy isn't real—you've never met him!" 

It's week four.  Suddenly X's opinions matter.  "So today, X, said that there is going to be a wheat shortage in Italy and the price of pasta will soar."  as a consummate Italian, normally a pasta-world-crisis would pull me out of a deep sleep.  I look at her. "Since when is X a part of your opinions?  

"You know, we’ve been talking for over a month.  It's like we've been on thirty dates."

"If you had really been on thirty, dates, made it to thirty dates, you'd be having great sex, wonderful meals, holding hands and spooning as you planned moving-in, a honeymoon or a vacation.  You'd know his family, kids, and all his nuances. 

               

Nuances?  Yes, the shit that can make it our break it.  The throat clearing, nasal spray he just have to use—and God forbid the wandering eye. 

'Wandering eye?"

"My friend Bunny dated a guy with wandering eye. She couldn't tell from the camera shot, his eye had a three second fix point but then it would move off to the side. She had to take Dramamine just to follow his conversations. 

"Whew, you got me worried." Said Kate. "I was thinking about the other wandering eye, you know the kind of guy who can't focus on you and as you're talking, he looks off and follows some bouncing ass across the room.

"Oh, he had that too, In fact I think that's how got it—eye torsion, he was the worst cheat." 

Week five.  Imaginary boyfriend is stalled in the amazon.  No contact for three days. I was waiting for him the send her the ransom note looking for money.  I packed her and her vodka up and we went to my house for the weekend. An artic storm hit and the power went out.  She sat in my snowbound car charging the phone and waited for her imaginary boyfriend to respond. 

"I sent him five texts today and he hasn't answered!  Do you think that's too many? I mean after all he could be kidnapped, he could be sick, I'm just concerned."

"No you're desperate." 

My friend was man-tied.  Her emotions were Shanghaied.  It could have been deliberate; he could have been pranking her.  Or he could have been living out a pseud relationship just to have semi-phone sex and a feeling he was really dating.   Dabble-dating, a form of flirting.  Anytime anyone amps up your amorous expectations and doesn't come through you are Mantied.   T'o-ed. 

RULE: Keep texts and emails brief, unemotional, light and to the point.  Unless you want an imaginary friend, you need to meet.  If they can't, you ask them when they think they will be back from Mount Everest, the golf tour, digging in Egypt and say, "I will contact you again when you are free."  Don't stray.  Don't be weak.  Don't succumb to keeping even a light contact.

 Why would you do that-desperation?  You think he'll find another love if you snap the chord.  Well, consider this a test.   A serious guy will want to get down to business sooner than later.

Did friend ever meet him?  Yes.  After months imaginary boyfriend showed up.  He had a voice like Mr. Rogers.  Yes, the Mr. Rogers.  The man with the Kids TV show.  And he was wearing a cardigan. 

Can Friends Become Lovers? Tell me. . .

Can they?  It happens more than we know it.  When you notice they are better looking than you thought, it's working.  When you are happy just seeing them, i'ts working. Comfortable together? It's working.  Research tells us that the mere exposure effect makes us sink into happiness when we see a familiar face, a loved one or an accepting friend. In spite of on-line dating,  more romances happen when faced with a familiar face.  And it keeps love going.  Happy couples relish seeing one another.  Have you had this experience?    

The Love Lost Generation: The Problem with On-line dating and all that Choice.

The Love Lost Generation:  The Problem with On-line Dating and Choice.   

Love-lost genration?  Sadly we are more confused than ever.  Our cave life made it all much simpler. A hundred possbile dates?  Are you kidding?

 GF Becca calls.  Disgusted with on-line dating- too much time, too much work, too little results.  Is she alone?  Hardly. The industry calls it "one of the best tools," but unfortunately our cave brains see it as a massive stimulus overload.  You just have too many choices!  It might seem great to have hundreds of potential matches but then again our mind plays some tricks with all that information.  First, it gives us a false sense of confidence that we are in more control than we are.  Then we make the next mistake, thinking we have control we maximize our pay-off.  So when Becca saw Tom, a heart surgeon who took a liking to her pic, she chose him—Not for nothing but Becca is a cocktail waitress and wouldn't know an artery from an arterial. 

What she doesn’t know is that our brains get irritated when we are faced with too much choice.  Oh how we hate to be wrong, indecisive and leave tings to chance.  So she makes her contact.   Now her brain decides to screw her over again—she becomes convinced they are destined.  She goes back to his profile and works over all the reasons they are a couple.  We call it post-decision dissonance and without all the science gab, it's a way that we make ourselves feel better after we make a choice.  We feel more confident.  Those dating sites know this.  They know you might do all the things that Becca did and that's why they give you certain information and then smack it with a percentage.  He was 97% her match.  For the next day she read, reread and presumed that they had everything in common.   Now effort- justification kicks in.  What's that?  It's when we amp up our confidence that our efforts are well-justified.  After all, she spent two solid days filling our questionnaires and another weekend responding to questions and queries.  Our minds don't like to think our efforts are worthless and Becca was absolutely convinced that there was a pay-off in there for her.  Of course her mind filled in all the gaping pot-holes in her path—after all with hundreds of choices and a 97% match, what could go wrong? Plenty. 

The date was a disaster.  He, like 67% of men use on-line dating as a hook-up tool.  After plying her with gin he proceeded to tell her about his other vein—She bolted from the restaurant. 

But even if that last scenario didn't happen all that choice lends us to experience some big disappointment. So what can you do?  First you just learned something about how thinking can undermine our efforts.  However in the next weeks  I'll set out some great rules that can help in maximizing on-line dating efforts. 

 For more information:   Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the  Perspective of Psychological Science, by Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher

Match.com: Plenty of Fish in the Sea

It seems all my friends are trawling these days on dating sites and I have a lot of chum to chew about.  I’ve vowed that if I ever have a single life, I will never go out to sea.  Take Bob, by far the best fisherman out there and my gf’s ex.  She left, he wasn’t ready, and with a broken heart, a heavy dose of sexual rejection,  he did exactly what men do to heal—they fish the sea of women.  He’s not into the catch and release program and he’s floundered the last month with at least a dozen fish,  some still on ice, in his walk-in-cooler.  I know he’s not exaggerating; my cousin, an experienced fisherman has told me many times the lure can be a phone call, a cheap dinner and a bottle of wine.  “Dawn,” he said, “there are so many women out there!”

So when Bob showed me his line and hook, and made his cast, I had no doubt they’d feast on his bait.   He listed his income in the 99% that most of us 1%er’s despise yet covet and then characterized himself as loving, generous and out for a long term relationship with a woman who could travel the world with him and visit exotic places.  They swarmed.

Bob responded, and with a heavy heart telling them he was still in love with his scornful wife and terribly lonely.  Men, he cast the perfect line.  This wounded guppy created the perfect feeding ground for bottom dwellers.  Woman #1 responds.  He tells me she is self-made, a professional gambler,  living with her aged parents, who she lovingly tends to and runs an internet business on EBay. I’m sitting right there when she sends him a picture of her at that moment in her panties. A Black lace piece of dental floss.  I look down at my crotch imagining what my husband might think if I sent him my shot, right at that moment—jockey microfiber granny panties.  I tuck away the idea of doing something fun for David and  went back to Bob’s plight.  Hi mind was wound in the Black lace but my logical prefrontal cortex was screaming.  So I translate: Compulsive gambler, lost so much money she has to live her parents basement and sell her garage sale finds to fill her gas tank.  I add that she might be selling her used underwear.” 

“But she doesn’t drink,” he retorts.

“Oh,”  I say, “she’s a recovering alcoholic too.” 

A week later he tells me I was right. His revelation came after he found himself eating alone in the casino dining room and after she swiped the tip off the table for “just one more game.”  The evening was topped off with wild sex after she beat him at strip poker and out of a couple hundred dollars.  “How did that happen?” I asked.

“Every time I lost a piece of clothing I had to pay her fifty dollars.”

By now he’s got a new one on the line.  “She’s really down to earth,” he tells me. He describes her life:  She doesn’t care about money— which was a revelation after her near-death experience, after the bus hit her, and after the state took her four kids when she woke from the three month coma, couldn’t recall her own name but had to start again by working in a soup kitchen and living in a studio.

“How old is she?” I ask.

He responded but all I processed was “still fertile.”

“Did you use a condom?” I asked. 

“Oh my God,” he said. “I never thought about that.”

Somehow my mind conjured up the predatory image.  Nothing more juicy than a fat wallet and a desperate man. 

“Bob, it’s like the food chain.  You think your landing plenty of fish but they have to feed too.”

As the weeks went by  Bob got tired of his expedition. “It’s like a full time job,” he told me. “Depressing as hell.”  

He turned the iPod towards me so I could read it. 

All the right words were there; Attractive, divorced, financially secure, wanted honest long term relationship, loved to travel to exotic places. . . .”

He scrolled up to the photo.  It was his ex.

Girl talk - Finding Mr. Right in the On-Line Dating world

     Girlfriend calls.  My home number has become 1-800 advice.  I welcome it.  First it reminds me how fortunate I am to not be in the market place.  Second, it’s fodder for writing.  Third, I love my Gf circle.  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses; I know I’m disorganized, very ADD, way too socially inclined, trusting…but I do know relationships. I got that right. 

Gf Gail says “I call you not only because you know so much, but you got it right. My last therapist had three bad divorces in the background and actually wanted me to visit match .com with her!”

Yes, I got the relationship thing right. 

Ask Girlfriend Melinda who is on the add lines to send me any ads that are funny.  This is no joke- here it is.