Into Oblivion

Phew! I'm off the dating site. What a relief. The pressure to be a walking advertisement, going out with some man whenever my son was at his dad's, on the off chance that this man might be the one, made me feel like some insecure, no sense of self, 16-year-old girl. In other words, horrible. So thank you all for the dinners, movies and drinks, but meeting a man online is not for me.

Yet even as I write this, I feel guilty for bashing the new norm. By now, after all, internet matchmaking sites are a billion if not trillion dollar business. If, as they say, money talks, then what it's saying to me is that I'm a failure. I might like to think of myself as a cool mom with friends nearly half my age, but the truth is I'm a cyber fuddyduddy, unable to participate in a little internet dating fun.

On the other hand, I've never been a joiner. Except for six months working at a newspaper in Vermont, three months at a Boston paper, and one week in Rolling Stone's New York office, I've always been been a freelancer. And as a New Yorker cartoonist friend once said, "You work long enough as a freelancer, and you become damaged goods."

I always thought he meant "damaged" in terms of the work world. Now, however, I'm beginning to think he was talking about my personal life. How else to explain why I don't belong to any club. Why I was kicked out of the only book group I ever belonged to (I kept trying to change the rules). Why, I can't even stick with a Sunday School for my son, switching temples every few years.

So to have to follow a prescribed dating protocol - first emails, then phone calls, then maybe meeting in person - well, it makes me feel like a caged tiger, and one which behaves badly at that.

Like the way I acted towards the last guy who contacted me online. What he wrote, "U have a smile that stretches from Chi-Town to Cleveland..." was very sweet, no doubt about it. But then he asked if I wanted to talk.

"No," I wanted to scream. "I'd rather not talk. I don't even know who you are, so why in the world would I want to have a conversation with you. And for that matter, why would you want to talk to me?"

But instead I held my tongue, took a deep breath, wrote back, "thank you," then hit the delete button and poof, sent my entire dating profile into oblivion.