Online dating – LiviKnit

2022 was a difficult year for me. My mom died, I went through my second divorce, and my kids and grands moved back to Michigan from Florida. The following summer, I took the opportunity to go home to northern Michigan and to heal from that year.

After getting settled in for the summer, I gave myself over to God and started manifesting my future. I asked God to lead me down His path and to show me His way. Every day I thanked him for bringing me my ideal partner whom I could love and who would love me for who I am. I also reminded Him that I would not notice feathers or cardinals. No, he would have to club me over the head with my messages.

In the process of healing, I thought I’d give online dating another shot. I’d met a nice guy before I went north, but I realized early on that I was simply repeating old behaviors. I ended it. By the time I’d settled into my VRBO for my summer stay, I had only about five days left of my eHarmony membership.

eHarmony is a bit unlike the others. Match, Zoosk, Bumble, and most others have you write a profile, add photos, let you say what it is you’re looking for, etc. eHarmony actually has you complete an 80-question compatibility test designed to give deep insight into your character. It then scores your compatibility with another member. They say anything over 100 is worth pursuing.

Swiping left ad nauseum was the reason I was getting off online dating. eHarmony is not cheap, and I found they didn’t seem to have much to offer me. Until one evening when I heard the notification and checked my phone. It showed a compatibility score of 107 with Bobby, a gentleman in The Villages, a ‘mere’ 95 miles from my home. He had ‘liked’ just about all my information in my profile, which of course caused me to peruse his profile despite the distance. It would be just my luck to find a nice guy and have him live a two-hour drive away.

He was Irish Catholic. He was from a large family. He loved people and kids. He’d been divorced five years after a very long marriage. He was 5’8″ (my bare minimum height requirement). He had three daughters and four sisters. And in every photo of him, he was smiling! No photos of fish or dead animals, Harleys or Corvettes. Just a smiling man who had to know quite a lot about females who ‘liked’ everything on my profile. I ‘liked’ him back.

After several texts back and forth, he called. I explained I was in Michigan. He used to live there. I asked how he found me since my distance requirement was 30 miles. His was 100. We compared notes; lives, likes, and dislikes. Many times I thought he was kidding me just trying to match me. For instance, how many men love musicals? We talked nearly four hours that first time, then again the second, and the third…

When I finally returned to Florida, he drove over to meet for coffee in Flagler Beach. My first impression was, “He’s not 5’8”. But he was attractive. White-blonde hair with an athletic build, he had a great smile, and he was a terrific conversationalist. We spent several hours getting to know each other, and then he drove back home.

A couple more back-and-forth visits took place until ultimately, while visiting me in Palm Coast, he told me he didn’t see this working; the distance was just too great. I totally agreed with him. As much as we were drawn to each other and our amazing similarities, the two hours between us seemed pretty insurmountable. We reluctantly said our goodbyes.

Several weeks later, after a visit to Michigan for a wedding and my return home, I received a text from him saying, “Can you chat?”

“Sure.”

He told me he couldn’t stop thinking about me and that he believed he’d made a hasty mistake. He wanted to try and make it work. I was rather hesitant because of the two-hour drive, but he was adamant saying we have so much in common, we’re so comfortable together, we owed it to ourselves to see if we could make it work. And so I agreed.

He was right. We are two peas in a pod. We complete each other in every way, and we are so comfortable together. In April of 2024 he asked me to move in, and I did. I left my precious northeast coast and my darling little condo in the trees and moved to The Villages to be with him, and I haven’t regretted it one bit. He is everything I never believed I would find. I am blessed daily with someone I can talk to who listens with compassion, speaks with integrity and honesty, and makes me laugh daily. God answered my prayer and then proceeded to club me over the head to make sure I knew it.

Ohmygod. Where do I start? I guess I start in 2016, unattached, independent, and looking for love in all the wrong places. When you’re past middle age, where the heck do you meet someone of the opposite sex? I’m way beyond the bar scene, even though that scene is quite active here near the beach. But I never settled into a local church, I don’t have school-aged kids, and my hospice job exposed me to mostly women. Most of my friends were either married or didn’t know any eligible men.

Enter online dating. Zoosk, POF (Plenty of Fish), Match, I shudder just to think of them. But truly, at the time and even now, it’s probably the single best way to get yourself out there and start meeting people. I know many, many now married couples who met the same way, and yes, they all have their horror stories, just like me.

It was to my great advantage that I grew up with eight brothers. Men don’t intimidate me even when they’re trying to be intimidating. And so I was able to view the pompous retired Army commander in much the same light as the pitiful Uber driver (“I’m in transportation”) or the starving artist. I discovered there definitely is such a thing as a mid-to-late-life-crisis in men. These are the men who divorced, sold everything they didn’t lose in the fight, and now live on a boat. There were too many of them to count, but I always wished them great luck.

After more than two years of online exposure (not a solid two years; I took breaks of months at a time), I was actually getting pretty savvy about the whole process. I found the fakes quickly by copying and pasting one of their photos into Google Images. Funny how that same great-looking guy is everywhere! And with different names! Or I would copy and paste part of their written profile into a Google search and see it appear on various sites, word for word. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google are all great places to investigate potential dates. Pictures speak a thousand words, but the real-life person can leave you speechless when they look nothing like said pictures. (That’s awkward.) Then there’s the multitude of men who would spend hours talking my ears off and then walk away knowing little to nothing about me.

Probably my most interesting discovery (duh) was that an inordinate number of these men simply wanted sex. Or they wanted to talk about sex. Or they thought if they fed me, they’d get sex. I suppose dinner is cheaper than a hooker, but really? I often felt like I was back in high school in the front seat of the car where some guy is trying to make out. I discovered from one ‘gentleman’ that the price of him helping me replace my thermostat was sex. (I settled on a YouTube video.) I’m not sure who some of these guys think they are, but spending any amount of time with them explained why they were still single.

It’s scary putting yourself out there. It takes guts. You have to keep your confidence high and your expectations at least reasonable. But I am thankful every day there are online dating sites at our disposal, because really, there are some pretty great people out there looking for the same things we all are. You just have to kiss a few frogs before you find them.