Single Girl

Planning my brother's wedding has made me think about my single status. Not that I'm unhappy being single, quite the contrary. I enjoy my freedom and I have a lot of family responsibilities that take up my time. But every now and then, I wish for a date, just a nice evening with intelligent conversation or a nice relationship with a member of the opposite sex with some companionship and courtship.

Then I jump back into the dating pool and remember why the hell I got out in the first place.

First of all, it's hard to meet people. Las Vegas is full of night clubs and bars and hipster hang outs. But I don't drink, I'm not a hipster and I like to be in bed by 11. Pus, I'm not a twenty-five year old surgically enhanced anorexic with porn star potential which seems to be the type of girl most admired at these places. And Las Vegas has no last call, so I don't even have the desperation factor in my favor. I've tried all alternative meeting places that the magazines suggest, like the grocery store or the book store. I will admit that I do get hit on occasionally at the grocery store but it's always by someone really creepy who stalks me for like ten aisles. And they usually don't speak English. I never get approached at the book store, but it is quite possible that I get too involved in the books to even notice if I did. (And I spend way too much money at the bookstore to hang out there on a regular basis.)

So then I turn to the Internet. Now I don't knock the Internet as a place to meet people. My brother met his fiancee online. But I have about as much success as a Republican in Congress right now. I reactivated my profile on two sites recently and so far I've been propositioned (not in a good way) a half dozen times. if I ever decided to become a prostitute, I could easily start my client list on one of these two dating sites. I get more offers from guys from out of town that are just coming to town for the weekend and "can they take me to dinner and a show?" When I respond "Sure, but I'm not sleeping with you", I never hear from them again, isn't that strange? The other site purports to match you based on compatibility but based on my matches it seems like the compatibility is more like "hey, this guys seems desperate and so do you so here you go!"

I don't think I'm asking for too much when I say that whomever I date must be fairly intelligent. I'm not talking genius but I prefer someone who isn't monosyllabic. Hey, I think I'm pretty flexible when it comes to less important things like felony convictions but I need someone who can speak (and write) in full and complete sentences. The emails I get from these men make text messages seem like "War and Peace" in comparison. I tried to engage one man in an exchange of information and was rewarded with an email consisting of four words, all spelled incorrectly, in no particular semblance of order. I'm not sure if I was supposed to read it as much as decode it. I can live with bad spelling or punctuation (not a fan, but I can grit my teeth and bear it) but I can't handle complete illiteracy. I'm a writer for crying out loud, words (and their order) are important to me.

I did attend a convention of very high IQ people in the hopes of meeting someone with an intellect, wit and ability to converse but instead found a high percentage of sex crazed, well, perverts. (Apparently this is common as more than one person referred to it as "dirty old Mensan" syndrome and said many young women were scared off from ever attending again. I know how they felt, as I have never been back either.) Please do not hate me, Mensa members, for pointing this out, but you are the ones who had to institute a 'hug dot' policy. (Name badges were color coded as to whether or not you felt open to being randomly grabbed by strangers. Green is yes, red is no and yellow is ask first.) I don't think that smart people shouldn't be as twisted as the rest of the population, I just expected them to be a bit more discreet about it. Of course, if I should ever want to join into a spirited discussion of both Esperanto and S&M, I'll know where to go.

So I'm giving up again. I envy those of you that have found your husbands and boyfriends. I'd love to have one. But I can't take all the stuff you have to go through to get there!