The Search for Mr. Right

Who knew that finding a suitable date would be so difficult? It's funny because when you complete all the questions you have they give you this thing to fill out on how important each thing is. For example, you give an age range and then you have to mark whether it's really important, somewhat important or not important at all. Only, I found out that it really is important how you mark those things because well, if, like me, you mark things as not that important (because I didn't want to come off as inflexible and rigid), they look outside of your criteria - way outside.

And that resulted in me receiving a bunch of "flexible matches", which I later found out meant they didn't match my criteria but, since I was so flexible and all, they thought they'd throw them in there. I kept getting matches for men over 60. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with that but that's not really who I want to date, you know? So, I went in and made a point of changing my age range in the system. Yet I still kept getting these matches of men in their 60s. This was still before I realized that I was getting these matches because I wanted to be "flexible".

Now, the shortest distance you can list is 30 miles, which frankly, for me - regardless of gas prices - is more than I want to travel to date someone. I don't even want to split the distance there...it's just too far for me. However, I had noted on the questionnaire that distance wasn't that important to me.

It wasn't until they gave me at least two matches that were - get this - in another state that it started to be important to me. Because, let's be clear, I don't live near any state line. That's when I made a point of figuring out why I was getting so many matches that weren't within my criteria. On the other hand, now that things are more important, I'm not getting as many matches.

Oh well, I still have 56 open matches - four of which are in the "communicating" stage. There have been 59 matches closed out by either me or the other party. And all of my "I'm not sure" feelings have lead to a closure, one way or another.

The last closing was on Beverly, age 50. I closed based on the physical distance between us but I'm wondering if I don't need to go back and check the importance of the gender of the match..... ;)