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How's the DATING thing working for ya?
Gregarius wrote: I've gained a lot from lurking this thread (it didn't feel right to use the word "enjoyed"), and I really appreciate everyone's willingness to share.
My marriage is in a very rocky place, and divorce looks likely. This is the first time I've expressed that thought "out loud." I'm having trouble accepting it, but at the same time I kind of fantasize about it. I'm resistant to change, but we're both fairly miserable in our current state. I can't decide if the right course is to work through it or just go our separate ways. My wife is finally seeing a therapist, and I'm more than willing to join her when the time is right.
Anyway, it's interesting to me to read about your dating concerns. For me, if we do get divorced, I would very much enjoy just being alone for at least a year. My worry is that I would prefer being alone too much, which might end up being a bad thing.
I wouldn't wait. Go see a marriage counselor if you can. If your marriage is going to work, it'll get there through you guys going to a counselor you both trust. If it won't (like mine), you guys will be much better off for having done counseling and knowing you 100% saw the marriage to its conclusion. After the first month or so of being separated, I have literally never had a second thought about if divorce was right---largely because we went through counseling and worked on it first and it still didn't work.
Also, nothing wrong with being alone, but I think you're going to be very surprised by your intense feelings of loneliness if you actually get divorced.
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We have found a counselor we like, but she wants to work with my wife for a while before bringing me into the mix. I'm far from blameless, but my wife has other issues she needs to deal with before we can make headway on *our* issues together.
As for being alone, I really just meant in the relationship sense. I have plenty of friends that I would finally be able to spend *more* time with, while still having the option to just chill out alone at home. It's more of a selfishness thing: I'd love the freedom to watch whatever movie I want, play a video game if I want, or just go out if I want.
Thanks for the support, guys.
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Gregarius wrote: It's more of a selfishness thing: I'd love the freedom to watch whatever movie I want, play a video game if I want, or just go out if I want.
I don't see it as a complete selfishness thing. Some people need more alone time than others. If you feel like everything you do must be with your wife all the time, and you're never doing anything that you really want to be doing even if only by yourself, perhaps that's why the marriage is on the rocks right now. It could be as simple a change as "Thursday night is Gregarius night, I can do whatever I want. You can have Tuesdays." and work something out like that.
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- Dr. Mabuse
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A week after moving out, I met a friend of my roommates who I took a liking to. We've gone out a few times (never acknowledged as dates) and I've been over to her place a couple of times, to watch a Swedish detective show. She's never given any indication of interest in taking things further so I was reticent to try anything. She's currently on tour with a band for the next few weeks, so maybe I'll grow some cajones in the meantime and try to broach the subject when she returns?
Probably not.
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So I have been doing a lot of dating for the last three years. The first year, I got used to modern dating apps and relearned the basics of dating as well as some modern quirks. There are roughly twice as many guys on the dating sites as women, but 40% of these guys are married or at least living with a partner. So the better women on these sites get an overwhelming amount of attention. I settled on joining two sites: Match (quantity) and eHarmony (quality). At any given time, there are over 1,000 women in my selected age range and geographical radius on Match, and maybe 70 or so on eHarmony. So far, I have dated roughly the same number of women from each site, with a couple of women who were on both sites.
I met a couple of great women that first year. I dated a lovely psychiatrist originally from Taiwan for a couple of months, but Juihsien broke things off because she is very Christian and I am an atheist. Then I dated a lifelong Minnesotan with amazing eyes and an IT job that combined her artistic ability and her knack for math. It was going great for a few weeks, then I had my first ever outbreak of genital herpes. It wasn't Molly's fault, we hadn't had sex yet but were headed in that direction. My doctor said that I could have caught it from anybody... my ex, women I slept with recently (there were three), or even women that I slept with back in my peak dating years in the mid-'90s. I struggled to tell her about my diagnosis, but couldn't find the words and got dumped because of her own insecurities.
Dating with herpes is nearly 20 times harder than normal dating. According to the CDC, about 1 out of 6 adult Americans have genital herpes. But 2/3 of them have never had symptoms, so only 1 out of 18 adult Americans are aware that they have genital herpes. There is a test, but insurance usually doesn't cover it because the test is only semi-reliable and often gives false positive results. The gold standard is examination of herpes sores by a medical professional. So it took me six months to get official confirmation of my affliction, when I was able to get an appointment with my doctor while I had an outbreak. I had 6 outbreaks the first year, 4 outbreaks the second year, and am on track for another 4 outbreaks for this year.
I signed up with a specialized dating site for people with permanent STDs: herpes, HPV, and HIV/AIDS. Despite living in a metro area with a population of about 3.5 million, there were only 8 women in my area with herpes, with is statistically absurd. There should be nearly 200 women in my search parameter at Match that have herpes, but so far I have only seen one profile on Match where the woman openly disclosed her herpes. She was also on the STD site, so I contacted her and we chatted, but I wasn't her type. I don't disclose my affliction on my dating profiles, but I have decided to disclose to any woman who seems to be getting serious with me. I have told four women so far. Two immediately rejected me, though not to my face. The third one didn't mind because she already had similar symptoms from a different health problem that was non-contagious. However, we were long-distance only and never got to meet. The day before Zeba was finally flying to meet me (she paid for her own ticket and even texted me a scan of it), a close friend of hers died and she decided to cancel the trip so she could be there for the funeral. Then she started to get cold feet about rescheduling, because she was beginning to realize that Minnesota winters were more severe than she imagined. She was originally from India but had lived near Tucson for more than a decade.
In early November, I met the woman that I am currently seeing. We are the same age and have similar personalities, taste in music, enthusiasm for exercise, etc. She was getting very flirty on our third date, so I told her about my disease on our fourth date. We are still going out, but she wants to take things very slowly now, and it feels like we will probably just end up as friends. It's disappointing, but the alternative would have been to keep my secret and then probably infect her with a permanent STD, and I won't do that.
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Shellhead wrote: Then I went to Match, and looked at a long list of women who have looked at my profile in recent months. I contacted two who looked at me recently and sent them each a two-paragraph message. Before I was finished eating my lunch, one of the women messaged me back and we traded messages for a while. We will be talking more this evening.
This is a key thing that I learned the hard way and that I want to share with everybody reading this. Most women (at least the Boomers and Gen Xers that are close to my age) on dating sites will never initiate contact with a man, because they have been socialized to wait for men to make the first move. I used to find that very discouraging, but eventually realized that the ones who looked at my profile were possibly interested in meeting me, so those were the women that would be more likely to respond to a message from me.
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Shellhead wrote: Before I was finished eating my lunch, one of the women messaged me back and we traded messages for a while. We will be talking more this evening.
Before I got home from work that night, she messaged me two more times, still very friendly. I responded with a single two paragraph message, addressing each of her two messages. And I never heard from her again. I wish that I could say that this was bizarre, but it is relatively unremarkable in online dating.
On Wednesday, I noticed that a woman that I went out with once last March had recently looked at my profile. I reintroduced myself and asked her out for coffee on Saturday morning. She said yes, so we met this morning. A coffee date should ideally be about an hour at the most. It's not a big date, it's a short scouting mission to see if there might be some potential. The conversation was great, but I started to realize that we had been there for quite a while, maybe 2 hours. I mentioned that to her and checked my watch, and it turned out that we talked for 3.5 hours! I think that it's safe to say that we will meet again. Especially since one of her stated interests was board games, though her idea of board games is light euros. She is interested in trying other types of board games, and showed some interest when I described a few of my favorite Ameritrash games.
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Huzzah!
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Shellhead wrote: ... it turned out that we talked for 3.5 hours! I think that it's safe to say that we will meet again. Especially since one of her stated interests was board games, though her idea of board games is light euros. She is interested in trying other types of board games, and showed some interest when I described a few of my favorite Ameritrash games.
I messaged her that evening, just to note that I enjoyed our date and looked forward to seeing her again soon. She replied, "Same-same," and I never heard from her again. I asked her out last Wednesday, and she didn't bother replying. She did tell me near the end of our long coffee date that she was also seeing two other guys, but I assume that everybody on these dating sites is possibly doing the same unless they say otherwise. The problem with multi-dating is that nobody spends enough time with a given person to really get to know them, and quickly rush on to the next date and the next after that.
So I went back on the sites and tried to line up at least one date for (last) weekend. One of the women I contacted was somebody who already gave me a like, so I assumed that I would at least get to meet her. No, not yet. She didn't reply to me until Saturday afternoon and already had plans for the weekend, so we are now talking tentatively about coffee next Saturday. Another woman sent me a like last night, and we traded a few messages until she went silent around 8:30. My overall track record is that maybe 33% of the women who message with me will actually go on a date with me. I also will be doing lunch next Sunday with a woman that I dated last year, but we are just friends now. And I am hoping to do dinner soon with another woman who I have been seeing since November, even though we are currently just friends with a possible hope of more later on.
All of this dating has changed me as a person. I went to a birthday party at a meadery on Saturday night, and brought some light board games because the host and at least half his friends are all board game players. I joined in with an ongoing big game of Cards Against Humanity. Then I hung out and talked with various people for a while, and got into another board game called Head Trip. (Head Trip is a so-so party game designed by the same people who created Cards Against Humanity.) Anyway, the overall crowd at the party was generally 10 to 20 years younger than me, and about 50/50 men and women. A younger version of me would have hovered around the host, who was the only guy there that I knew fairly well. But this current version of me was very comfortable with chatting with the women at the party, and by the time some of us sat down to play Head Trip, it was two guys and five women at the table. And two different women commented more than once that they really enjoyed talking with me. I wasn't hitting on any of them, because I couldn't quite tell who the couples were, and also everybody seemed younger than I currently date. I think the crucial change was that I have become a good listener, actively listening and asking good questions while still occasionally offering my own perspective.
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- SuperflyPete
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I will say this: If my ex got sober and started attending mass, it would be almost impossible to not want her back. I'm not saying I'd push my girlfriend in front of a bus to get to her, I really do like this woman. I have no intentions of marrying again, and she's the opposite of me in a lot of ways, and I do worry about compatibility as she's a bit of a slob and I'm an almost OCD super detail oriented clean freak whose compilations are only titrated down by my slight laziness. I worry I'll be spending the rest of my life chasing after her picking up cups. I always kind of picture her like that kid from MN Syamalan's "Signs" but she's really not remotely like that.
I wish I could have convinced my ex to get help and counseling with an actual psychologist, not one of these ludicrously bad "Therapists" you see online. Not a day goes by that I don't wish shit was different. I've come to terms with the fact that she is a party girl who values hedonism and fun above all else, so I'll never be back with her, but to love so profoundly for so long and to just have it end is a bitter fucking pill. I'm not even really mad it went the way it did, I'm really more mad that I will never love anyone as much as I loved her, nor for as long. I'll never have a 50th anniversary unless medicine gets really good really fast, and I decide to marry for some odd reason. And even if I did, I'm certain I won't marry this one because I just dont know if she is as motivated with health and fitness as I am, and I won't be with a fat, sick woman for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I won't be saddled with using my retirement to fund her healthcare for avoidable diseases. Maybe I'm a cunt for thinking like that but I'm 50 in August and I haven't been anything but honest about it. She's walking 5K's with me so maybe she is really starting to value her own health. That ozempic shit is a killer, it fucked her up pretty bad,
Short version: fuck no-fault divorce. There should be a requirement for 6 months of counseling,

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I wanted to finally tell SO about my diagnosis and get her advice about how soon I should bring it up with women I am dating, but that conversation will have to wait for now. I have decided to wait as long as possible before disclosing to C, in hopes of building a strong connection before I give her the bad news. Disclosure will still need to happen before we get physical, because I am not a psychopath.
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