It's My Life

I don't believe in online dating.

		Sunday, 05 August 07 - 04:14 PM (GMT) By Marie D in Relationships aka tricky category

Sometimes, my friends would ask me how comes I am still single.
Although I hope to meet my Mr Right some day, I like where I am in life right now, and people around me do not always understand that. But still, the not meeting the right guy is probably the main reason.

Of course, there will always be someone to tell me that if meeting men is the problem, it can easily be solved. With a few clicks, on an online dating service. Ah, what cannot be solved online these days?

The truth is, I gave it a try a few years ago. I have no horrible story to tell about meeting total jerks, or guy who had lied about their age or appearance, or married guys looking for an affair... I only met men who were alone and looking for their significant other, just as I was. But it didn't work.

At first I thought it just didn't work out for me: I was finding it hard to be online very day, available for anybody who wanted to talk because well, you never know, the one you turned down could have been the right one. I was finding it hard to have 3 dates with 3 different guys on the same week. And I was finding it hard to decide which one of those guys I liked best. If I liked any, that is.
So I gave up.

It was one year later that I read several articles on the subject, and began to think about my experience again. And this is how I see it now (and sociologists see things the same way). When you enter that see full of fish, you look for someone who shares your interests because you need something to start a conversation. Oh, that guy likes Fiona Apple and Bruce Willis, too, I am going to contact him!  And of course the standard questionaire we fill in when we subscribe are full of information of that kind. So we look for someone like us.

But look around you, look at the happy couples, ask them what they love about each other. I bet they won't tell you that having a favourite actor in common made their relationship last. Actually, it is their fundamental differences that brought them together and made them a good match. One of my friends'husband finds it hard to make any decision; he says that what he loves about his wife, is that she can always decide what to do so quiclky. Unlike him. My best friend, before she had her kids, told me she thought she was going to be a terrible mother because she's so anxious, but that it was OK because her husband would be a great father. Unlike her, she thought.

What we need in a long-lasting relationship, what we crave for, is someone to give us a hand and help us walk when all we want to do is sit on the side of the road and stay there for ever. And vice versa. And that is something you cannot look for in those standard questionaire.

You will probably tell me that you know someone who met their significant other online. Actually my colleague just married a guy she met online. She kept looking for 3 years, so I guess if you look long enough and have a bit of luck, you might find a partner this way.

But I am convinced that looking for someone this way is mostly unproductive and leaves a lot to luck.

Precarious love

		Sunday, 13 May 07 - 06:40 PM (GMT) By Marie D in Relationships aka tricky category

My friends would think I am to feminist to say that out loud, but it is true: sometimes I wish I was born 50 years earlier because that would have made my love life easier. I would probably have had less choice and options about my life than I have now, but I wouldn't have been so complicated.

And I am probably not the only one thinking this way: I read an article this week-end that was pointing how difficult it had become for the adult of today to find a significant other and commit. That is because our society has been valuing independance and choice for the last decades.

Indeed, young now know very well who they are, and want to have options and make choices. But the truth apparently is that, to build a long-term relationship, you need to accept that you might have to change, or give up on things, or limit your options. A typical example: more and more people who receive job offers that require them to move to a foreign country tend to accept it. If they are in a relationship, they turn it into a long-distance one, with all the possible consequences.

And it turns out that women are the first victims of their own new possibilities. Most of them are still willing to be in a long-term relationship and hear the biological clock ticking. But a lot of men, at the same time, adopt two kinds of different attitudes: either they don't commit because they know there are plenty of women available, or they turn to foreign countries (like ex-USSR or Africa) to meet women who still live the "traditional" way - that is, who are not willing to have that much options or independance and who will follow their husband and his choices.

If that trend keeps going, more and more European women will be alone while some countries will see all the women going abroad to get married. Talk about unbalance.
By 2010, 40% of European households will be made of one single person. People will partly have chosen it, and will partly have been victims of their independance.
So I am wondering: are we really happier when we have more choice?

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