Love, Naturally

I would rather be alone than in poor company. But being alone and turning fifty during a pandemic was a condition my loved ones considered terminal. Their recommended cure? Online dating. When I told them I’d rather take lye or arsenic, they responded tenderly, with tough love and shame.  

“It’s not for me,” I said during a call with one of my tough-loving friends, a therapist fifteen years my junior with no recollection of life without cell phones.

“That’s what everyone says until they do it,” she said.   

“It’s not the way I connect. I need to meet someone naturally.” 

“Nature is irrelevant. It’s about creating opportunities to meet people. And you can’t complain about being alone if you’re not trying to fix the situation.”

I shook my head and hung up. I didn’t think I was complaining, but why else would her words have irked me? I stewed over her words. Maybe it was time to drink the tough love tonic instead of the glass of wine I gulped, digesting the conversation. 

“I’ll show them,” I thought, conscripting my laptop to create a killer online dating profile with one goal: prove the ineffectiveness of their pushy advice. How hard could it be to lose my virtual virginity? Nobody taught me the machinations of losing my real virginity, and that hadn’t been so tricky. So, in my age-appropriate, pragmatic way, I googled “how to select a dating app at fifty.”  Cue the daunting music. The results were as vast as they were stupefying, as sites for every category of human preference, identity, and desire materialized before me. 

Notwithstanding my curiosity, I scrolled past the steampunk vampire cosplay seekers and selected a site that touted itself as an elite group of singles. I couldn’t think of a reason not to become one of those, and ostensibly did the minute I typed in my credit card information.  

So, with a gauntlet at my feet, a membership in hand, and zero experience typing my personal idiosyncrasies into some romantic data-crunching vortex, I took the first step—the questionnaire. 

With each response I clicked, my shoulders involuntarily shrugged. I assumed the questions represented the perfect cyber tool to dissect me into the puzzle pieces of an ideal future pair. And then it got weird. 

According to the results, I was easy-going, introverted, agreeable, and quite inventive. All true. But the analytics also deemed me “rather sensitive” and the opposite of “emotionally stable” under the category labeled “neuroticism.”  

I sunk in my chair. Which questions characterized me as diametrically opposed to a state of emotional stability? It didn’t seem like a personality test, but it was, and based on the results, I’m not sure I would date me, much less recommend anyone else do so. Not only did the appraisal of my personality clash with how anyone I know would ever describe me, it also couldn’t bode well for matching me with potential suitors, right? 

Wrong. Forty-seven messages later, I was on the verge of carpal tunnel syndrome from scrolling and swiping. I grossly underestimated the number of men out there looking to meet the newest inventive, agreeable, neurotic woman online. I felt like fresh chum in high-tech waters. This was a different planet I was landing on, so I hunkered down like an astronaut in training. I did my research. 

It took two hours to read all the messages. It was like window shopping for a man instead of shoes. The more I spelunked through profiles, the more messages I received. It was too much. I had to engage or scrub the launch. 

Enter Jerome. He sent me a smile, followed by a lengthy introduction, before laying his cards on the table. He was seeking a relationship, and according to the questionnaire, he was divorced, financially stable, and not a bit neurotic. It didn’t hurt that he looked like a chiseled older version of every Hollywood tough guy I’ve ever crushed on. Better yet, according to the wizard behind the dating machine curtain, we matched well. So, all I needed to do was be honest and straightforward and show him my cards too. Easy, right?

Wrong again. Three hours later, I realized that laying your cards on the virtual table is nerve-racking for an online dating virgin with fifty years in her deck. I found myself – a confident, successful attorney – thoroughly intimidated. I reread my response and walked away before rereading it with fresh eyes as if Jerome were a federal judge to whom I was making a capital case. Then it dawned on me. In this new environment, I am neurotic. 

Never had I worried so much about making a good impression in the old three-dimensional, pre-pandemic world. But I didn’t meet this guy someplace in person with our body language confirming we liked something about each other, signaling the chemistry. No, here I had to take a chance and lay it out in writing as he had, like a pre-meeting informational dump of personal self-descriptions. 

When I finished the commensurately responsive Reader’s Digest version of my personal opus, I squinted hard and hit send, then went on a hunt around the house for dust bunnies before I peeled and stored every vegetable in the fridge. Not long after, his response dinged, rescuing me from mentally polishing silverware I don’t even own.  

Jerome scored his first point when he ended the emails and called me. From there, we began to video chat, where our mutual attraction grew inside our online boxes. We both worked from home and consented to a pre-date quarantine because we agreed there was some potential passion between us. If only he’d brought some on the first date.

It started with an outdoor brunch and a side of awkward conversation. We’d revealed ourselves in small doses during those online encounters, but we clunked through real conversation with no cadence. The date ended with a walk back to my place, sparkless, except for my original physical attraction to him. It was awkward saying goodbye, but then I remembered how Cher once described men. Optional. Like dessert. And like so many women, I’ve fallen prey to believing that the best version of my body is rolling around somewhere in the past, firmer and thinner. I didn’t regret inviting him in because I decided when I’m seventy, I’ll wish I had this fifty-year-old body rolling around with Mr. Hollywood’s physique. 

I never heard from him again, and I was glad. When it comes to romance, the internet will never replace a serendipitous encounter. Jerome was a nice guy, but I would have declined his invitation if we met by chance in person. Algorithms cannot capture human essence. We are all diamonds that way, our facets as rare as our fingerprints. How they connect and reflect one another while suffering the human condition is unique. And as I suspected, my facets don’t shine in engineered environments. I need naturally occurring places, where I can sense a potential partner’s chemistry. I need to start in the field, the forest, or the ocean— the dinner party, the produce aisle, or the fishing trip. I’m hard-wired, not wireless. 

In the end, I thanked my beautiful forthright bullying friend for tough loving me into facing the fear of losing my virtual virginity. But the thing about confronting one’s fears is that it is usually a one-time deal. Facing a fear of snakes doesn’t result in a love of reptiles. So when she attempted to strong-arm me into sticking with it, my answer was a firm “no.”  

“But online dating lets you meet as many people as you can. You can suss out the chemistry later,” she said.

“I’ll wait and meet someone the old-fashioned way,” I said. “I’ll know him when I see him.”

And I was right. A few weeks later, a man at a table in my favorite restaurant started a conversation across the six-foot continental divide carved by the tectonics of COVID. I can’t describe what attracted me to him, some facet shining, reflecting something familiar. 

We started with a lunch date that turned into a five-hour conversation and one long, game-changing kiss. A year later, our facets still shine together because nature has everything to do with it, and the nature I stayed true to was my own. 

Sola Damon is a recovering trial lawyer with four unfinished manuscripts in her bottom drawer. She is the author of Namaste at Home: Positive Thinking and Meditation During a Freakin' Pandemic. She lives in South Florida, where she's finally dusting off those manuscripts and turning them into novels.