My Changing Perspective on Online Dating

The online dating wars continue!

This morning, I had a weird experience. I have a tendency to wake up while it’s dark, so I consider it an opportunity to pray. I suspect it’s God’s way of telling me I didn’t pray enough during the day. I woke up early this morning, and I spent a lot of time communicating with God.

While I was doing this, I looked at my phone, as I so often do. It’s hard not to check the Christian Mingle site when I look at my phone. There is something addictive about fielding inquiries from people you know are African scammers. Talking to scammers has become a diversion in and of itself, and there is also that unquenchable desire to see if a real person has responded to you. I don’t mean a potential mate. I just want to know I talked to someone who wasn’t a criminal.

I had two new contacts, not counting the usual obvious scammers. Both were in their thirties, which seemed odd. One was in Alaska, where there are supposedly several men to every woman, and the other was in Illinois.

I could not resist “liking” their profiles.

The Alaska lady had a long, serious description. She wants to build a life with someone instead of inheriting. Not sure what that’s all about. She won’t talk to leftists. I thought that was great. She just laid it out there. No apologies. She’s into things like farming and snowmobiling. If you move to Alaska, you have to call them “snow machines,” but I’m in Florida, so “snowmobiling.”

The Illinois lady is black, and she’s an RN. She wasn’t Halle Berry, but her main profile photo seemed to radiate warmth. Very strange.

I responded to both of them and resumed prayer.

While I was praying, I started to feel strong love for the lady in Illinois. I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t know this lady. There is no reason why I should have feelings for her. After a while, it occurred to me: I was feeling the love of the Holy Spirit.

God can do that. In fact, I think it’s something he wants to do for us all the time, every day, because our own love is inadequate and very conditional, and we tend to direct it to the wrong people. I have felt God’s love going through me before. I really like it. I don’t want to be crabby all the time. I want to be free from scars.

I started thinking about my attitude toward online dating. I felt I needed God’s help in feeling love for all the people who contacted me. I haven’t been nasty to people, but warmth generally hasn’t been a big part of the picture. It’s all pretty businesslike, and I have also taken some pleasure from gently needling scammers.

Yesterday, a Canadian lady “liked” my profile and sent a message. I looked at her profile. It was bizarre.

Proudly, she announced that you don’t have to be conservative to be a real Christian. That’s factually wrong, but okay. She called herself a liberal and a big LGBTQRSTUV&#($#^LOL ally. I figured her account was being used by an African. I thanked her. I told her I had voted for Trump twice and that I had just come from practicing precision shooting, with an AR-15, in my yard. I said either her account had been hacked or she was having a bad reaction to magic mushrooms.

If she was an African, it wouldn’t faze her. If she was a real liberal, and she had a sense of humor, she would be amused and move on. Haven’t heard back from her, which is good, I suppose.

It shows that I wasn’t investing a lot of emotion in what I was doing, and that’s typical of my Christian Mingle mindset.

I feel like I should be conscious of the need to have God’s love run through me when I deal with people from now on. Whether my flesh will permit it is another question.

I had been feeling bummed out about online dating. I was up to my ears in scammers, and people with whom I initiated contact never responded. I started thinking about reality: maybe I was just that unappealing. Not everyone is attractive.

I’ve received a few contacts that seemed legitimate from the start, and generally, I took one look and said, “There is just no way. I can’t do it.” One lady was nearly 80. Another had no hands and feet. Some profiles say things like, “As you can see,I’m a big lady.”

There is only so much weight I am willing to carry. Yesterday, I realized a lot of people were probably doing the same thing when they saw me. I’m pretty sure one lady I contacted went so far as to block me.

I should lower my standards, right? Well, no. Living and dying alone is a lot better than being trapped with a woman who knows perfectly well that you consider physical affection an unpleasant and humiliating chore. No woman wants to be a charity case. Being affectionate with your wife shouldn’t be like giving a sponge bath to a burn victim. I don’t want to wake up every morning and see a reminder that my romantic life was successfully and permanently cursed. Okay, an empty space would also remind me of that, but I wouldn’t have to kiss it or take it to an expensive restaurant on Valentine’s Day, and it wouldn’t resent me.

I had felt somewhat discouraged, but after I felt God’s love going through me, I felt much better. It somehow made it easier not to take anything personally.

I don’t have positive expectations, and I think I’ll probably delete my account at the end of the month, but I do have a better outlook.

I think the lady in Illinois is a scammer, and I suspect the one in Alaska might be a white separatist who has an AR-15 much nicer than mine, for a different reason.

That’s fine. How people treat me and whether my love life works out are less important than what happens inside me and how I treat others.

For anyone who keeps score, I have received 16 messages from scammers in the last hour.