The One Who Loves Church..and Pretty Women

My intentions when I started this blog were to write at least once a week and feature guest bloggers recapping their horrendous dating stories, too. My last post was obviously weeks ago and there is a reason for the delayed, and ‘much anticipated’ second story. I've never been told by a doctor that I have ADD(attention deficit disorder), but I self-diagnosed a couple years ago thanks to WebMD(Caution: use at your own risk when searching for your symptoms....a runny nose search can lead you to thinking you have nasal cancer and only have two weeks to live). Although I'm a great multi-tasker in the workplace, I'm not perfect with juggling all the happenings in my personal life. So the past month I accidentally took a small detour with a “potential in my quest to find Mr. Right, and ended up on a gravel road, in a town I've never heard of. Then I came to a fork in the road and realized I needed to take a turn in the "right" direction, the Mr. Right direction...corny cliche, I know! And literally I was in Iowa corn fields when I discovered this...that really is corny. Anyways, in a different post, I will better explain why I may have intentionally been lost on this detour the past month. I'm still working my way back to the main road, and he's still lost somewhere. 

Two years ago I was dating a guy I was confident to spend the rest of my life with - until he broke my heart - and stole my dog. After a serious break up, friends and family offered words of encouragement like, "He didn't deserve you anyways..." and "Just be glad you didn't get married before you realized he wasn't the one.." or my least favorite words of encouragement, “You’re still so young, you'll find someone else." Now the reason I hate that is because I keep getting older, and guys don't like girls my age. I'm not old enough to be a cougar, and I'm not young enough to be fresh meat, so therefore I'm no longer young. I'm middle-aged in the dating world. However, the next step in recent singledom is friends and family trying to set me up on dates so I can move on and just forget about that guy I wasted four years of my life with. If you know me, you know that I love meeting new people and trying new things, so this whole "blind" date thing that happened to me has been pretty exciting and I wanted to move forward with an open mind.

"my perfect match"

About a year ago one of my good friends, Mandy*, was dating her college boyfriend who had just moved to my hometown to finish out his last year of college. They were convinced that his new roommate would be a perfect match for me. I think the only reason they thought we would be a good match is because we were both single at the moment? I really can't think of any other reason why we could have been compatible....I mean, Charlie Sheen is single (I think), but that doesn't make us a perfect match. Now Gavin Degraw on the other hand, we could possibly be a perfect match! Since there wasn't any other real prospects in my life at the time, I decided to meet up for a drink with Mandy, her boyfriend and his roommate, who I'll name...Kevin*. We met up at this shady spot downtown and the waitress took our order. When the bill came, I paid for myself. My bill was $6. For a guy who has told my friend how interested he is in me, he didn't leave a great first impression when he failed to offer to pick up me tab. Strike ONE!

I gave Kevin the benefit of the doubt since he was really nice and he invited me to go to church with him each Sunday. Still keeping an open mind that maybe his religious views would somehow make me attracted to him, I gave him my number and officially became Facebook friends. Soon enough though, he would text me, Facebook message me and write on my wall every day. He was smothering me with social media messaging. Stike TWO!

In my final days of trying to be nice, without being interested in the slightest, he texted me one afternoon and asked if I wanted to go to Easter Sunday services with him and then go out to lunch with Mandy and her boyfriend. I really didn't want to go to lunch with him, in fear that he would think it was a church/lunch date and then stiff me with the bill, but I agreed to go because I knew his church put on an amazing Easter service. Mandy called me that Friday before Easter and asked if I'd heard from Kevin lately, and I had told her he had texted me day before talking about our plans for our chunch (church+lunch=chunch) date. Her boyfriend had become worried because Kevin didn't come home the day before and it's really unlike him to not to keep in touch with everyone. If you're like me and dated someone who's been to jail before, you know the first place to look is the county inmate website. Sure enough, like "Where's Waldo?", we clicked through a couple pages and found his mugshot and saw he was booked with charges for PROSTITUTION! Strike THREE! My first thoughts were, "Is he a male prostitute?" or "Did he hire one?" 

Although I must admit I would love to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and go into Louis Vuitton in my yoga pants, be ignored, and tell them "big mistake, big mistake…HUGE!", and then walk out with bags full of expensive clothes. Anyways, my ADD kicked in...but it turns out, he was part of a huge police sting trying to crack down on prostitution from Craiglist(if you're ever bored on your lunch break and need some humor to get you through the rest of the afternoon, click on the 'missed connections' link under the personals). When he got released he texted me. Not knowing I knew what happened, he asked if I was still up for Easter chunch date. As a Christian, it wouldn't be right to cast judgment on others as we're all sinners, but needless to say, the good Lord saved me from dating that guy! I eventually had to sin. I lied to Kevin, telling him I had a boyfriend so he would stop messaging me. I still don't know if he knows I found out...but either way it would have been the white elephant in the church pew that Easter Sunday. Mandy and I are still close friends, but her privileges of setting me up on dates have been revoked until further notice. 

The One Who Made Me Start This Blog - May 16, 2012

There comes a point in every single woman’s life when she reflects back on her dating past and starts to wonder why she’s alone. She asks herself questions like, “Why don’t guys like me?” and “Why am I still single?” Then she starts to make herself believe things like, “If only I was skinnier and prettier, guys would like me…” and “I’m never going to get married and have kids…” and “I’m going to die lonely with my eight cats eating my corpse before anyone discovers I’m dead.” Am I right? I hear love stories all the time from friends, relatives and coworkers bragging about how they met “the one,” but what I don’t often hear are the entertaining stories of the other “ones” that lead them to that special “one.”

Not so long ago, I had what Oprah might call my “AHA moment.” The guy I was seeing at the time was tall, dark and handsome. What more could a girl ask for? We talked on the phone for hours everyday and had this unbelievable connection where we understood everything about each other, so much so that he referred to me as the “closest girl in his life, other than his mom,” almost like a “sister” to him. At that point, a red flag popped up in my head because no girl in her right mind wants to have a sibling kind of bond with the guy she is sucking face with, except maybe if you’re from Missouri (Just kidding y’all, Missourians! That is what they call people from Missoura, right?) Talk about awkward. After a few less than exceptional months of seeing each other and taking our friendship to the next level, things took a turn for the worse, and I woke up one day (on his birthday, actually) and realized I was never going to marry to this guy. We had become such terrific friends, like Gayle and Oprah, but without the lesbian tension, that he didn’t know how to treat me like a girlfriend, but instead treated me like a girl who is a friend. So I asked myself what was the purpose of being in this relationship. I thought about it long and hard (that’s what she said!) and I couldn’t think of one, single reason why I was with this guy. Now maybe you’re thinking (or maybe you could give two craps less), “They were so close, why wouldn’t she want to date him?” I will get to more of this story in a later blog…but at this AHA moment, I decided to make a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t settle for just tall, dark and handsome guys, but only for the perfect “one.” The one who wouldn’t refer to me as his sister while sticking his tongue down my throat.

Whether you’ve found your “one and only” at church, a bar, work, or from an online dating website – you had to kiss a few frogs before you married your prince. As for me, I’m still kissing frogs waiting for one to turn into a prince. Isn’t that the fairy tale cliché every girl desires? I’ve seen all the classic fairy tales growing up, and as my sweet, naïve nieces grow up, a part of me just want to be straight with them and tell them that those fairy tales aren’t realistic. But, the inner optimist in me truthfully holds out hope for the fairy tale of my Prince Charming to find my glass slipper and bring it to me, and then we’d live happily ever after just like Cinderella. Except I might change a few details in that my prince might come in the form of a small-town, country boy riding in to save me in his big ol’ GMC truck and slip my missing cowgirl boot on me.

So as a single girl pondering my dating history, or lack thereof, I’m recalling all the men and boys who have come in and out of my life, along with a few who are currently still in it. I’ve dated, come close to dating and have been set up to date a few winners as well as a few losers. During my AHA moment of time, I started to label each of these winners and losers I’ve come in contact with names like, “the one who loves church and prostitutes,” “the one who calls at 2 a.m.” and “the one I thought was ‘the one’ who stole my dog.” Like I said before, I’ve hypothetically kissed a lot of frogs…

At no point in this blog am I trying to hurt feelings or declare that I’ve been the perfect candidate for someone to label as their “one and only.” I’m simply sharing my shameful, painful, and often humiliating, humorous stories of what it’s like being a hopeless dater. My name is Jill and I’m a hopeless dater. The first step is admitting you have a problem right? If you are familiar with the twelve step program, you know the second step is to believe that a higher Power greater than ourselves can restore our sanity. I believe God has “the one” already picked out for me, and whether I’ve already met him, or I meet him in one year or 10 years, I will hold out for him so I don’t have to be a hopeless dater any longer.