Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there...

I really wish I wasn't typing this while I sit alone on a Friday night listening to soft rock music...but sadly that's exactly what I'm doing.  Sometimes the mood just strikes me and I have to write.  Sure it's been about 7 months since the last time I actually took the time to do just that...but better late than never, right?

It think it's no secret I've been doing the online dating thing...since...well...since I was 16 years old and I discovered yahoo chat.  I found the cutest picture of me in existence, made a profile, joined chat rooms, and talked to virtual strangers.  Always males.  Ideally they were single, but let's be real here...I'm sure most of them weren't.  If anything, the internet has allowed the world's perverts to take the stage and show case their ability to be douche bags.

I was always offended, but slightly flattered with the "wanna cyber?" chat boxes I'd get.  No, I could never, sick...but thanks for asking!  Ugh.  Seriously.  I must just have one of those looks that dirty fucking men are attracted to.  I certainly didn't catch the eye of any hopeless romantics looking to sweep me off my feet and treat me like a queen for the rest of my life...

Fast forward 15 years and I'm still fucking at it.  Still finding the cutest pictures of me in existence, still making up honest yet witty profiles, and still getting messaged by nasty ass men who only want one thing from me.  It's atrocious really...the amount of attention I get that I don't actually want.  I mean...sure, like I said, I'm flattered that I'm not some really unfortunate looking girl who never gets asked out.  It's reassuring to know that I can, and do, attract people of the opposite sex.  That is the point, of course.  But I don't know what it is about me that says I will put up with some of the nasty dirty shit I've gotten sent to me.

Granted, I recently decided that I was done PAYING for a fucking website to NOT find me a date.  Yes, I paid for match.com.  In fact, my post about my match.com ad has the most hits out of any other post I've done.  The closest thing I got to a date was a text the day of with an excuse about not feeling well.  So I joined Plenty of Fish and OKCupid.  Both free.  Both giant pieces of garbage filled with illiterate assholes only looking to get in to your pants.

I went on two legitimate dates with someone I met on POF (for you coupled folk...that's what we call it, OKC and POF).  They were terrible and awkward.  I told myself I needed to be more open about the guys online.  I needed to stop being so judgmental over their misspellings and bad writing.  I need to not be so picky about their profile pictures.  And I got what I asked for.  Mediocre.  He was nice enough...but he was weird as fuck.  While I wish him the best, he was just not for me.  And I wasn't for him either.

Now I've texted many more men than that.  Giving out your number is the next step after messaging back and forth.  Calling comes after that.  I've talked to a few guys on the phone too.  Always awkward talking to someone you've never actually met.  No guy was ever awesome enough for me to say, yeah...let's do this...let's meet!

Recently I was talking to a guy who found me and sent me a message telling me how beautiful I was.  I get a lot of these, but he seemed honestly sincere about it.  AND he wasn't ugly.  Now, I'm not so shallow.  In the real world...I'm not so picky.  But this is online.  You have pictures...you have words.  That's it.  You have to judge what you have.  It's so fucking surreal.  But this guy was successful, and nice, and seemed to be really in to me.  He just lives 3 god damn hours away.  So I had to break it off before I got attached.  YES, I'm going to let distance get in the way as a matter of fact.  He works weekends when I have off...how the hell were we ever going to make that work??

My worst story is the hot guy who simply messaged me that he thought I was hot and thought we should meet.  And I thought he was smokin hot so I said okay.  We exchanged numbers.  We texted back and forth for about 20 minutes one Friday night and I ended up in the back seat of his car making all kinds of bad decisions.  Never heard from him again.  He got what he wanted.  I might have if I hadn't been so drunk and could actually remember.  But it is what it is.  He was hot and I needed the attention for a hot minute.  It may have been longer than a minute.  I wouldn't know...

I was talking to another super hot guy online.  We texted back and forth almost every weekend.  It was usually me saying I'm going to bed and I do not want company...but a couple of times I actually gave in.  I agreed to have him come over.  I made myself all cute.  I cleaned up my place.  And I never saw him.  Twice that happened.  Once he had a bogus excuse...the other time, not even an excuse, just didn't text me back.  I realized I was only putting up with his bull shit because he was good looking.  I knew all this guy wanted was a piece of ass...and the two times I gave in, I was feeling particularly like I needed a good time just to take the edge off...

In the end, even the really nice guy pretty much expected to drive three hours to get laid.  I realized that that was it.  This is where I have to draw the line.  I love having sex.  More than most people I know.  I have had a lot of it in my lifetime.  But jesus fucking christ...is that all there is?  I can have sex.  I can go to a bar and find a man and bring him home.  I do it all the time.  That is not what I'm looking for.  At least not anymore.  It was fine for a while...but now I'm getting older and it's just getting sadder.  I'm not Samantha from SATC.  As much as I wish I was, or as much as my friends think I could be...I'm not her.  I crave intimacy.  I want it so bad it hurts sometimes.

Physically it hurts me to be alone.  Getting older is just another reminder that I'm not getting any younger.  I'm going to be 31.  Thirty-fucking-one people.  When I was 21 I remember thinking I'd have my shit together by now.  Granted I was "in love" when I was 21.  Had the most immature guy in the entire world casting me out and reeling me back in.  Once I finally got free of his spell I decided, fuck it.  I'm sleeping around.  I'm doing to men what they do to me...use them and leave them.  And I was pretty damn successful at it for many years.  I slept with a coworker for 3 years on the pure principle that he was hot and most of the women wanted him.  He was my status symbol.

But I digress.

As I get older I watch all my friends leave my single world one by one.  They find boyfriends.  They get married.  They have a baby.  They have another baby.  They get divorced too...but that just means I'm old enough to be married, have children, and get divorced...and I haven't done any of those things.  It's hard not to compare yourself to your peers.  It's bad enough that I didn't go on to grad school and I have to forever compare myself to all the smart people I went to high school with who got master's degrees.  I have to compare myself to my sorority sisters who got their bachelor's degrees and then went on to have the careers of their dreams.  A lot of them make a lot of money.  And that's bad enough.

I have accepted that I will not go on to more school.  I may never make the kind of money I would like to make.  I may have lost that ambition the day I didn't apply to grad school.  But I have not lost the ambition to be a wife and a mother.  Essentially...I can get that started without having a single penny.  Going to school is expensive.  You can't even walk through the door without thousands of dollars.  But you sure can fall in love for free.  And you most people can even get pregnant for free.  These are goals that I consider to be "still attainable."

And maybe I'm still single because I come from a broken home.  Both my parents have been married 3 times.  I never knew what it was like to have a mom and a dad under the same roof, in love, loving us, staying together and raising us--until I grew up that is.  My first memories are of my parents apart, hating each other, and me being pulled in two directions.  I never wanted that for my future.  I told myself that I am only getting married once.  I'm going to make it count.  I won't get married for the wrong reasons.  I won't "give up" and get divorced.  Which means I have to marry one really incredible person, don't I?

And maybe it's not that simple.  Maybe I valued my freedom and independence when I finally left my one-horse hometown.  Maybe I was too busy enjoying being successful in college away from everyone I knew...starting my own life with the people I chose to have in it and not the people I was stuck with.

And maybe I've just not met anyone worth marrying.  Now I know that one is true.  I've really only truly liked a handful of men in the last 11 years.  Two are now married.  They were all disasters.  The worst part is, I honestly thought these guys liked me back.  None of them did...not really...not in the end.  They all broke a piece of my heart.  I let them have it too.  I was fooled in to believing I'd actually met "the one guy" who proved that they're not all the same...and they turn out to be all the same!

But the point of the story is (yeah I've finally gotten there) that I keep going.  I keep hoping I will find that one guy who proves that they're not all the same.  They don't all want impossibly tall, impossibly skinny, impossibly beautiful women.  They don't all want someone who isn't me.  They won't all put up with crazy just because she's hot.

Someone is going to want to sit up with me until 4 in the morning and tell stories.  Someone is going to laugh at my jokes.  Someone is going to want to stay in and watch movies with me.  Someone is going to go out with me and my friends and steal the show away from me.  Someone is going to take me to dinner, take me to another country, take me home to meet his family.  Someone is going to want to spend the rest of their life with me.  Someone is going to love me.

At least that's what I keep hoping for because I am a hopeless romantic.

It gets me down sometimes when people tell me all the ways I'm going about it wrong.  It's easy for people who are part of a couple to say such things.  It's always, you're trying too hard, you're not looking hard enough, you're on the wrong website, you need to be on a paid website, you need to do this, you need to fix that.  Have you ever tried meeting someone at the gym?  At work? (which my company strictly forbids by the way).  It's always you should try this, you should do that, you should look here...  Why is it always me who is doing it wrong?  I find it hard to believe that there is something ELSE I could be doing to find the right man.

Have you ever thought for just a minute that maybe it's the men who suck?

Well I have.  I just declared tonight on Facebook that I'm fucking fabulous and I'm done trying to convince men of this fact.  If they need a better profile picture, or a funnier description, or a skinnier body, or longer hair, or whatever it may be...then they don't need me.  And I don't need them.  In fact, fuck them.  Yes, you there...fuck you for not realizing how god damn awesome I am and how lucky you'd be to date me.  I am amazing.  I will love someone some day with my whole heart.  I will be a wife.  I will be a mother.  I will be the best thing that ever happened to them.  And if they can't see that right now...then they don't deserve it.  I did not wait 30...almost 31 years...to settle for some schmo.

I've seen people get married for the wrong reasons.  I've seen people settle for the first man who came along.  And I've seen them get divorced too.  Sometimes shit just doesn't work out...but that's why you have to wait until you've found someone who is willing to put in the effort with you.  I just don't think it's possible to meet someone ready for a lifetime commitment when you're young.  I'm okay that I will be older when/if I get married.  I've already figured my shit out.  And I've fucked a lot of hot guys.  I have no regrets in that respect. I will not marry someone and wonder if there is better out there--because I've been out there.  I am fucking OUT THERE.  And I know what I've found.  And it's simply not enough.  No one has been worth all this shit I'm going through--but I keep faith alive that I will meet one some day.

Sometimes it's just hard.  I get down a lot.  I get lonely all the time!  I don't have many single friends left and it really fucking sucks to be alone.  I want children before I'm too old to have them.  I AM happy with my life right now.  I do love myself.  I do think life is worth living...even if I'm stuck doing it alone.  I have great friends.  I have a great family.  I have great things in my life.  And I know some day I will look back on all of this and shake my head and laugh.

This is 2013.  Thirteen is my lucky number...mostly because I was born on March 13th.  I've been focused on finding a man for the past couple years so I guess it's time to just focus on me.  Been working out...been eating healthy.  Coincidentally, I'm down 13 pounds.  So I'm going to keep trucking along and waiting for the day when I get on here to write a blog about how great this year turned out to be once I decided to just focus on me for a while.  Yes it sucks that I'm sitting here alone on a Friday night.  Pretty broke.  Out of flex points so I can't even eat anything bad to make me feel better.  But as they say, any day above ground is a good day.  So as this one comes to a close, I guess I will go to bed finally done with this mess.  I've deleted all my online dating websites and taken all the random men out of my phone.  Then I declared my independence on Facebook.  Because it's not official until it's on Facebook.

Now that step one is done...on to the next...not-so-obsessed-with-finding-a-man step.  We'll see how this goes.  You can pretty much guarantee at some point I'll get online to type about it.  Let's just hope it's sooner than later...