How do you meet someone?  That was my question.

After thirty years of marriage, my husband went through the stereotypical middle-aged rite of passage, otherwise known as a midlife crisis. He quit the job, bought the sports car, and had the affair.  I was too busy to notice until it was too late to fix.  I was in the crux of my career, and thinking I had his devotion and support, was barreling forward with intense focus and unbridled hours towards the next promotion.

The promotion came as the marriage spiraled out of control.  Progressively, I had moved, literally and figuratively, from the bedroom to the couch to the guest room.  Finally, I filed for divorce and moved out of the house –  exactly two days before turning the BIG 5-0. 

Needing a quick and clean break and somehow feeling guilty because I didn’t want to live with my cheating ex-husband anymore, I took very little: a few plastic tubs of my personal stuff, clothes and shoes, a dining room table that belonged to my parents, and a loveseat I had picked out specifically for my home office a decade ago.

As I mentioned, two days before the tidal wave of 50 washed over me, I sat alone on the floor in an unfamiliar, too large, almost empty three-bedroom house looking at six plastic tubs that seemed to hold the sum total of my five decades of life. I put my head in my hands and had the much-deserved pity party cry. 

My son was grown and married and had his first child just a few months before.  I can remember the look on my soon-to-be ex-husband’s face as he found out five days after he bought the sports car that he was going to be a grandpa. It was quite a blow to all the effort he was putting into recapturing his youth.  As for me, I couldn’t be more excited at the prospect of becoming “Gigi” and having a little rug rat to love and spoil.

I spent the next year hanging out with friends.  My three very close girlfriends from the office got me through the most difficult times. The four of us seemed to each personify a stereotype and collectively form some sort of synergistic unit. Teresa is quiet and silently wise when it comes to almost anything, but especially, when it comes to something earthy and natural.  For instance, if you are allergic to poison ivy, she knows just the remedy – chew on a leaf or two and build up an immunity. She is one of the most beautiful people in the room, but instead of being conceited or aloof, she bestows her radiance on everyone else.  You can’t be around her for even a few minutes without a little of her splendor rubbing off on you. 

Darla is gifted with spiritual insight and conflict resolution. She can look at any situation and instantly drill down to the heart of the matter and address the root of the problem.  She is a parent liaison charged with settling disputes before they are brought to administration.  The outcome of her work usually reaches much further, helping parents understand their children, helping children take responsibility for their actions, and causing everyone a little self-examination and spiritual growth. 

Tammy is worldly, well-read, and well-traveled.  She exudes culture, art, and style; and she is eternally optimistic. She doesn’t allow her friends to wallow in self-pity or even hard-earned misery; instead, she deftly reframes the situation to show you how good things really are.  I am the audacious and intellectual one who seems to have more misadventures than adventures.  I’m never afraid to try something new, and I’ve always got a story to tell.  

The truth is, we all four share bits and pieces of all of these traits – wisdom, beauty, spirituality, positivity, and intellect – and it was our commonalities more than our differences that caused us to bond. (By the way, these are the traits I believe we all collectively share!) Tammy was the one who introduced us all to the idea of seeing everything from the perspective of “fabulous” – and it was a great perspective to adopt.  Why in the world should you simply tell your girlfriend her new hairdo is cute when you can tell her it is absolutely fabulous?  And there’s nothing like the way a girl with a slow Texas drawl can say “fabulous”!  You have to drag it out so that the first vowel is almost pronounced twice and each syllable somehow gets accented:  fa-a-bu-lous! Can you imagine working in an environment with this collective positivity?  I was blessed.

It was Darla and few other friends who surprised me on my dreaded fiftieth birthday by dragging my puffy red eyes and tear-stained cheeks to a Japanese steakhouse complete with a sashimi-wielding chef who playfully shot risqué jokes at the party and squirted sake in our mouths as he conjured Americanized washoku before our eyes. She also lent me her couch until my mother came to visit, dragged my sad tail end (her words) to the store, and forced me to buy furniture to fill the house.  

My trio of friends – Darla, Teresa, and Tammy – distracted me, prayed for me, encouraged me, laughed with me, and mostly reminded me how much better off I was each day to be on my own and away from the Narcissistic asshole, which is mostly how we referred to my ex.  

My best guy friend, Alex, was a lifesaver as well.  At first, the weekends when I did not have my daughter were unimaginably painful.  I grieved the shift from full-time to part-time parent.  It was unnatural for my nine-year-old to be away from me half the time.  I had agreed to a 50-50 shared custody arrangement because my young daughter with the old soul was insistent on fairness and spending equal time with both parents.  I wanted her to feel the least amount of guilt, pain, or regret possible; so in my own guilt, pain, and regret did what I thought was best for her.  

It was killing me!  Alex who had divorced three years earlier and basically “lost” the nearly-grown stepchildren he had raised knew better than most the muck I was wallowing in.  He would have none of it and made a point to spend every other weekend distracting me with one adventure after another.  So gradually, the worst experience of my life faded, I adopted the new normal, and somehow started discovering who I was as a single, independent adult.  Eventually, I was ready to date, which brings me back to the original question:  How do you meet someone?

This was a legitimate question.  I live in a small town, worked at the same school district for twenty years, went to a small church.  I knew almost everyone in my limited circle, and there was no single, divorced, or widowed dashingly handsome and successful man my age in that circle I’d even consider going out with.  I didn’t participate in the bar scene, barely even drank fruity light-weight concoctions, and I hadn’t dated anyone other than the Narcissist in thirty-three years.  

Let’s think about that for just a minute. The last time I went on a first date, I was in my teens and had all the necessary requirements for confidence in dating:  Teen Beat magazine, the high-school smorgasbord of drooling boys, tiny waist accompanied by perky boobs, and limited frontal lobe function!  Thirty years later I had a two-baby body, read legal bulletins and pedagogy publications for fun, and had a fully-functioning, mastered-degreed frontal lobe.  None of which seemed conducive to dating. Further, most of the teenaged boys on the aforementioned smorgasbord had rings on their fingers and were scattered and busy building careers and families. So I turned to what seemed the most logical and effective way I knew of to meet men:  online dating. 

Four years into this jouney as I shared my escapades with my friends, they always replied, “You should write a book!” And every time I struck up a conversation with a woman who was braving the online dating scene as well, she would invariably echo my own epiphany, “I could write a book!” So guess what? I did. It’s called “Fifty & Failing, Fabulously!” (Amazon.com)

Here’s the deal, I know that many of you could write your own book about this topic, but you may not have the inclination or the time. So this blog is to share those funny and poignant stories that become the fabric of our online journey. Let’s play fair – keep it PG, don’t identify anyone by last name (using a fake first name is best), and keep it friendly (as much as possible) and upbeat even if the date was disasterous!