In 1986 I was married, so I missed the article by Newsweek warning me of the great man shortage. Now that I am no longer married and getting older by the minute, I wonder if there is any truth to it. Are my chances of getting married dwindling away? The pool of eligible bachelors is shrinking in my opinion and I am not about to marry a 20-something. I actually cringed when Stella got her groove back since I would be screaming bloody murder if my love interest played video games all day. But that’s just me.

I am actually a subscriber to a couple of dating websites – match.com and eharmony.com. I have to admit that match is really boring and the quality of singles that I’ve met thus far leaves much to be desired. I am willing to bet that all the handsome strangers displayed on their pages are really just decoys. I’ve tried to make contact with a few (ok, so I like a good-looking guy – sue me) and not once did I get a response. The only men that contact me are older than me, balding, chubby and some other physical attributes I’d rather not get into. Am I being shallow? Judgemental? My son says, “Mom, you’re too picky!” So what!? I LIKE being picky. I’ve lived alone for so long now that I am pretty set in my ways and bringing in a completely different personality from my own just wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t last a day in a relationship like that.

So I look for similarities but also issues that matter to me the most. For instance, I am a horrible housewife I’ll be the first to admit it. I hate doing laundry, windows, floors – if it involves cleaning I hate it. Which is not to say that my house is just a nasty mess, it’s just not Cleaver clean. I have dust bunnies and dog hair in various locales across the house and I don’t even care. But I’m a hypocrite. When I know visitors are coming I’ll go into a frenzy and scrub everything. Why is that? I hate when people judge me on inconsequential stuff but then I turn around and feed right into the craziness. I’m digressing again. Crap.

Back to the man shortage. Both websites leave a lot to be desired although I will say that I’ve made contact with a very nice gentleman in Washington state. Nothing but emails back and forth so far; but I like what I read. So my head goes into overdrive, “What if we really hit it off and he asks me to marry him and then I have to move to Washington? It rains too much, that would make me nuts. Why can’t he move here?” and so on and so forth. It’s an entire scenario from start to finish and it never ends well. So I’m a little nervous if I am about to sabotage myself again. I do this every time I meet a man. Finding faults in them that I simply could never live with. Sometimes it’s warranted. Like the handsome police officer who ended up calling me at 3 am in the morning all the time because he worked the night shift and well, am I not supposed to be at his beck and call? This was the same handsome gent who could not believe that I wouldn’t sleep with him in a New York minute. Come to think of it he was from NYC so maybe that’s a normal thing there? I told him he was in the South now and he’d have to try to become like molasses – real slow and easy like. He didn’t like it. His entire conversations revolved around sex, having sex, getting sex from me and so on. It was irritating. Needless to say he is history.

Why are there so many single people signed up for dating websites but only a handful seem to be making connections? You don’t hear that thousands of folks have found their soulmate and marriage through those sites, just a few hundreds. So, if there are 3 million subscribers and 100 successes what does that say for their success ratio? It totally stinks. If I were to hire a roofer (which incidentally I am working on) and he told me that 3 out of 100 customers were completely satisfied with his services, I’d tell him to go take a hike. So why do we shell out mucho bucks for those dating websites? Optimism, dear Watson. Or maybe we are all delusional. Or optimistically delusional with Pollyanna tendencies. I for one, am about to cancel the subscriptions – for the third time. Yup, I’ve done it before and wasted my hard earned money on Chubby Checker and his buds and got absolutely nothing in return. Not even a date.

I’ll keep you posted on how Mr. eharmony works out, but I’m not packing yet.