Too much letter writing and no date with Лора.

[garote]

Лора and I never met in person, so it's weird to include her in my dating stories, but we did have quite an extended email exchange. It started after she sent me an opening message on the dating site, asking a couple surprisingly personal questions about my romantic history. Her profile showed a woman with short dark hair and freckles, pleasingly round, with a distant look in her eyes, as though she was pondering her new life situation. She was recently divorced, and was still on good terms with her very geeky, socially isolated husband, and still trying to encourage him out of his shell. Aside from that detail, the bulk of the profile was a list of favorite books and authors, and we spent a lot of time discussing them.

Over email she told me the more complete story with her ex-husband. They'd been together for fifteen years. For their entire marriage he'd desperately wanted children with her, and she'd repeatedly turned him down, saying she wasn't ready. She had a list of conditions in her head, which he did not meet, and which she never had the courage to explain to him. Eventually he sank into a kind of pervasive despair, and they stopped enjoying each other's company. They suffered together this way for years, mimicking happiness for the benefit of their friends and relatives, who were all flabbergasted when they separated and she moved into her own apartment. They still hadn't gone through the divorce paperwork, even though she knew without question that they would never get back together. Meanwhile, he paid for her apartment. She was still leaning on him heavily for financial support in general.

This story was delivered in a series of mini-essays, half-coherent as though she was working it out as she wrote, and combined together into a long message that she prefaced with a statement of intention: She was sending me all this in order to "get serious about our communication" so I could decide whether to ask her on a date. She concluded the story with what she was looking for: Her next big relationship, with some "harmless commitment-free fun along the way" if that didn't manifest itself immediately.

Her tone was very matter-of-fact. It broadcast confidence, as though her mysterious list of conditions, her lingering entanglement with her ex-husband, and their current financial arrangement were all qualifications, showing a stage well-set for dating. Following up this novel, she sent me a few more intimate questions about my past, declaring that it was time I reveal more about myself so we could "really connect." I couldn't figure out what her deal was, and why she thought it was okay to make demands.

I decided to answer her questions and then gave her a very blunt reading of what she'd said: She was using her ex for money, being weirdly co-dependent with him, and being vague and possibly dishonest about her intentions. Why would any of that sell me on romance with her? She needed to figure out who she was independent of him, and build her own complete life, before pouncing on people with demands. She responded with more mini-essays, one explaining how she deserved some financial support from him after providing so much emotional support - because men are terrible at emotions and women are always saddled with the "labor" of managing them - and another about the value of being as thorough as possible in dating correspondence because meeting a strange man face-to-face is so risky it should be done as few times as possible.

"I have learned quickly," she wrote. "What men want from the dating world is to use women to deposit their fluids and then throw them away, just like toilet paper. If you reject them in person they can get unpleasant or even violent. I wish to avoid that situation. So I ask that men demonstrate they are different up front. I feel like I have no choice. Believe me, if you were a single woman you'd understand."

I was a bit fascinated with her. It was like I'd wandered into an auto shop and discovered a mechanic very skillfully and professionally installing a jet engine onto a log splitter. It was a disaster in the making, but I had to know why they thought it would work.

I pushed back in a message of my own: Your ex sorely wants kids, but men just want sex? Meanwhile you want to start a big romance, but you're still married -- but first you want to have a bunch of "harmless fun," but men are horrible because they want harmless fun? You believe in honesty, as early as possible, but you have no remorse over stringing your ex along for years when you knew you'd never agree to kids?

She responded in parts, and her tone became less confident as she went on. She admitted that she probably had a lot of evolving to do, as she adjusted to being single. She said she didn't like the idea -- hated it, actually. She said that the key to finding her next big romance was to do it while she was still the sort of person who was suited to commitment, and the longer a person remained single, the more they evolved to be suited to that, and to be content with being single instead of committed, and that was bad. Her friends had all told her she would need to plow through a lot of bad matches before finding a good one, so she wanted to design a procedure that would guarantee she was single for as short a time as possible. That struck me as funny because it was something a person with an engineering-oriented mind would try, and it was supposedly her ex-husband who was the engineer...

Moving fast meant weeding out all the terrible men with the absolute minimum energy spent on each of them. Asking them a lot of intense personal questions and giving them a prepared essay on where she was at in her life and what she wanted seemed the most expedient. Men who weren't willing to put in the effort to read a thing, and couldn't write about their past or feelings clearly, would just fail to respond, and she could peruse the ones who passed her filter from a keyboard, safe at home.

I asked: "Then why did you send me an unsolicited message? It doesn't follow your procedure."

She said that she'd altered her procedure, because every man who messaged her first, there was one of two outcomes: Either she looked at their profiles and was revolted, or she sent them deep questions and got silence in response. So she was doing her own searching, and sending her own opening messages, and even though it felt a bit degrading, it was working better. Men seemed to like the attention, though most of the conversations still lapsed into silence before a meeting. And she was being as picky as she could be, preferring long profiles and reading every word of them, before deciding to make contact.

I was weary of our conversation, so I tried to wrap things up by telling her that I didn't think "evolving to be single" was something to avoid, and that if she slowed down and added more intermediate kinds of communication - like phone calls, or video - she might have a better time. I assumed that she would take the hint that I wasn't really keen on dating her, after learning so much about the mess in her head and responding so stridently. Disagreement and arguing in an opening exchange of messages are really obvious red flags and I figured she'd seen them waving just as clearly as I had. To my exasperation, she asked me out on a date.

I ignored the message. Sometimes silence is the only explanation you get.

I knew I was contributing to her disappointment, but the idea of meeting her in person just to have more of that conversation felt exhausting. And even though she had tried to explain it away multiple times, and even if I wasn't ready for my own big romance to start, I just couldn't embrace the idea of going on a date with someone who was still married.