Expired Warranty

I've been helping my friend navigate the online dating scene by pointing out the less obvious pitfalls. So far I've warned her away from the guy who posted four photos of his cat, one depicting the cat wearing a tutu, one gentleman who somehow landed a very clear shot of his own ear hair while snapping a profile picture in his bathroom mirror and one poor bastard who's a Calgary Flames fan. This may have been my own personal bias, but Flames fans can be douches.

My friend has one rule she follows that I hadn't thought of. She will not pursue any guy who isn't separated or divorced. If he's in his mid to late forties and never married, she figures there must be something wrong with him.

It's true that the vast majority of men in that age bracket posting profiles are indeed separated or divorced, so she has plenty to choose from. Looking over her shoulder as she shows me her prospects feels like a dreadful glimpse into my future.

I didn't marry in the first wave, when available men still had their hair and discernible waistlines. My sister has gone so far as to marvel how men lose their necks after they turn 34. One year there's visible separation between cheek, neck and shoulder, the next year it's nothing but jowl.

I won't get to know what it's like to marry somebody I'm still physically attracted to, because I'll need to wait until the first round of marriages end in divorce and I get the leftovers. The fat, bald, neckless and embittered leftovers.

(There is a slim possibility somebody might marry me sooner in order to secure citizenship or to convince his parents he really isn't gay, neither being really ideal.)

(I've thought about it though, and I'm not sure which option will be better in the long run. On one hand it will be embarrassing to tell people I haven't seen Abdul since he was sworn in to the country, but on the other hand I'd hate to have to compete with my husband for the pool boy's affections, mostly because I'd probably lose. So there's that.)

I've surprised myself recently by skimming articles on step-parenting, thinking that by the time the estimated 50% of current marriages end there will likely be children involved.

At the very least I should be collecting boarding school pamphlets and wondering how to schedule solo vacations to coincide with the weekends the kids are spending with their father.

I don't want children, and anybody who knows me knows it's not a good idea for me to have them. Despite my apparent double X chromosomes, I'm the type who would consider nothing wrong with the idea of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do -- who wants a baby interrupting her precious bath time? Finding a baby in my bath would be horrifying.

The decision to have children is usually already played out in the first marriage though, so I'm unlikely to have much say as the runner-up wife. I thought I was really coming to terms with not only failing to cross the marital finish line at the same time as everybody else I know, and was even beginning to accept that by the time the race started again, the runners I'd be chasing would be a lot slower on their feet, what with the enlarged prostates and type 2 diabetes.

What I hadn't counted on was the possibility I'd be disqualified from that second race, simply because I never finished the first.

Godammit.

My online dating friend is adamant if a man reaches middle-age without one marriage under his belt there's something desperately wrong with him, and the same argument could certainly be made for a woman who reached spinsterhood in 2007 and just kept right on going.

I can't argue with this logic, because it's obviously true. Is there something wrong with me...? Is this your first time reading this blog?? Of course there's something wrong with me.

There is a metric fuck-ton of what is wrong with me, and I can only begin to name half of it. There are teams of doctors in Switzerland trying to come up with names for the other half, and I have no idea why I picture teams of doctors to be in Switzerland, but I do. Obviously, there is something very, very wrong with me.

There's something wrong with everybody else though too, so I don't know what it is about me that's so glaringly obvious. I know some truly despicable women who have landed themselves husbands so amazing movie audiences wouldn't buy it and yet, they're married. She's happy, he's an idiot and I resent them both.

Certainly, geography and circumstances have to play a small part. It just can't be my own dysfunction, so glaring I can't pinpoint it but somehow it shows up on Google Maps.

The city I live in is not exactly kind to single women. I went out to a popular club to check out a benefit concert. Proceeds were going to the Cops for Cancer charity, and while donating to cancer is all well and good, my six readers would likely be able to predict what the other big draw was, and it wasn't the music.

(Trust me, it wasn't the music. The opening band was so terrible I wanted to throw things at them. Heavy things. Heavy, sharp things. I would have given my next mortgage payment to cancer research just to make them stop.)

Silly me, I thought there might be cops there. So did every single woman within a 25 mile radius. At one point early in the evening I did a rough count: approximately120 women.

The men were much easier to arrive at an exact number for, because there were nine of them. Nine. Subtract the three guys who showed up with girlfriends clinging to them like life-preservers and probably feeling like their men were on the verge of being sexually assaulted or torn limb from limb, whatever happened first, and subtract the two guys clearly over 60 and the remaining four who appeared to be twelve...and you suddenly have an estrogen soaked tragedy.

Please, please spare me the line about finding somebody when you're not looking. The next person who says that to me is going to get my shoe down her throat, and I will still be wearing it.

If you're single, you are always looking. That is the point of being single. You can look, you're supposed to look, and you can not help but look. The "You'll Find Somebody When You're Not Looking" crowd really needs to challenge the "You Just Never Know When You'll Meet Somebody So You Probably Shouldn't Wear Those Pants Again" crowd to a dance-off, just so I can have some peace.

Obviously, finding somebody amongst the handful of men in my age group not yet married in my chosen city is about as likely as stumbling upon Jimmy Hoffa in my laundry pile. I'm coming to terms with this.

What I'm having more difficulty with though is losing that second chance - hardly fair to have it go the same time as the first.