CSotD: Please don’t ask, don’t tell, about Barbara
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Seems odd to be returning to the topic of second-time-around romance within the same week, but today's Close to Home brought forth such a hearty "Yes!" from me that I couldn't rule it out on the basis of having recently discussed that sort of thing.
Besides, romantic disasters never go out of fashion.
That previous post was about post-divorce dating with kids, but, in the comments that followed, there was some talk about the broader elements in which I mentioned that I got to the point where I didn't want to date anyone who wasn't at least a year out.
One woman I dated early in my second singlehood fairly swept me off my feet by referring to "Parents Without Partners" as "Parents Without Prospects," and asking why on earth you would want to go to a gathering of people who want to stand around and talk about how badly they got screwed.
She was more than a year out.
And, yes, that unintentional-but-let's-exploit-it pun about getting screwed does call forth Steve Martin's "Wild and Crazy Guy" riff about how, in his country, to divorce someone, you throw a bit of poop at their feet and say "I divorce you!" three times, and that, for fun, they go to bars looking for girls with poop on their shoes.
Or George Carlin's comment on tattooes, that it's nice to meet someone and know right away that they don't object to doing something they'll regret in the morning.
But nobody really wants to get badly screwed, and even the who-cares amoral hipsters of the moment have made "Walk of Shame" a popular expression. If you haven't outgrown that "any kind of love is better than no love at all" thing by your early 20s, you're one of the people nobody in their 30s should ever have to go out with.
But, returning to John McPherson's cartoon, yeah, you need the Ex-Counter(tm), and it needs to be preset so that, if it hits a certain total, a bell rings, the date's over and you both just get up and walk away. And, no, it doesn't matter who had the higher score.
Okay, yes, it does. In fact, Match.com should make you post your previous high score on your profile so that people know what they're getting into.
Granted, we all need to do a little talk-therapy as part of the rebuilding process, and it's also hard to reminisce about your life as if a dozen years of it hadn't happened. Never mentioning your ex is a sign of dysfunction as unmistakable as not being able to talk about anything else.
But come on.
My first prolonged post-divorce romance had been going on over a year the night we were having dinner with a couple she knew. About halfway through the meal, the wife started looking around and then turned to me and said, "Do you feel like there's a fifth person at the table?"
To be honest, by that point I was so used to the constant comparisons that I kind of thought my role in the relationship was to not be Steve. Apparently, Steve was a very good thing to not be and I was very good at not being him.
But, for that matter, nobody should have been dating me at that stage, either. It was a *click* moment, but she had been doing such a magnificent job of not being my ex that I extended her contract another three months anyway.
It's the only relationship of any substance in my life that I regret. If only we had had the Ex-Counter(tm), we could have avoided wasting so much time.
Or a clue.
Yes. If we'd had a clue, that might have worked, too.
I had already decided to add this video, in which Bobby Vee racks up a distressingly high score on the Ex-Counter(tm), but didn't expect to find such an apt version. Not to be missed!
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