PonderEthereal

Online dating kinda has a reputation for being a little bit scary. You get to hear what they SAY they are like and maybe see a picture or two - and then you are face to face with them at possibly one of the most wonderful - or horrific meetings you’ve ever had. But, if you use face reading, there is a whole lot you can tell about a person before you ever decide to meet them.

I took a class by Barbara Roberts on face reading a couple of years ago and what I learned from that one class has been invaluable in online dating. That said, one picture is only one moment in time. Some of the more changable features might only be indicitive of that moment. I want to see more than one picture of a person and I really only read for the things that are most important…

Don’t just go on a date with everybody who crosses your radar. How miserable would you be on said date if he were a total loser? Here are 10 ways to pick the losers out before you wind up on a date with them. And I suppose these could be used for girls too, to a certain extent… but girls have a different set of warning signs, really.

While emailing/talking, listen for these warning signs :

1. He is over the age of 25, doesn’t have a job, lives with his parents or doesn’t have a car. Or he has a job but he hates it, doesn’t make much and doesn’t know ‘what he wants to do with his life’. While we all have periods of time like that, but if you’re looking for quality, by 25, he should have a pretty good idea of where he’s headed and should DEFINITELY…

As a girl who uses dating sites, I find it extraordinarily difficult to weed through all the crap. However, there are some really easy ways to weed out the obvious ones. If you have any interest whatsoever in landing a female with a brain, here are 10 things you should not do.

1. Choose a user name with the words ’smooth’, ‘jerk’, ‘psycho’.
2. Add no information to your profile or put some trite message there like “I cant sum myself up in a paragraph” or “just email if you want to know”.
3. If you are 30, still live with your parents, don’t have a job or a car - just give up.
4. Email her in txt speak, with lowercase I’s or with no punctuation or proper capitalization.
5. Use a picture of yourself that you took on your webcam in your bedroom with your dirty laundry in the background
6. Post a picture with your ex obviously…

excerpted from a larger piece

“Why?”

That’s it. Just why. And even as the question comes out, the answer echos around my head close behind. It’s loud. So loud that I should have heard it. The answer is that there is no answer good enough. There is nothing he could tell me that would even come close to explaining the pain that he caused me, the damage he inflicted. This is the horror of abuse. Senseless, deep scars. There is no answer good enough. There is nothing he could say.

Even in that moment. Even that moment frozen in time, with no pretenses, only the reality. He, in the dark, staring into a mirror, looking back at himself, in slow motion, looking over at me. Me, in pain, bearing damage he inflicted staring back at him. Even in that moment, without walls, there is nothing he could have said. No truth from the…

No… clearly the place to start would be when I found out about Mistress. It’s at this point that I realize that I have really tried not to think about all of this. I mean yeah, I knew that. But no… I have REALLY tried not to think about it - to the extent that I have to pull my notes out… my calendar, my blog entries, my emails, my recordings.

Oh, yes. I have really neurotically recorded my life that way. I think it was partially a desire to just talk about things with others, where blogging was concerned… but ultimately, it was an adaptation to living with someone who painted a different reality than the story of actual events. Any time his character could have been cast in doubt, in retrospect, he simply rewrote the story. So he would get caught in a lie, fuck someone else, say…

…. exerted from a larger piece…

I should digress into secrecy, shame and humiliation because as all this was going on, I didn’t tell anyone. I barely told anyone we were physically separated until long after it happened. In fact, for 6 years. Although every now and then, it would spill out in moments of extreme hurt, anger or frustration, I was either afraid or too ashamed to tell anyone. As I write this, this is the very first time I’ve considered spilling out the entire story and it feels very much like a confession.

I knew, as everything was going on, over the years, that his cheating and other abuses were not ok or normal but I still wouldn’t or couldn’t see clear enough to label them for what they were - abuses. Even though, on some level, I knew. I also knew later that his “crazy making”, as a…

Crossposted to Trusera

It was bound to happen at some point. That time when ‘looking autistic’ is unavoidable. He was playing. He picked up the cat’s squirt bottle and sprayed me from across the room. Just one squirt and BAM… I was melting down. I curled up in a ball on the couch, rocking and wincing. I was trying, trying not to cry. I could FEEL it happening. I knew that every muscle of my body was tensing, cringing, wanting to fold in upon it’s self. In retrospect, it’s like some sort of horrible slow motion.

It was just a squirt of water. Wet sensations make me queasy. Sudden, unexpected things are jarring. Things flying at me, even if only water, are sudden and unexpected. Especially when it’s water.

I melted down. For me, melting down is tears, rocking and crumpling up in a little ball. I can imagine that is quite…

I am looking through old posts for a particular subject entirely unrelated to my relationship with Ryan and I keep running across these posts where I’m crying about something he did or said.

It’s easy, in retrospect, to look back and say ‘if he was so abusive, why did I stay’. It was NOT easy, in the moment to separate my feelings of love for him from the way I should react to how he was behaving towards me. That is the nature of an abusive relationship. If the abused always ran away, ‘it would be no fun’, as Ryan told me. In plain english. In black and white. And I STILL didn’t listen.

There is nothing unpredictable about Ryan. How he acted 2, 4, 6 years ago is the same way he was acting the day we split (excepting a particular domestic violence incident). The sad, angry, frustrated entries from 2…

I have discovered over the last few weeks that I am horribly predictable in my physical ‘type’ when it comes to guys. Like… SO horribly predictable that I think every guy I’ve ever been attracted to could potentially be related.

There are a few exceptions.. but even when I think about those exceptions, I can think of a point of time when the thing that doesn’t match did match. It’s like an accrual method of features. So without further ado, If you have the following, I would like to have your children. (hah.. j/k) Light eyes, brown hair, shaved head, facial hair of some sort - usually scruffy, somewhere between 5′9″ and 6′5″, not overweight but no hard bodies here, tattoos and piercings a plus.

Rawr.

Sometimes, I find myself wanting to ask someone “Oh, you think you made a bad choice in partners, huh? What ever gave it away? The fact that they can’t hold down a job or the fact that they are addicted to every substance known to man?” And although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend running a background check, there is something to be said for doing some ground work and really figuring out who this person is before you agree to anything beyond a few trysts. Here are a few things that should be HUGE warning flags in a budding romance.

• Messed up credit report - every body messes up. But by messed up credit, I mean, has a few major dings or a regular occurance of minor dings - so much so that they can’t get a car on their own (if income weren’t an issue). And I guess it kinda depends upon…