Click here and enjoy listening to the love story of Trudy and Joe Hunter!

This is but one of the many recorded by an awesome organization, StoryCorps. FlirtySomething visualizes an initiative with StoryCorps where members can record stories of courtship and romance and upload them to their profiles using mobile StoryCorps studios.

The Queen Bee is buzzing about StoryCorps and hope they will response in the affirmative. For now, enjoy this story and visit StoryCorp site for more!

Bookmark It

Situation: You meet a guy or gal online, offline, in line…wherever. You make and keep a date with that person. In its aftermath, you wonder how they felt about the date, and you’d like to let them know what you’re thinking too. For better or worse, it’s only human to reflect and to want to communicate.

Something feels too overt, too forward, too aggressive about either phoning or emailing this person. But you want to tell them that their profile picture doesn’t do them justice, or that you’re not used to a guy opening the car door, or to generally communicate that you’d like to go out again, or not….

As a service for singles in search of a soul mate, FlirtySomething is all about making the journey as fun, frustration-free, and functional as possible.

• So we devised the Apres Date Review system — to provide a dynamic new communication channel for FlirtySomething members.
•  Sign up or sign in to FlirtySomething today and post an Apres Date Review about the last date you went on. Don’t worry, the review will not be published with your profile unless both you and your date approve!
• Please send us any feedback, comments, critiques of your experience using the FlirtySomething Apres Date Review system.

Bookmark It

How crass have homo sapiens become? I ran across this article about a recent speed dating event featuring men with big wallets and women with big attributes of the gold digger kind. Decide for yourself.

I’ve never attended a speed dating event but suppose it could be kind of like a moveable feast. You get to test the chemistry with not one but a whole roomful of strangers, all in one fell swoop. One shower and shave, one carefully assembled ensemble, one trip across town. Not for just one first meeting with a potential soul mate. No, to meet a roomful of candidates. Exponentially increasing the odds that you’ll blend well with someone. Right?

Not necessarily. Success at speed dating it seems would also depend on how promiscuous you are, meaning easy to blend with. Setting aside all Puritanical or otherwise derived connotations commonly associated with the word, promiscuous originated in chemistry, and meant two substances that blend easily.

Speed dating — I picture squirrels in ties and heels racing from table to table trading inanities, chomping on nuts, appraising each other. Like Bartleby, I think to myself, “I’d prefer not to.”

How about slow-dating, on the other hand? That’s where you get lost in conversation, and time recedes into the background. Some moments are captured in your memory for playback. You’re so inside other moments, you can’t even remember a lot of the date, just that it was a very pleasant respite from an often hectic life. That’s when I enjoy a date!

A slow date is a slice of life…Salsa dancing on the sidewalk…Watching a swimmer emerge from the night sea…Holding hands as you cross the street…

Bookmark It

Let’s face it. Sometimes you don’t know whether there’s chemistry on the first date, or maybe little red flags went up when he referred to a certain demographic as “those people”, or when he called his mother a narcissist. But she’s cute or he made you laugh. So you’re not sure about whether to book a second date. Three tips about second dates:

1. Use FlirtySomething’s Apres Date system. Write an Apres Date Review about the first date. It’s a nuanced way to communicate with someone you’re not sure about. The system is easy to use and walks you through the process step by step. Once your review is completed, the system will guide you in sending an invitation to your date to read what you’ve written about him or her. Your review will summarize what you did on your date, how you think the date went, whether or not you’d like to book a second date and why (or you can select not to answer that question). And if you met your date on FlirtySomething, the system will ask you to rate the accuracy of his or her FlirtySomething profile. In order to read your review, your date will first have to post one too. The pair of date reviews are confidential between you and your date unless you both choose to publish them in your FlirtySomething profiles.

2. Let’s say you both post Apres Date Reviews. One of you has indicated a strong interest in booking a second date. This makes the situation somewhat promising. At the very worst, the second date will clarify whether to go forward most likely right from the git-go, I’ve found. If it’s no, you can make it a quickie. Don’t ever book a concert or play for an iffy second date. Keep it loose, and allow yourself a polite early exit strategy. Either way, go forward or jump ship; the second date will make it very clear.

3. If you’re lonely and bored, book a second date. What have you got to lose? In fact, if it’s really really bad, at the very least, it will help you to experience your loneliness and boredom in a whole new way!

Bookmark It

There is so much content online, and now alltop.com arrives to sort it out and make it more readily available to people like you and me. Narrowing my search on alltop to just relationships, dating, online dating, or sex still produces an abundance of recent posts and articles from various sources, reliable, and not so much. …Articles authored by writers serious and talented, and not so much. Of value to the reader in that they exist to edify, entertain, and nourish the mind, or not so much. Articles posted maybe for nefarious purposes such as driving traffic, revenues, or other forces which cause the writer to whore him or herself to the market.

Not that I haven’t done that, or am doing that too. We all must eat. Even FlirtySomething’s Queen Bee. Yes, I am selling my new dating site, FlirtySomething.com. Yes, I wish it to become profitable as a business and to return my investment of time, energy, and $. But more fundamentally, we exist to put a buzz in your ear, to excite and amuse, and to get to the heart of matters of the heart — with special focus on online dating and singles ISO.

With that lengthy disclaimer/introduction/drumroll, I’m here to discuss the Golden Rule, the only rule, and the only real counsel to keep on your journey through every online dating conundrum.

It’s so simple — there are no rules to successful relationships or happy dating that differ from rules for success and happiness in general. So, to simplify your dating life, just remember the one rule that really matters — simply treat people — even those with whom you can play out your deepest Freudian issues and fantasies — as you wish to be treated.

It’s not called the Golden Rule because is worthless, especially now, when weeding out the wheat from the chaff is potentially so much more complicated. More people, more technology, more halls of mirrors.

How exactly the Golden Rule plays out on the dating landscape, I leave to you to discuss via your own comments and stories.

Bookmark It

I received the following story from a FlirtySomething member. It’s a cautionary tale, and one most online daters can relate to.

“Randy was handsome, English, and his favorite movie was Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. ‘Looks aren’t important to me,’ his profile said. ‘I’m looking for personality.’ I emailed him, and he responded within the hour.

We moved quickly from email to phone calls to first date. He was as attractive in person as in his photo – a full head of wavy red hair, rugged face with twinkling blue eyes. After a game of pool, he kissed me unexpectedly across the table. Nice. And that English accent. Doesn’t anything said with an English accent sound classy?

Still, with all his attractive traits, something didn’t seem right. I determined to meet him again, but to hold back on getting too interested.

We went on dates weekly for the next month. He was charming, interesting – full of stories. He had traveled. He took classes, even one in watercolor. The perfect man?

There was one very strange thing about Randy. On each of our dates, when it was time to order drinks, I’d order something non-alcoholic. And every time, yes, every time, he’d ask me why I didn’t drink. He’d probe for reasons. It usually took fifteen minutes to convince him I really didn’t like alcohol, as though he hadn’t heard exactly the same explanation the week before. It was odd.

Finally, my intuition told me that despite all his obvious attributes, there was no connection. I met him at a local bar, and gave him the ‘this isn’t working’ speech. It went well. We agreed to end as friends.

‘Now that we’re friends,’ I said, ‘I can ask you something that’s been driving me crazy. Why is it that every time we go out, you ask me why I don’t drink? Don’t you remember from the last time?’

He paused and looked thoughtful. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘first, forgive me for my forgetfulness regarding your beverage preferences, but now that we’re friends, I suppose I can tell you. I’ve been very busy these last few weeks. About the same time you contacted me on the dating site, two other women contacted me. I’ve been seeing all of you each week, waiting to see who I wanted to be with. I’ve slept with both of them, and I was just waiting to sleep with you before I decided who the winner was. And, I guess, alcohol consumption is usually a good prelude for that.’

I beamed. He looked at me in confusion.

‘What?’ he asked.

I could not relax the smile that I could feel stretching from ear to ear. ‘You make me so happy! So very happy!”

‘But why?’ I’d just broken up with him: how could I be happy?

I placed my hands on Randy’s shoulders and looked him square in the face. He had just revealed to me that I had escaped being one of the women in an unannounced sex contest. He was handsome and charming, and there was no chance I was going to sleep with him only to find out that he was sleeping with two other women while he waited to find out who was ‘best.’ Life was good.

‘Because I’m not dating you,’ I told him. ‘Because I’m not dating you!”’

______

Actually, it’s kind of a pedestrian story in the online dating universe. Most of us online daters, especially, have been part of such a competition, wittingly and unwittingly. And it begs the following questions:

1. Do you think comparison shopping-for-the-best girlfriend/boyfriend is inherent in online dating?

2. When do you take your dating profile out of play? Should two people have a “taking our profiles out of play” conversation? Why, and when?

3. Have you ever broken it off with someone early on because they were always on Match.com or POF, even as you two were seeing each other?

4. Have you yourself been an online dating-aholic?

Please post all your favorite dating stories, hellish to hilarious to heavenly…on FlirtySomething.com  of FlirtySomething’s Facebook page today!

Bookmark It

This article is a must read for FlirtySomething members interested in an authoritative, accurate, and in-depth analysis of online dating. A summary of its findings legitimizes our assumptions about online dating, from the user perspective, and, specifically, the quasi-scientific compatibility tests that function as matchmakers on some of the major dating sites.

The findings concur with what we drew from experience and research when we first dreamt-up FlirtySomething a couple of years ago. They guide us going forward as we seek to develop FlirtySomething into the Trader Joe’s of online dating, a place that people visit for the experience, ambiance and possibilities for phatic communcation as much as for the “goodies” you may take away with you when you leave.

Bookmark It

A_. cut my hair the other day at
Carefree Haircutting on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore. You can hardly tell. That’s why I go to her. And I like her personality. I’m not a salon girl. But I like A_. She knows her way around my head, and she has me in and out in 15 minutes.

She’s a curly-haired redhead in her mid-twenties from a family of farmers and truck drivers in Buffalo, New York. She just got her first solo apartment in Long Beach, and she’s really enjoying the privacy and autonomy that affords her. She said she’s not going out so compulsively. In fact, she loves to stay home now and cook dinner and luxuriate in her singlehood. Her favorite meal is Sloppy Joes. Kind of a throwback…

She met a really nice guy recently, a Spaniard. They’ve gone out a couple of times, but she’s taking it slow. For the first time, she’s able to communicate her feelings with a guy, she told me. Apparently, this guy from Spain has tapped into something in her that eluded the farmers and truck drivers she grew up with. He showed up at the salon while A_ was cutting my hair. Surprised her with a large Jamba Juice. Maybe he’ll teach her a thing or two about nutrition! Looking forward to next haircut and a progress report on this budding relationship.

Bookmark It

Here’s the FlirtySomething 12-step program, loosely adapted from the original AA 12-Steps. As the dating site that emulates real world falling-in-love, FlirtySomething is all about you, your experience as a single adult searching for a holistic relationship, a soulmate possibly, at the very least positive online dating experiences:

1. Admit that you need the help of a great dating site to enliven your dating life.
2. Believe that FlirtySomething can restore your faith in love and romance.
3. Decide to turn your will and dating life at least partially over to the care of FlirtySomething.
4. Post a searching and fearless profile of your true self on FlirtySomething.
5. Admit to yourself and others who you truly are, your weaknesses and strengths, especially when it comes to relationships.
6. Be open and willing to change.
7. Be prepared to stand on your good reputation in the FlirtySomething community.
8. Practice common civility in all matters of the heart.
9. Be honest and forthright with other FlirtySomething members, whether you want to date them or not, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Realize that being single is about the journey, and for some it may never end. So enjoy the FlirtySomething experience no matter what the outcome.
11. Use FlirtySomething to grow your awareness of self and others.
12. Spread the word about FlirtySomething to single friends and acquaintances.

Bookmark It

Having just dismissed as reductive articles that abuse division and classification in order to dummy down complex subject matter, I’m going to do that very thing in today’s post!

It’s clear to me that people date for different purposes at different times of life. And I think it would behoove all of us to be more aware of just why we are dating, and to know that our purpose is often a shared one with contemporaries. That’s why, at least for the most part, it makes good sense to date people who are in the same phase of life as you are.

[Of course men and women often prefer to date outside their life-phase. Call them what you will — normal, dirty old men, cougars, oedipal — we’ll leave that discussion for another post.]

These dating-life phases are approximations. Some people mature really young. Some maybe never. But in general, here’s the why people of a certain age are dating:

1.  Teens- early 20’s date to play. To act largely on hormonal impulses and in-so-doing, to learn the rules of the road. To discover sexuality and the agreements that sometimes accompany it called “relationships.”

2.  Mid-20’s through 30’s date to mate. If you’re interested in, hell-bent on, or chosen to procreate, it will most likely occur during this time frame. So, it makes sense that dating is very bound up with mating. The gal or guy you date is potentially part of your off-spring’s gene pool. This is very serious business.

3. 40’s through 60’s date to relate. At this point, you likely have already procreated and divorced (arrghhh…shouldn’t have married that high school sweetheart, after all!) Even if you haven’t, you are not likely to be looking to start at family much past 40. You still want a relationship, or a series of relationships, or a bunch of contiguous relationships. This is the practice you started back in your teens, and you’re still in the process of perfecting it. Or attempting to.

4. 70’s+ date to play again. Or so I believe. Haven’t hit that mark quite yet. But I have observed that as people age, they often revert back to childhood or to more youthful pursuits. Time is wicked and spares no woman or man. But the saving grace, hopefully, is that we all get to play in the end. No more imperative to procreate. No lingering fascination with a perfect relationship. Just dating for the sheer pleasure of the other’s company.

Bookmark It