It took 630 contacts, 62 coffee dates and 5 relationships before I found my husband
Over60 community member Becky, 62, from the Gold Coast in Queensland, had to kiss a lot of frogs to find her perfect man – literally – through online dating. Here, she gives a funny, inspiring and detailed account of her happily ever after.
“I am living proof of the power of optimism over experience. At 50, I had been married twice – the first was when I was young enough not to know better and the second, which was much later, was when I realised at the age of 34 that if I didn’t have children soon, it would be too late.
That marriage lasted 14 years and gave me two wonderful sons. The marriage fell apart as soon as they were old enough for it not to be a problem for them and now here I was, moving towards the dreaded 60 milestone (kicking and screaming I might add), financially secure (I had always been as lucky in my career choices as I had been unlucky in my personal relationships), but with a deep sense of loneliness and a feeling that I had to make a real effort before it was too late to find out if there was anything in this “true love” business.
It was around 2001 and I was working in the IT industry. This meant that I was not as uncomfortable looking online as I may have been if I had still been in some of the other careers which litter my past.
It was relatively early days for the online dating scene and I was reluctant to let anyone know what I was doing as it was still seen as somehow a bit “tacky”, although why it should be considered quite acceptable to meet some guy in a pub or at a conference rather than in a coffee shop after a series of emails and phone conversations, I can’t understand.
I started out with RSVP because it was the most high profile dating website at the time. I created the profile name of Becky and that name stuck with me even until today as this article shows. I was too afraid to post a public photo of myself but I had one available, which I could reveal with a password to any interested suitor if he seemed okay and I thought he was worth the chance.
At first, I started out with the complete truth with regards to my age. I was 51 at the time but I’ve always been a bit of a “hippy chick” and I’d aged well enough for most people to pick me as being several years younger, nevertheless, I went first of all with my true age.
However, this netted me a bunch of contacts from blokes who I just knew I would have nothing in common with. I guess I was looking for someone with the same ‘Peter Pan’ approach to life as myself. I wanted someone young at heart but not too different in age to myself – I definitely didn’t want a ‘toy boy’. So I knocked a couple of years off (something which my now husband has NEVER let me forget).
I was also not prepared for the sense of rejection I felt when I’d been chatting online to a bloke for a week or so, and he seemed nice. He asked to see my photo and I sent him the password only to have him immediately drop contact with me. That feeling wore off pretty quickly, I also changed the photo!
I don’t remember the first time I arranged to meet someone for coffee – I have no recollection of that person at all as I don’t think it went anywhere. This leads me to an observation I quickly made and which has been amply re-enforced over the years. The one business to make a killing out of the online dating market in my opinion is Coffee Club.
They are everywhere, you can usually park nearby and they are seen as safely anonymous. If my husband and I are ever at a Coffee Club, even today, we entertain ourselves by trying to pick out the people waiting to meet someone they have only, until that moment, ‘met’ online.
Over the following five years, when I dated online, I compiled the following set of results:
Contacts from interested dates (in RSVP these are known as ‘kisses’): 630
Contacts which led to coffee or something similar: 62
Contacts which led to dinner: 28
Contacts which led to second dates (dinner, movies, etc): 10
Relationships: 5
Marriages: 1
Over the years I have met and chatted to quite a few guys who have told me some awful (and sometimes quite funny) stories of their online dating experiences. I remember one chap saying he’d been chatting to a woman online for a couple of weeks and they had arranged to meet at (you guessed it) Coffee Club!
She apparently walked in, scanned the room, saw him and walked over, looked down at him and said, “Oh no, you won’t do at all” turned around and walked out. I liked him because he laughed when he told me even though he said he’d been shattered at the time.
One of my less memorable experiences was meeting a guy who told me he was in real estate, and that his marriage had broken down due to his constantly being at work. He then took a mobile call and spent the next 30 minutes trying to negotiate some real estate contract. I don’t know why I hung about but after 10 minutes I took out my book and started reading.
He didn’t really apologise when he finished but he told me that he was looking for a ‘girlfriend’ who could occupy his two children, who he had on alternate weekends while he went to work. I gathered he was after a babysitter with ‘benefits’. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested. The whole ‘date’ (and I struggle to call it that) felt like a job interview!
One of the other strange experiences I had was from a woman who wanted to meet because ‘I sounded like fun’ and she wanted to compare dating experiences. We did catch up a few times for a meal and a laugh but we fell afoul of each other when I started dating a bloke who (as she said) ‘she wasn’t finished with yet’.
I had an odd and rather unsettling experience with a man who claimed to be 54 (my age at the time) but who I doubt could have been any older than 34. I never really got a straight answer from him about anything and after a while it got too wearing and I dropped contact with him.
I had heard from other women who mentioned there were blokes out there who just like older women. Trouble was I didn’t feel like an ‘older woman’ and it was not a role I wanted to play – even for fun. Like I said, it was unsettling.
I ended up in a three-year on-again/off-again relationship with a man who suited my lifestyle. He was younger (by about five years) but had been retired on a disability pension due to depression.
He spent his time travelling around and camping in all sorts of places. I had never really gotten in to camping but I grew to enjoy these trips. We also did a lot of bush walking and photography. We remained friends for a number of years and he in fact came to my wedding with his new partner.
Perhaps the worst experience I had was with a man who told me his previous partner, some two years before, had committed suicide because she found she was suffering from some debilitating disease, which would eventually leave her wheelchair bound and in pain. He then said ‘but I never want to talk about it’.
I honoured this wish and never discussed it with him, but it turned out that he was far from over the experience and after a couple of months told me that he’d been ‘seeing her’ in his room when he woke at night alone. He broke up with me in a particularly brutal fashion which led me to suffer a great deal as I’d grown very fond of him.
It was after this that I knew I had to do something about myself as regards to the poor relationship choices I seemed to keep making. I started visiting a psychologist and he was pivotal in the next stage of my life. He said to me, ‘Becky, what is it that you really want in a relationship?’
I started babbling about finding ‘the love of my life’, someone to ‘take away my loneliness’ and on and on it went. He shook his head and said, ‘how can you find what it is you are looking for when you don’t even have a clear idea what it is?’
He sent me away to compile a list of all that I wanted in a man and told me to spend at least 10 minutes each night thinking about those attributes and who that person would be. A month after that, William walked into my life.
I say ‘walked’ but that wasn’t strictly true. He drove his new car to my house, parked outside the house next door and promptly backed up over the gutter scratching his brand new wheels. I was standing on my verandah, hidden by my garden, watching him, and I remember thinking, ‘minus five points for not being able to drive’.
Nevertheless, I watched him as he walked (oblivious to my gaze) down the footpath to my house. He was wearing green ‘slacks’ (he said they were jeans but in my opinion anything by Farrah is a slack, not a jean) and a pink shirt. I thought ‘oh no, he’s gay!’
But, when he walked up the stairs and we saw one another for the first time, I had this strange urge. As he leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek, I turned my head and kissed him full on the lips. I could see by the startled look in his eyes that this was not what he’d expected but he later told me that he found it very enticing and that it immediately piqued his interest. Fortunately, my concerns about his sexuality were unfounded.
Looking back, I’m surprised I invited him to my home without first meeting him. This is certainly not something I would recommend to anyone meeting someone for the first time. However, we had been emailing for a couple of weeks and had spoken on the phone at length for a few nights and I had felt a real connection with him. He was also in IT and knew the scripts to all the Monty Python sketches (I’m a big fan), so how could he be a threat? He also met two of the many ‘must haves’ on my wish list – he was six feet tall and a Virgo.
We dated a few times but each of us was wary after previous dating debacles, so it wasn’t until after my birthday at Christmas that we really started getting serious about each other. We both agreed to stop dating other people and he introduced me to his mother who was up for the holiday from Sydney.
I had the strangest feeling when I was with him of my blood fizzing in my veins. He was my Peter Pan. Full of fun, silly jokes, highly intelligent, well informed (he is an avid reader of the Economist) and very fit (ran marathons and rock climbed regularly). I couldn’t understand why he was still single! He is four years older than me and had also been married twice, but they had both ended badly. My sons approved of him and even my ex-husband who I kept in touch with regularly seemed to find him acceptable.
In April, of the following year, he proposed and despite having told my friends that if I ever looked like getting married again they were to take me outside and give me a good kicking, I said, ‘of course’.
We married in May 2007, having first made contact with each other online in November 2006. I can honestly say that true love is everything that the songs and the books say it is. I am sublimely happy and my only regret is that we didn’t meet 30 years ago, although as he says, ‘darling, I would probably have stuffed it up’.
We built a house together and now live on the Gold Coast. I’ve retired but he continues to works part time. In our spare time, we read, garden, bush walk, talk, talk, talk and laugh a hell of a lot. I think it’s a sign of a great relationship if you can put up 250 metres of fencing together without having a single argument, but having lots of giggles along the way!
To anyone out there at the age I am now (I’m 63 this year and he’s 67), who is alone and doesn’t want to be, I’d say, ‘Don’t be fearful! Go online and give it a go.’ You have complete control over the dating process. You don’t have to chat to anyone you don’t like the look or sound of, you can pick the location for the first date and you can remain as anonymous as you want to – you don’t even need to give your real name.
Unfortunately, sometimes you have to ‘kiss a lot of frogs’ before you find the one, but hang in there. There are a lot of people out there who are not what you want, but you only need to find one who is and your whole life can change into something wonderful. Mine did.”
If you have a love story to share please get in touch at melody@oversixty.com.au