Couples who meet on-line: more likely to stay together, or to divorce?

Internet-dating is considered to have entered the mainstream only six or seven years ago – which means that some of the very first couples to meet on-line and marry are reaching that “seven-year itch” period and getting divorced. I just read an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Ellen Gamerman called “Mismatched.com” (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114384627003413965-2XVceV35D4JuD4oJ0dlBSeFBDM0_20070401.html) about these first cyper-couple divorces. The divorce lawyers and former couples quoted in the article say that some people who meet on-line tend to rush into the relationship, because they think they already know each other through their profiles. Or they feel fooled by someone saying one thing in a profile and proving to be different in person. But if someone lied in such a major way in their profile that it would lead to divorce – claiming they value a healthy lifestyle when they’re really a drug addict, for example -- wouldn’t you notice before you married them??

A couple of the major dating sites have started services to help keep people who meet on-line together once they form a relationship and marry. As the article says, “EHarmony.com is opening a new ‘relationship lab’ this summer where some couples who met through the site will be monitored for at least five years to see how the marriages fare. In an initiative dubbed ‘Project Moses’ internally, JDate.com, a Jewish singles site, is contracting a dating coach to train customer-service representatives in relationship counseling for couples who call in…At EHarmony.com, newlyweds can now pay $240 for a 12-session marriage program created by a team of in-house psychologists.”

One surprising statistic mentioned in the article is that “an estimated two million married Internet users in America met their spouses online -- that is about half the total number of people who married last year.” That’s a ton more than I would’ve guessed.

I predict studies will show that it doesn’t matter how you met. People who meet in a bar, at the gym, or even through friends can misrepresent themselves, rush into a relationship, and end up divorced. Actually, when I’ve met a guy through a friend, or at church, or at a club, I was more likely to say, “But I met him through my friend/at my church/at my favorite club! It’s meant to be!” and then keep trying to date someone who was not a good match for me. But with on-line dating, I’m much more likely to cut my losses and not “waste” my time on a doomed relationship (to put it pessimistically).

According to attorney Kevin Hickey (http://www.kevinhickeylaw.com/blog/?p=71), the top reasons for getting divorced don’t have much, if anything, to do with how you met. They are:

“Poor communication; financial problems; a lack of commitment to the marriage; a dramatic change in priorities; and infidelity.
There are other causes we see a lot, but not quite as often as those listed above. They are: failed expectations or unmet needs; addictions and substance abuse; physical, sexual or emotional abuse; or lack of conflict resolution skills.”

And here’s one last excerpt from Gamerman’s “Mismatched.com” article:

“Marriage counselors and divorce attorneys say they are often struck by how much of what brings people together online ultimately contributes to the undoing of the relationship. One of the hallmarks of online dating, for example, is the quick intimacy driven by heartfelt profiles that can go on for pages and reveal everything from a person's favorite food to a weakness for tattoos. Focusing on these attributes, some psychologists say, makes potential suitors more likely to overlook someone's downsides. A 2004 Match study said 11% of its married couples were ‘in love prior to ever meeting face-to-face.’”

Now that’s just ridiculous. How can you be in love with someone if you’ve never met them face to face!? I’ve had high hopes about meeting someone in person that I seemed to click with on-line, but I would never describe myself as “in love” with anyone I’ve never met.

Except Michael J. Fox, of course.

Single in the Suburbs; Speed-Dating Regulars

My newest on-line addiction is “Single in the Suburbs” by Sara Susannah Katz (http://www.match.com/msn/article.aspx?articleid=6313&menuid=1&lid=429). It’s a very funny and entertaining blog about starting to date again when you’re in your 40s, divorced with kids and a (too large for comfort) mortgage, living in the suburbs in the Midwest. Katz has written 57 entries so far, and I read them all in two sittings. Apparently dating in your 40s isn’t any better or worse than dating in your 30s – you still find guys who want to date you, but you still come to learn that a lot of them are rather weird (as we all are, I guess). Reading Katz’s blog does make me appreciate living in New York City even more, if that’s possible. It’s harder to date in a small town. Here in the city, not only are there a lot more single people, but if I date someone for a while and he breaks my heart (or vice versa), it’s extremely easy never to see him again. There’s still the risk of running into him randomly on the subway or wherever, but much, much less than when you live in a small town of 10,000 people.

I forgot to tell you a funny story about my HurryDate (http://www.HurryDate.com) speed-dating experience last week. I ran into one guy who is an acquaintance I’ve known for six years, so that was fun -- but there were a couple of other guys there I had speed-dated before, including one strange guy I have now speed-dated THREE TIMES! The host was really nice, so my friend and I were talking to him afterwards about these “repeaters.” Then my friend suddenly stopped and said, “Oh, I’m sorry -- are these guys friends of yours? Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about them like this.”

The host shook his head. “They’re not my friends.”

“But you were talking to them like you’re old pals,” I pointed out.

The host rolled his eyes, leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “That’s because they come so *&^%ing often!”

Ha! I guess there is a small subset of these awkward guys who speed-date CONSTANTLY to try to meet all their dating needs. Poor things.

Cheating

Here’s the latest on Mr. No Touchy-Feely: he e-mailed me last Wednesday and left me a voicemail on Thursday. I sent him an e-mail on Friday morning. Didn’t hear from him again until Tuesday evening, when he left me a voicemail after getting home from work and before going back out to another activity. I e-mailed him on Wednesday. He e-mailed me yesterday (Thursday) saying he could call me that night. I e-mailed that a friend and I would be having dinner and watching the “Office” season finale together, but I could call him Friday night if he’d be around. He e-mailed me back that he would be around, and that we could exchange our reviews of “The Office” when we talk. So, I’ll give him a call tonight. I do think he’s shy, at least in some ways (well, obviously!). But I like him enough to want to give him more of a chance. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, one of my friends (thanks, Gwen!) sent me a link to this article on “how to cheat-proof your marriage” (http://www.20daypersuasion.com/cheatproof-marriage-sample.htm). Do you agree with this paragraph?

“Men enter into a relationship or marriage expecting a woman to stay as beautiful and easy to handle. Women enter into a relationship or marriage expecting a man to change for the better. These differences are often what lead to breakups, separations, or divorces. These differences, along with the fact that men constantly want excitement, and women need affirmation and praise, all lead to infidelity.”

What do you think? Seems a bit stereotypical to me – “easy to handle,” that’s a more appropriate description for a horse than a person! Don’t most people of either gender want excitement AND affirmation AND praise? (I know I do! :) However, I did identify with the part about expecting/hoping a man will change for the better. Part of me seems to be attracted to guys who need mothering, guys with a lot of potential who haven’t quite gotten their act together in some way. It’s something I have to fight against. After all, it’s a lose-lose situation to get involved with and try to “improve” someone who isn’t willing to improve themselves. Much better to be with someone I like so much, I don’t feel they need any improvement. :)

The article also claims that cheating is the most common reason for divorce. But isn’t cheating due to some earlier problem in the marriage that went unaddressed? I would think that cheating would be a symptom of relationship trouble, not a cause.

Analysis of a Doomed Marriage

I just read a devastating article on a great web site called Tango: Smart Talk About Love (http://www.tangomag.com) titled “Marrying Mr. Wrong,” by Isabel Rose (http://www.tangomag.com/2006184/marrying-mr-wrong.html). It starts with this paragraph:

“JULY 4, 2002: I’m sitting on our deck in the Hamptons an hour after everyone has left, realizing that my marriage needs to end. There have been too many red flags and it’s been too hard for too long. I’m drained. I’m sad. I’m lonely. My husband is just on the other side of the screen door, sleeping on the sofa we bought together at Ikea right after we bought the house. On his chest, our eleven-month-old daughter drools in her half-sleep.”

Then Ms. Rose goes back and analyzes, one by one, the various red flags that prove she never should have married her husband (now ex-husband) in the first place, starting with when they met in April 1995. The one that really got me was when she was having a drink with her ex-boyfriend, and when he asked if her current boyfriend was her soul mate, she said, “Definitely not…he doesn’t understand me at all.” This was in June 1997 – after they had been dating for TWO YEARS! And not only did she go ahead and marry him a year later, but then she had a kid with him! It’s sad, really. Oh, and his outright ignoring her when she spoke (red flag #3)? Inexcusable! (I’m also surprised his boss wasn’t punched in the mouth, or even better, socked with a lawsuit – see red flag #8.)

Ms. Rose certainly wanted to get married. It was like marriage itself was the be-all and end-all, and it almost didn’t matter with who. She had a fear of being alone, it seems. I went through a time in my life, in my early- to mid-twenties, when I felt the same way. It’s easy for me to read her red flags, shake my head and say, “What was she thinking!?” But I’ve certainly excused away warning signs in my relationships, though not to the point where I got anywhere close to engaged, let alone married. However, if a guy had actually shown any interest in me when I was 25, I could potentially have done exactly what she did, which was to cling to the relationship at all costs, even though it was all wrong for her. Not meeting anyone back then was a blessing in disguise, because I learned I could take care of myself and exist just fine on my own. It’s fun to have a boyfriend, and amazing when you feel a real connection with someone. But it’s not like I’m going to die of loneliness or anything without one.

I’ll bet Ms. Rose’s ex-husband has his own list of red flags about their relationship. That would be interesting to read.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I truly enjoy articles exactly like this, about people who are unhappily married or who are getting divorced. I mean, I REALLY enjoy it. It’s like relationship porn for me. Can’t get enough. Is that terrible? It’s not that I like the idea of people being in emotional pain. It just assures me that it’s much better to be single than married to someone you’re always angry at, or don’t particularly like, or who doesn’t like you much anymore, either.

Oooh, I just noticed that Ms. Rose’s article is excerpted from a book that came out last year called “The Honeymoon’s Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage and Divorce,” edited by Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin. A whole BOOK of relationship-porn! Excuse me while I mosey over to Amazon.com....

Compromising vs. "Settling"

Where do you draw the line between compromising -- something everyone has to do in any relationship -- and “settling,” or resigning yourself to a relationship that isn’t all you’d hoped for? On one hand, I’m a ton less hard on myself in my 30s than I was in my 20s, which has made me less critical and more forgiving of the faults of other people, including the people I date (difficult as it may be to believe from reading this blog ;). On the other hand, I also find myself thinking things like, “Well, I’ve waited this long to find someone – I might as well hold out for the perfect guy!”

Of course, the perfect guy, much like the perfect city or the perfect job, does not exist. But you can fall in love with someone, or something, in spite of its imperfections. For example, I moved to New York City in 2000 having lived in four different cities/towns in the previous five years (Roma, TX; Austin, TX; my hometown of Oakland, NJ; and Boston, MA), and I assumed that, like with the previous places I’d lived, I would stay for a year or two, then move on. I didn’t fall in love with New York at first sight. It took months to get the knack of pressing myself into a crowded subway car during rush hour without feeling like I’d faint from claustrophobia. Not being able to drive to a supermarket and load up on enough groceries to last a couple of weeks took some getting used to. My rent was high, and I wasn’t making that much money. But as I walked the streets of Manhattan during my lunch hour, I could feel the energy of the city pulsing around me, and after only a few months, I knew I had finally found the place I never wanted to leave -- and except for my year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps a couple of years ago (when New York and I had a long-distance relationship), I never have.

Interestingly, I had the opposite experience when I’d moved to Boston the year before. After I got into Boston University’s creative writing program, I excitedly planned to fall in love with Boston and spend the rest of my life there. But then I arrived. I tried to like living in Boston, I really did. But I was always lost (Boston is NOT the place to live if you have no sense of direction), continually being disappointed by public transportation, and lonely. I’d been living there nine or ten months when I suddenly thought, why am I trying to force myself to like it here when my heart is just not in it? As soon as I got my master’s degree a couple months later, I fled to New York, only because I had three friends there and it was relatively close to my dad in NJ. It was never the city I expected to love – but that’s what ended up happening.

And so it is with dating. You can spend months, even years, with someone who is perfectly nice and who, on paper, has everything you’re looking for, yet you’re just not feeling it. Then someone who doesn’t match your vision of the ideal partner at all ambles into your life, and before you know it, you’re in love. It’s the furthest thing from an exact science.

What triggered all of this were several interesting essays on compromising vs. settling. First was an article on eHarmony’s web site titled “Do You Have Realistic Expectations?” It starts out with, “To date is to have standards. But expectations for your future flame must have compromising perimeters to allow for the unpredicted.” You can find the whole article at http://advice.eharmony.com/?page=articles/view&AID=1956&cid=2091&aid=41607 but it basically says that you shouldn’t rule out a good person who actually exists because you’re holding out for some impossible fantasy. However, the article doesn’t help you discern when you’ve crossed the line between “having standards” and being too choosy.

Intrigued, I then typed “is he the one or are you settling” into Google, which turned up this amazing article by Lori Gottlieb entitled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” which appeared in the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly. Go to http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry to read the whole article, which is unsettling, thought-provoking – and really, really funny. After years of search for Mr. Right, Gottlieb finally decided to have a baby on her own. Now she is the mother of a beautiful baby boy, still single, and her advice, as summed up in paragraph 6, is:

“Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling ‘Bravo!’ in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)”

Trust her, she says – the man of your dreams is NOT out there, “because you dreamed him up.” Better to “settle” for someone who doesn’t completely rock your world than end up permanently single. The funniest part is paragraph 11, where Gottlieb points out that “what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.”

Marriage and family as a “very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business” – ha! I love it!

Her article, however, is definitely geared to thirty-something women who hear the incessant ticking of their biological clocks. She says once you and Mr. Good Enough start churning out babies, you’ll barely see each other anyway, so at that point, what difference did it make WHO you married? At least you can take turns watching the kids. And if, worst case scenario, you get divorced, at least you’ll get your weekends free when your kids are with their dad, plus child support – none of which you’ll get if you have a baby on your own. (She doesn’t take into account how extraordinarily expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally draining divorce can be, though – not to mention hard on the kids.) Since I don’t care if I ever have biological kids and I want to adopt older children, my situation is a little different – easier in some ways (much longer time frame to work with), harder in others (most guys either want to have biological kids or don’t want to have kids at all).

If you’d like to read single moms’ reactions to Gottlieb’s article, check out author and single mother Rachel Sarah’s blog at http://singlemomseeking.com/blog/2008/03/09/one-single-mom-says-that-you-should-settle-for-mr-good-enough/ Some of the comments noted that if Gottlieb had used “compromise” or some word other than “settle,” her article would have been a lot easier to agree with. Tellingly, some said that they were single moms precisely BECAUSE they had settled for their now ex-husbands – with whom they’d been miserable. As Barb (http://www.zenmothers.com/) noted in her comment, “It’s hard to do everything yourself and would love a break from being my kid’s short order cook and taxi driver every now and then, but I would rather be alone than pick a man just to have someone cover the husband duties.”

And finally, I also found an article by Joe Atkinson entitled “Are You Settling for Someone?” (http://www.revolutionhealth.com/healthy-living/womens-health/relationships/dating/settling) which quotes from a book by psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum called “Is He Mr. Right? Everything You Need to Know Before you Commit.” Kirshenbaum thinks that a healthy relationship needs to have the following five traits: “1) physical chemistry or affection; 2) real intimacy, or an ‘at-homeness’ with the other person; 3) fun, which she describes as ‘the glue of intimacy’; 4) safety, trust and security with the other person; and 5) mutual respect. To Kirshenbaum, settling is accepting a relationship in which one of these ‘five dimensions of chemistry’ is missing.”

What do you all think?

"For Better Or For Worse" Cartoonist To Divorce

I am so sad to learn that Lynn Johnston, creator of one of my all-time favorite comic strips, “For Better or For Worse” (http://www.fborfw.com), is getting a divorce from her husband of 32 years. :( I must have been living under a rock, because I just learned about this even though it became public knowledge last fall (http://www.modbee.com/life/funstuff/story/100348.html).
Apparently, Johnston’s husband, hereafter known as THE JERK, moved out last April and asked her for a divorce because he fell in love with somebody else. Johnston admitted it was a complete surprise to her. I’ll bet! Who marries someone and raises two kids with them, then abandons them to run off with another woman after 32 years!? THE JERK, that’s who.
I am so disappointed by this. I hope some amazingly wonderful guy who actually deserves Johnston comes along and sweeps her off her feet.