Me: So this guy invited me over for dinner at his place.

Therapist: Doesn‘t seem safe.

Me: In hindsight...nevermind. The thing is, he lives at a condo complex where a bunch of my friends live, and the houses are pretty tight together. So I figured if something happened I could yell louder than a hyena and escape safely.

Therapist: What was on the menu?

Me: His email said rib-eye, mashed potatoes and zucchini.

Therapist: Wow! So he’s a good cook too?

Me: I’m figuring you can’t eff up a rib-eye right? So I learned from a previous flub up that you should always bring a bottle of wine when invited to dinner at someone’s house.
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I was hurting, just kind of achy all over. I couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from, but I knew why, it was because it was too quiet. I pulled the covers up over my naked shoulders and let the tips of my eyelashes meet the bottoms of my eyelids, they whispered, “just go to sleep.” As I laid there doing a 400 meter dash in the silence of the swimming pool known as my thoughts, I realized something.

Me: He drank too much.

Therapist: How much is too much?

Me: Too much that he couldn’t drive us home and we had to call a cab.

Therapist: Oh come on, better safe than sorry. I think it’s responsible of him to call a cab after a few drinks that put your life and a DUI at risk.

Me: I‘m not done, this wasn‘t just any cab.

Therapist: Ok, continue.

Me: Did I mention the date was excellent?

Therapist: No. I’m thrilled to hear that part.

Me: Seven miles...

Therapist: Why are you staring off like that? Are you ok? What was seven miles?

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I felt more than I thought I’d feel when I heard he had died. Maybe it’s because I happened to be alone that night. I’ve been alone a lot lately. Physically alone and emotionally alone, the type of alone you feel when you leave work late and the parking lot is empty, and your car is the only one there.

The first thing I did was sit down at the computer, click to youtube and type “man in the mirror” in the search field. I probably watched the video twenty times in a row…I’m sure that’s not healthy. It was 1988 when it was recorded, five years before his first judgment.

Therapy Sessions of an Online Dating Addict - Fiction Folks. Fiction.

Me: So I have to start by saying, I‘ve never had a one night stand, and certainly not with someone I just met online.

Therapist: Who are you trying to convince?

Me: No, seriously...I’m just saying.

Therapist: Ok, continue.

Me: So he‘s super cute, and I think someone slipped something in my drink.

Therapist: Foul play?

Me: No. I shouldn‘t be so extreme, it‘s entirely plausible that I drank too much, but I just really don‘t believe that one margarita and one lemon drop would have caused me to get that drunk.

Therapist: The phrase of the guilty.

Me: I think I might set up a sting at the bar, I‘m pretty sure the bartenders are roofie-ing drinks.

Therapist: Is roofie-in ... Read More »

Therapist: 10pm for a first date?

Me: Well, on his profile it said he was “in school” so I understood when he said he “had class” and couldn’t meet up until 10pm.

Therapist: I guess that’s fair, trying to fit a dating life while working a day job and extending his education, nothing wrong with that.

Me: Right. So he said it was night classes downtown. I immediately phoned a few friends to find out what kind of classes were downtown.

Therapist: Hmmm.

Me: Well, my friends thoroughly convinced me that he was probably in night school for his law degree. So I’m thinkin, “Score!“ and willing to accommodate this whole late date deal.

Therapist: Law degree does not equate to excellent suitor. But I concur the education is a good start.

Me: So I pull up to his house at around 9:45pm and realize, it’s the exact condo I almo ... Read More »

The definition of vulnerable is: capable of being physically or emotionally wounded.
The definition of violation is: doing harm to a person, especially the chastity of.

My life is now public and open for attack. While most of the world is generally kind, there are critics, and there are those who are jealous, and worse, there’s those that stalk you.

No stalker is good. But some are better than others. There’s silent stalkers, who never reach out but you know they are lurking, there’s stalkers that reach out to you privately but make themselves known, even showing up to public places, and then there are obsession stalkers.

Those ones are the worst. They follow your every move, they wait for anything to catch a closer glimpse at your life. Usually they start by imitating it, and when that doesn’t get the response they’re looking for, they start doing things to instigate you, including saying nasty things. Th ... Read More »

Yesterday I sat for nearly four hours struggling to find the words. Trying to avoid the inevitable phone call. A humdrum of collective thoughts were bouncing around in my head and regardless of how many different metaphors I tried to draw, they would not come out in any logical sense.

I had so much to say, and I couldn’t find a way to say it, because I was afraid of what I would be losing.

A few days earlier I'd realized that I had almost everything, but it wouldn’t be enough to make me happy. It was the moment when you realize that your mind will never win the battle against your heart, and it was in that special moment that I realized I had two choices- accept it and move forward having failed my heart, or dive into fear and take a chance to get what I really want most at the risk of giving everything else up.

But it wasn’t all about me, I was playing with two hearts. After spending a few hours letting m ... Read More »

The text came through and it said, “my copy has arrived.”

The words in and of themselves, and perhaps even put together don’t seem that important. Unless of course it’s a copy of a birth certificate for your newborn baby, a copy of the escrow documents on your first house, a copy of the divorce settlement or… your Memoir being delivered to the man you wrote about.

Suddenly I realized I had written about my life, in painstaking detail, and suddenly I began to feel exposed.

While I share a lot of information with the world, the things that affect me most deeply have always stayed very close to my heart, and suddenly I realized that all those things that I’d chosen to protect over the years were available…on Amazon.com. I felt like I’d taken a scalpel, cut out my heart, sprinkled a little bit of my soul on it and uploaded it to YouTube. Why did I do this?

Because somehow if I put my thoughts on p ... Read More »

Therapy Sessions of an Online Dating Addict: Failed The Myers Briggs

Me: I found the perfect match.com profile.

Therapist: Perfect is a strong word.

Me: No, it was absolutely perfect. He’s educated, works as a firefighter, fairly witty, photos looks excellent, owns his house so he understands commitment, my age…
So I reached out to him, sent him a wink, he winked back.

Therapist: A wink is a good thing right?

Me: Yea, in match.com land it means “I’m interested.”

Therapist: Got it.

Me: So after he winked back, he mentioned that we share a love of golf, and that we should meet up at the driving range…

Therapist: Wow, I like this one already!

Me: Then he adds, but before that I would like you to fill out this questionnaire.

... Read More »

Me: He was super cute…and with a girl.

Therapist: So you didn’t meet this one online?

Me: Nope, it was after the Padres game, a big group of us went to celebrate the win at the top of Altitude in downtown, since winning is so rare.

Therapist: (chuckling) How did you approach?

Me: I surveyed the situation throughout the evening, he was super tall, very handsome, blonde hair, green eyes, pretty well built. My guess was military because his hair had that look to it.

Therapist: Stereotyping, be careful.

Me: So just as my group of friends is about to leave I just walked right up to him and said, “Is this your girlfriend?”

Therapist: Smooth move.

Me: He said “Hi, what ... Read More »

A little salt on the deepest cut stings the most...

One day I stood with my feet deep in the sand, the ocean waves lapped over my ankles, and quickly, with each receding wave, my feet sank deeper; before I knew it, the tide had risen.

I was surrounded by water. I was standing in the middle of the ferocious Pacific ocean. Rather than turning to run, I stood still. I was almost calmed by the way the water rolled in, and the sky got dark. Stars peppered the ceiling above my head and somewhere amongst my fear I felt safe.

The sand became a mold of my feet and suddenly it was soothing to watch the wild of the ocean all around me and know that the water would not get higher, I would not sink further. So I stood still.

Then it all changed. I felt a current that sent a warning all the way up my legs and landed somewhere between my eye lashes and my gut, and I was afraid.

My ... Read More »

Me: I think I’ve been going on too many dates.

Therapist: Right, addiction is a tough thing to break, that’s why we spend this hour each week talking…What makes you come to this realization?

Me: Well, I said from the beginning this was a numbers game.

Therapist: To a certain extent, yes…we know though that you take this whole plethora of available candidates to the extreme.

Me: Well, last week the girls and I went to Taco Tuesday Girl’s Night Out at our usual bar.

Therapist: Ahh yes, Girl’s Night…don’t you usually invite a potential match.com date?

Me: Yes, I usually invite someone to stop in and meet the girls if I feel he’s got good potential.

Therapist: Ok, so tell me about Taco Tuesday.

Me: So I’d gone to lunch with this guy Patrick and I thought he was a potential for ... Read More »

Everything I’ve ever worked for is gone…

I watched the small white digital numbers switch from 11:59 to 12:00, another new day has arrived that I’m not sure I’m ready to welcome.

Optimism abounds in my life, I find the positive in all the negatives, I don’t dwell on the lows and I bounce back quickly from the blows. I’ve surrounded myself with people whose eyes express love and hope. Today, at 12:01 even those people whisper these words…

Everything I’ve ever worked for is gone.

Day in and day out I offer up words of encouragement having come from the very bottom (after all that’s what the whole novel is about, surviving that fall, not once but twice).

And I realize, I believe my own words each time they escape my mouth. But I’m saddened…I’m saddened to watch one by one as my friends and my family lose it all. A deeper part of me knows that I’m better positioned than ... Read More »

Me:  So, here I am floating on a daisy shaped raft in the pool of a friend’s house, chatting with her in that way two people chat when they are both randomly drifting across the water, soaking up the sun, enjoying life and the weather. So naturally, in this relaxed state of self indulgence the topic of my online dating experiences came up. I mentioned to her as I dipped one toe off the edge of the raft into the chilly water and dribbled the sprinkles across my sun stained legs that it is nearly impossible on a first date to really get to know someone without coming across as prying, or being overly anxious to get to the point. The point being, are you and I really going to make beyond the first ‘online’ date? This means I’ve met up with you at an incredibly public place, where the price point of anything & Read More »

I’ve never been the kind of girl who is the other woman, that is…until now.

No lady ever walks into a relationship and says; sign me up to be the one he runs to. When I first learned the truth my natural reaction was to run, but in the moment where I turned on my heel and spun, I asked myself, am I really ‘the other woman’ or am I ‘the woman?’

What felt like buckets of blood poured out of her body as she clutched her lower abdomen and raced to the bathroom in the early hours of the weekday morning. She spun around before shoving open the bathroom door and saw the trail of black tar behind her. 

<div styl Read More »