Online Dating Coach: Moving on ? The Benicia Herald

By John Gavin

I MOVED TO THIS TOWN A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR AGO.

At that time I worked in sales, knew very little about Benicia, and had never had anything I?d written published.

Upon arriving here I soon discovered the little coffee shop in Solano Square where I?d end up spending many mornings. On one particular morning there I met a nice young lady who sold ad space for the local newspaper: The Benicia Herald. As conversations between single people often do, the talk turned to dating, which led to me telling her of my idea to someday write an online dating and relationships column for a newspaper. She liked the idea and said she?d run it by her editor to see what he thought.

She called the next day to say the editor liked the idea as well and would I submit a sample of what I was proposing? I wrote the sample column, the newspaper ran it and I?ve been doing this ever since.

The first two lines of that very first column were:

?A number of years ago, after my divorce, I jumped back into the dating pool.

?And I very nearly drowned.?

And was that ever the truth. I?d been married for more than 12 years when, in 2002, my wife and I divorced. Until the events that led to our divorce occurred, I would have told anyone who asked that I?d be married to the same woman for the rest of my life ? and would have been happy to say as much. So when the time came to dust off my dating skills and get back in the fray, I was feeling more than a little lost ? and still a bit confused as to just how I got there.

Want to hear something interesting? I probably get as much out of these columns as many readers do.

Here?s what I do on a weekly basis: Review letters sent to me from, and conversations had with, readers about dating and relationship issues. Then I write something I feel may shed light on perhaps both the cause and solution of those issues. But do you notice how I do it? I typically start with a short anecdote from my own life that I feel is somehow like the situation I?m writing about.

Here?s the part that intrigues me: I think I write a lot of this advice to myself.

A few weeks back, I wrote a column titled, ?Are you here to pick up or drop off?? In it, I likened the dating sites to a Goodwill Store because we often go to the dating sites to, in essence, pick up a person someone else has cast off.

The advice I ended up giving in that one was basically as follows:

Guys: Women never stop testing us, so to preserve a marriage we, likewise, need to never stop being worthy of a passing grade. And women: Understand that the fella you just met online has probably been through the divorce wringer, so show a little patience with him and you might just end up with a good guy who?s better prepared for future relationships because he?s learned from past failures.

In August I wrote a column called ?Us and Them,? about a phenomenon I termed ?the cycles of attraction,? which spelled out the different pace at which men and women get into relationships. I explained that while men can go very fast at the beginning, they can slow down just as quickly, leaving a woman scratching her head wondering what just happened.

In October I wrote a follow-up to that one called ?Chase or Space,? in which I compared men to a superhero I used to watch on TV called Ultra Man who would run out of power when up against steep odds (and yes ,that?s how we men view new relationships), and who would often leave the scene only to later return and finish the job.

In it, I told women that if a guy signals he needs time away to himself, let him go; in fact, encourage it. And I wrote that if you do this rather than try to hold on tighter, you might just find that if he knows he can leave he?s more likely to stay.

It was just a couple of weeks after that that I wrote a little column called ?Lost in Translation,? in which I dissected a hit pop song that purported to be from a guy who really missed his old girlfriend, sung to that old girlfriend using very romantic language in an effort to get himself invited to her place for a night of romance ? but, as I pointed out, just one night.

I used that exercise in lyrics deconstruction to make the point that a man?s truth is often more easily seen in his actions than his words. And that perhaps women should listen less to what we say than watch what we do.

As I continued to instruct myself in the ways of love, it led to some soul searching of the ?Am I even capable of having what it is I say I really want?? variety. And so I wrote a column with the mildly sensationalistic title, ?Confessions of a Player,? in which I wrote how easy it is for men (myself included) to get caught up in the rapid-fire dating style of what we term ?dating sites.?

To contrast how men and women use these sites differently, I wrote a little farce I called ?Online relationshipping? in which I lampooned the fact that these sites seem to be geared much more toward how men go about getting into a relationship.

But I do tend toward the melodramatic on occasion (OK, all the time), and in the spirit of trying to lighten the mood I also penned some cheerier submissions. There was the one with the pithy title ?Because you?re good enough, you?re smart enough, and doggone it people like you,? in which I wrote that perhaps we should all lighten up just a touch, take a deep breath, and not take the whole dating site thing so darn seriously. I made the point that when women walk into a bar they seldom do so with the goal in mind of finding a guy to marry, so why put so much pressure on themselves to find Mr. Right on the dating sites?

This column is, ostensibly anyway, about online dating. As such I have tried to wrangle much of the content (be it regular old garden-variety dating advice or plain old relationship advice) under the umbrella of dating online. But every now and then I write about online dating in a very specific way, with a very intended effect in mind. One such column was ?Excuse me, but do you validate??

In that particular column, I made the point that if online dating sites were solely for purpose of finding Mr. or Ms. Right, then based on the incredibly low per capita incidence of that happening we probably would all have given up on the sites long ago.

But I went on to offer that maybe what?s going on is that the feeling of validation we get from our opposite sex counterparts ? as well as the sense of hope of finding someone for our own that being on such sites helps bring to us ? might be a clue to their real value.

And doesn?t that neatly wrap up online dating as a subject that we, you and me, have now pretty well figured out?

OK, so I?ve just summed up what I consider the most important advice I?ve given, in the best columns I?ve written, over the last year. What do you suppose that will lead me to write about next week?

John Gavin lives in Benicia.

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