Dating Embarrassment

by Chania

Well, dating is never easy when you’re 16 and desperately want a boyfriend, but it can get much more difficult if you’re very naive and with your head in the clouds.

I had my first boyfriend at 15 (it only lasted a month and a half), and I can’t possible imagine what I saw in him then. But at that moment I was so eager to have a boyfriend that I was literally “blind”. One afternoon, after waiting 3 or 4 days for him to call, I simply got out of the house, in spite of my father’s warnings that it is embarrassing for a girl to look for a boy and to contact him, and that she should wait (“That’s what I have been doing for 3 days, dad! I want to see him!” Man, how desperate it sounds now…) and I went to his block of flats. I knew that at that hour (around 6.30 pm) he should be outside with the boys, playing football. But nobody was there, probably because it was dark and cold.

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Is that a Sty in your Eye?

by Karen Rodriguez

I was 24 years old and divorced living in a house with six other flight attendants, with only a laptop and a suitcase as my real processions. However, that wasn’t the worst part. I was now at the airport being picked up by my first date via Myspace, which is a current site being used by people who were too broke to pay any fees at a real dating site. Surely, this was a recipe for disaster, but having found love and marriage so quickly at a young age once makes me an eternal romantic.

His name was Peter. He was 26 years old, divorced, with a 5 year old daughter, and working at a hardware store. Amazing the potential suitors you can find by just typing in your zip code while including a twenty mile radius. Even if we did not have movies, passions, and interests in common, we had divorce, starting over and heartache to dwell on. Soon after, what followed were the awkward first phone calls. After the second week of phone conversations he let me know he told his daughter that he had a new girlfriend. This should have set off an alarm in my head. Instead I was flattered. A flight attendant’s life could at times be very lonely, and a friendly voice during a layover in Alaska or Kuwait was better than watching an episode of the Golden Girls.

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Online Dating Profiles: A couple paragraphs that can change your life

by Ed Attanasio

Because I am a writer, many of my friends ask me all the time to write their online profiles to post on dating web sites. I always feel like it’s a big commitment — kind of like writing someone’s resume or biography. There’s a lot at stake and the pressure to write something really good about someone can be very exhausting, because many of my friends are highly dysfunctional. How do you effectively describe the essence of a human being in just a few paragraphs? Without lying or opening yourself up to a civil suit?

I must admit, I have gotten pretty adept at it over the years. The secret to writing a great profile is to emphasize the good things about people while minimizing their shortcomings. Stretching the truth slightly is no crime and many people do it.

No matter how bad or messed up some people are, you can usually find something positive to write about them. They say that Attila the Hun was really nice to his elephants (“loves animals”). Hitler was a vegetarian (“healthy and fit”). And legend has it that Genghis Khan took really good care of his fu manchu (“well-groomed”).

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