. I mean, the addict in my life has been for 20 years, is it silly to go?
ACOA is different from Alanon - it’s for people who are dealing with how a childhood like yours is shaping their behaviors in their adult life. It doesn’t matter at all that your mom is gone. I do think it would be helpful for you.
As for LH’s comment about “hypergamy” - actually studies by OKCupid show that while both sexes aim above their own attractiveness in OLD, men do this a lot more.
G - sorry the date turned out to be a bust. This is a guy who should have been a coffee date. Talking about his “dorky” hobbies - do you think he might have been on the spectrum? I was reading a Ted talk synopsis about what makes people “creepy” - and how most of it isn’t actually what true creeps present as. Reading the description I thought people on the spectrum fit a lot of the things we think of as “creepy”. Which is too bad because they are often quite loyal and kind.
The truth is, the first online date is like the conversation you have with someone upon meeting at a party or a bar. It’s where you find out enough about them to decide whether you want to go on a real date with them or not. You just talked to this guy at a party and found out he’s not for you. Young people meet tons of people that way who aren’t for them before they meet someone who is.
Trying to think back on my OLDing days to see why it worked for me. First - I liked the OKCupid platform because profiles were fairly long and I could also see the score of how closely we matched on a series of questions about values and attitudes. That did seem to be a fair indicator. I think it helped me screen out a lot of incompatible people right off the bat.
Second - I think at least half of the men I dated were men I contacted first. Did this translate into “punching above my weight” because these men hadn’t contacted me first but were interested once we started talking? I don’t know. I know sometimes I was above their stated age range (as in, they stated something like 2 years older to ten years younger, and maybe I was 5 years older) but that seldom seemed to make a difference to them. (Maybe guys are just so tired of rejection that they’re interested in a woman who will reach out? Or maybe they had an antiquated idea of what a woman slightly older than them would look like and I messed with their preconceptions?)
Third - I was open to men of other races. 2 of my 3 longest post-divorce relationships were with men of color. (Although my exH was white, I had had relationships with a couple of African American men in my twenties as well). Plus the only date who picked me up IRL, Mr Big Lots, happened to be African-American as well.
Four - I scrutinized their profiles closely for clues. I think I was able to rule out a lot of people this way who would have otherwise been failed dates.
