Taking Action

One of the things you realise once you’ve turned 40 is that lighting candles and praying at Infant Jesus church for ‘the one’ to appear will simply not work; you have to take action (i.e. action apart from buying candles and saying the rosary).
The bane of being brought up in a strong catholic environment – the default answer is to turn to God when you need things to be sorted out in your life. I remember once in a desperate mood opening up the bible to the passage from Isaiah which says “The lord shall be like a husband to you’… and I immediately said ‘Thanks God but I prefer someone in real life whom I can hug and hold’.

So that’s how Brigit joined one of the popular match making sites on the net. But then of course, being very shy (and paranoid – what if, God forbid, the folks in office found me on that site?!), no photos were put up. “I want someone who finds me interesting enough based on what I’ve written to contact me first”. And thus began the adventures.

The first chap lets name him Mr K was in his own words ‘tall, dark and handsome’. Well his pictures definitely looked nice and he wrote well; his punctuation was good (you’d be amazed at what bad grammar the average Indian man writes!) and he definitely was witty. Brigit was already in love with him after the first couple of emails, by the end of the first few weeks, she’d walked down the aisle and had a baby (a girl but of course!). Please do note, that all of this was in Brigit’s head; the poor chap had no inkling of his future progeny – for they hadn’t even met!

Well, Mr K after a couple of emails invited Brigit out for coffee at the "Baristas" down the road. Brigit was excited and nervous at the same time; what if, God forbid, he knew someone who knew someone else who knew her colleagues at work! Then the entire office would get to know that she was on a match making site and ‘looking’; it somehow sounded so distasteful. Didn’t most people, after all, bump into the love of their lives somehow – even before the internet was invented? Does that mean something was ‘wrong’ with her? These and a gazillion other thoughts were racing through Brigit’s mind as she changed her outfit, yet again, for her first ‘date’ with Mr “The one”.  

The meeting turned out to be a disaster. Brigit walked in expecting ‘sparks’ and ‘stars’ to fall when she met Mr K. Instead the only thought that came up was how different (read that as much older) he looked from his pictures. Yes, dear reader, the first rule of online matchmaking sites – never believe the pictures. They were probably taken around 10 years ago and are suitably cropped or photo shopped. So you never see the bald pate as the photo is conveniently cut off at the top and neither do you see the big paunch as he’s only got a mug shot posted etc. Do you get the picture, or rather ‘non picture’? 

Needless to say, the one hour passed on mercifully and Brigit slunk back to her apartment completely mortified. For a woman who is very confident at the work place, here she was reduced to a shy, petrified teenager faced with a rock star.  So from being tongue tied and refusing to give her official name and reveal who her employer was, she had pretty much covered whatever could go wrong on a first date. Moral of the story to quote a guru whose newsletters are doing the rounds on the net, Christian Carter’, “Don’t create the instant relationship”.   All the webcasts and newsletters read on this topic seemed to have gone waste as far as Brigit was concerned but the first date ever with an online beau was a turning point.  From now on, Brigit would see each first meeting as a coffee and nothing more. Needless to say, she had to ensure she didn’t get pregnant or wedded in her head in the first few weeks that she met the guy.  Mr K was tall, dark and handsome but he just didn’t do it for Brigit.  Where were the ‘sparks’ that were meant to bless this star studded meeting? Apparently somewhere between the first kid and the baptism, they must have been put out with holy water…