Epilogue: Almost Five Years Later

In case anyone stumbles across this blog, I'd like to report what's happened in my life since I retired this blog 4 years & 10 months ago. 

I left my job and home. 

I moved to BigCity. 

I got married, started a new job, bought a house, and otherwise turned my life upside down.

I became a father. 

My wife and I are expecting our second baby next May.

So... a lot of shit has happened! 

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K and I are still in touch.  Although I have not seen her in person since that tearful goodbye at the K-tropolis airport over five years ago, we are good Facebook friends and regularly email each other.

After about six months of a no-contact detox, we got back in touch and started emailing each other again.  Since then we've written each other regularly every 2-3 weeks.  She has not dated anyone seriously since we broke up, but she does tell me about crushes or dates she goes on.  I'm almost to the point that it would not bother me if she dated someone new.  Almost.

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My new wife is another K.  But her name is longer than K's, and you could say that K[my wife's name] is just K[my ex's name] with more letters. "Kabbabba is just Kabba with more letters."

I went on dates with about half a dozen women after K and I broke up, but never got past the 2nd date. Ten months after we broke up, I met K-wife on an online dating site. She was living in BigCity and I was living in Snarktown. We were 150 miles from each other, but after dating K, who was 700 miles away, this felt like local dating. We had a lot of common interests, and bonded over our love of spreadsheets. She won my heart with the following statement: "I have all my books in a spreadsheet organized by author, title, and genre.  I don't know if this is useful but I like having it."

I drove to BigCity to see her for our first few dates, which were underwhelming. At the end of our second date I turned to her and said, "So, what do you think?"  She said, "I don't know what I think."  I said, "I don't know what I think, either."  We almost stopped seeing each other.  But we stayed in contact, talked about our misgivings, and kept dating.

It's the strangest relationship I've ever had, because there were no big fireworks, just a lot of slow incremental steps toward love and commitment.  It's not passionate like it was with K, but the true litmus test is that since K-wife came into my life, I've been happy.  She balances out my wild mood swings.  She's good for me.    

A lot of the same interests I developed with K were things I bonded with K-wife over (folk music, cooking, farmer's markets, etc.)  It would be easy to construct the narrative that dating K was a stepping stone, a kind of training, to meeting K-wife. If only I could shake the feeling that K was the One Who Got Away.  That feeling slowly fades over time, but it's not completely gone. Logically, I think I know that K-wife is much better for me than K was, but K was like a rich, rare dessert: I never got enough of her.

By a very weird, enormous coincidence, I found out early on that K and K-wife knew each other! They've never met in person or have lived in the same city, but K's sister went to college with K-wife.  (They're Facebook friends.)  When we all figured out the connection, K's sister was able to serve as a sort of dating reference for me.  It's nice to know she told K-wife good things about me.

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Before I even met K-wife, I'd been thinking about moving to BigCity, ironically because I thought it would be easier to be single in a big urban environment. When we started dating I got more serious about looking for jobs in BigCity, and over the next year I applied to 27 different positions.

We got engaged on October, 2012, a little over a year after we started dating.  At that point I took the plunge and made the commitment to move to BigCity whether or not I had a job.  We planned our wedding and started looking for houses.

The following May, two months before our wedding, I was offered a job on the day we closed on our house.

Our wedding was awesome, one of those rare occasions where a Huge Life Event exceeds expectations.  My family likes K much better than SnarkEx.  They think she is much better for me.  And she is.

One of the things that K-wife and I love to do is travel.  Since we've met, we've been to New York, New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, North Carolina, DC, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Toronto, and others I've probably forgotten.  We've climbed mountains and ascended skyscrapers and taken thousands of pictures.  We both love to walk and hike.

We went to Iceland for our honeymoon.  One my favorite all-time Facebook posts was this: "So you take a chance and meet up with a stranger on an online dating site, and two years later you're arguing on the top of a a volcano in Iceland."

Good times.

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Since we were older (41 and 34, respectively) when we got married, K-wife and I tried to make a baby soon after.  Because of our advanced ages and the fact that I know so many people who had trouble conceiving, I expected it to be a long ordeal.  We prepared ourselves for the possibility that we couldn't have kids at all.  Which I think I was fine with.  I've always been ambivalent about having kids.

It was weird trying to make a baby.  My whole life I've been obsessed with sex, and trying to get it, but at the same time I'd taken every precaution to NOT make a baby.  Taking away that precaution was strange and freeing.  Wait, you mean I'm allowed to get someone pregnant now?  On purpose???  It was like being told that suddenly crack cocaine was good for you.

Alas, we didn't get much practice.  We made a baby so quickly and easily that we didn't actually believe the first two pregnancy tests we took.  It was kind of ridiculous.

During the pregnancy I had no idea how I would take to fatherhood.  I just hoped I wouldn't hate it or resent my child.  What if I don't bond with it? What if it's ugly or annoying?

We had a beautiful baby boy in September, 2014.  I hate to be such a cliche, but holding him in my arms for the first time was a transformative moment.  I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I love being a dad.  It turns out I love my son and bonded with him.  Taking care of a baby is both easier and harder than I thought it would be.  But it never feels like work.  It's stressful and fun and exasperating and gratifying. But not really work.  I'm one of those obnoxious dads who posts videos and pictures of his baby boy all over Facebook.

And now, as our little toddler is drunk-walking around the house and getting into everything, we're getting ready for Fetus 2.0. We both like having siblings and wanted to give our boy someone to grow up with. The kids will be less than two years apart. The thought of having to take care of two kids under two is scary, but no less scary than having a kid was to begin with.  I'm sure I'll meet that challenge as I have all the others: with whining, humor, analytical detachment, and plenty of snarkicism.

Afterthoughts

Thanks, everyone, for your comments and emails about my decision to retire snarkbutt. It is truly gratifying to know that my obsessive little thoughts have had an impact on people.

I know it came as a shock to many people, and I'm sorry for that. I did start having these feelings last November, which I wrote about here:

This blog is becoming a monster that that can't be stopped. It's good to have an outlet like this, but I feel that it's out of balance, too important, and I'm not sure that it ultimately is good for me. It's eating up more and more of my time every day. I overshare and then feel bad about it. I don't know who is reading and there's this weird tension between wanting to stay small & anonymous and wanting to be popular. Having all my naked thoughts out on the blogosphere is like posting anonymous videos of my wang on youtube.

I've had a few days to consider shutting down the blog, and it feels like the right move. For two days now my creative energy hasn't been held hostage by all the things I plan to write here. (This post is actually spontaneous-- I hadn't thought about it until this morning.) It's actually sort of liberating.

I would like to emphasize that this decision is not about one girl (who I haven't even met yet.) She might have been the catalyst, but this is something I've been debating for a while. I think in order to move on with my life, I need to say goodbye to this blog. It keeps me in a frame of mind that's not healthy or balanced. I need to concentrate more on my real life.

This is not an end, but a beginning. I can't express how grateful I've been over the past years for all the new diverse people I've "met" through this blog. Now that the blog is ending, I can take many of those connections to the next level, through Facebook and email and my public blog. I'm not disappearing, just changing my focus.

Some time in the next week I will shut this down. After that I will start contacting or friending or sending links to all of you who have requested it. (Email buttsnark@yahoo.com if you want to be in the loop.)

Thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks for reading. I can't say that enough.

Retirement

Yesterday I realized that I have a potentially supremely embarrassing security hole in this blog. The profile name I used on one of my online dating sites is an obscure word that, if Googled, could lead the person back to this very blog. I had chosen that word the last time I internet dated, about 1.5 years ago. Over the three years of the life of this blog, the word appears in exactly two comments (not even in the text of any posts), but that's enough to put it as the 6th or 7th search result on Google.

I realized with a sinking feeling that if any of my online potentials Googled my profile name, she could discover this blog. And that would just be... way too much information. I have already removed the two comments with that word, but Google has a memory, so it could take quite a while for the search results to change, if ever.

I could change my profile name on the dating site (and probably will), but my dilemma is this: If I change my profile name, it will look fishy to the women I'm currently corresponding with. Suddenly they're receiving messages from a name they don't recognize. It looks suspicious and might draw more attention than if I just let it be.

There's one person in particular I'm worried about. She's sent me two messages so far, and they are super clever and very funny. This one has more potential than any other woman I've pursued since K. So I don't want to blow it.

And there's really only one surefire way to guarantee she doesn't see this blog: shut it down.

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It's actually something that's been on my mind for a while. This blog is taking up too much of my life. About 70% of my social interactions take place through my snarkbutt identity. It feels way out of balance. I'm not getting work done (both professional and personal.) Maybe it's time for me to step back. Put my energies into a new project.

The other thing is that I'm tired of worrying about all the security risks involved in staying anonymous. I've always known that the security around this blog is not airtight. If Snarkbutt ever decided to run for president, people would figure out my real identity. There are enough clues. I even had a scare last summer that K could find it. (She did, but respected my privacy enough not to read it.)

This blog has been my best friend for 3 years. It's helped to get me through my divorce, countless post-divorced dates, and my first post-divorce heartbreak. I don't know what I would have done without it. But three years is a long time in the life of a blog. I've written 490 posts. Received 1,101 comments. Had 21,179 page hits since last July. (Thanks, Blogger stats!) I've made dozens of friends through this blog, and the prospect of leaving all that behind is sad and terrifying.

But I also know that this blog can't last forever. In some ways, it's holding me back from my ultimate goal, which is to find a mate. As someone pointed out when I was writing about the breakup with K, I shouldn't ever let my next girlfriend read this blog. It would be like reading my love letters to an ex. And I feel uncomfortable blogging about potential or future mates. It feels like I'm violating their privacy, even though I try to be careful not to reveal too much about them. Or I'm violating my own privacy. In order to really find the kind of love I want, I need to let this blog go.

*****

So I'm not sure what's next. I could continue to write, but just make it password-protected. But I'm not crazy about that idea. I think I'm ready to move on.

Maybe this will be an opportunity to concentrate more on my public blog. Create a name for myself in the blogging world where I don't have to hide who I am. The public blog won't be as personal or as revealing or soul-searching as this one. And I suspect many of my divorce/heartbreak blogfriends won't want to follow me there, since it's much more about politics and religion and books and stupid stuff (from a liberal atheistic Unitarian bent) than examining my own neuroses.

One big advantage is that I could finally Facebook friend many of my blogfriends without worrying about the security risks.

I'd like to give people the opportunity to read what's going on, but at some point in the next week or so I will probably close down this blog. I can't say what will happen after that, if I'll be able to make a clean break or if I'll need to wean myself away. I may continue to read and comment on other blogs, and I may not. If I do, I may do that as snarkbutt or with my public profile. I just don't know how this all will play out.

If you want to stay in touch or see my public blog or friend me on FB, send an email to buttsnark@yahoo.com ("snarkbutt" was already taken. WTF? Actually there are several others out there who aren't me.)

I thank all of you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking this journey with me. I will really miss snarkbutt and all his bloggy friends, but it's time to retire him.

Momentum

Sometimes it feels like I live a completely different life than everyone around me. Like I'm playing by different rules or observing different social norms. Like I'm a robot or alien or someone who just doesn't belong here.

This thought is brought to you by online dating, where all manner of behavior exists. Where you can greet someone and they just flat out ignore you. Or you're in the middle of a conversation and they just disappear.

Or the conversation is so random and stalled that it has the same rhythm as a Youtube video that keeps stopping because it has to load. You only get short snippets at a time. As you can imagine, it's hard to get any kind of momentum going in that environment.

I'm the type of person who needs momentum. All this starting and stopping, starting and stopping, is not good for me. It's not how I interact with people. Or it's not how I prefer to interact with people, anyway.

And it's not just with dating that I experience this lack of momentum. Even among my friendships, it's hard to build up a head of steam. I might go out with an acquaintance or new friend and we'll have a great time, but then due to schedules, lethargy, and lack of initiative, it will be a month before we have any contact again. By then whatever connection we had will have lost momentum.

This is why being single doesn't work for me. Why I need someone primary in my life. I need someone who I can gain some momentum with. This lifestyle doesn't meet my needs.

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Despite that, I had two attitude tweaks this weekend that might lead to a New and Improved Snark.

The first is this: much of my discomfort at being single stems from the fear that I'll never find another partner. My biggest fear is that I'll be alone the rest of my life. But. If I knew-- 100% knew for sure-- that this state is not permanent and that one day I will Find Love again, then, yeah, I might be able to just enjoy this time to myself. I might be able to embrace my singlehood.

So, why not just assume it? Whether or not it's true, if I can improve the quality of my life and attitude merely by believing something, why not just believe it? And it's not like I'm deluding myself by believing something that's ridiculous. Like, that I'll never die or that I have the largest penis in the world. It's something that, objectively speaking, probably will happen. So why not just assume it will, and make myself a whole lot more comfortable?

The second insight is this. I've been complaining a lot lately that I haven't made much progress on my writing projects. Well, if I were to start dating someone, those projects might really stall, especially my loveography in fairy tale form. It will be a whole lot harder to write about my Quest for Love once I'm in a happy relationship.

So maybe I'm single for a reason. This is supposed to be the period in my life when I'm creative and write.

*****

After a day and a half with this new attitude, online dating already threatens to interrupt my writing momentum. A new player has entered the scene. Someone local and cute and very, very funny. Even funnier than K was, based on the one message she sent me.

We'll see if we can get any momentum going.

On Tennis Shoes and Cookbooks

In the five years that I've been playing tennis, I've been on a quest to find the perfect pair of shoes. Because I run around the court so much, I put a lot of stress on my feet. I've tried dozens of shoes, but they never quite fit right. Each new pair will do something bad to my feet: cause blisters or callouses or turf toe, always in a different location. (And lest you think these are insignificant maladies, it was a case of blisters that caused my wife to leave me.) It always takes me a while of experimenting with different sock thicknesses to get used to a new pair of shoes. I own six different kinds of athletic socks!

So I was really happy last summer when I found the perfect pair of tennis shoes. They didn't give me any of the issues the other shoes did.

The problem is, tennis shoes wear out, and as the treads on my perfect shoes wore down, I needed to replace them. I went online, only to discover that that model isn't made anymore. There was only one pair left (in my size!) so I ordered it. But when they arrived, they looked like this:

Obviously, that was not the shoes I ordered.

I got in touch with the store I ordered them from, and they tried to correct the mistake, but it turned out that my perfect shoes were mistakenly sent out of the country, and it was impossible to get them back. They refunded my money. But I really wanted the shoes.

Now I can't find that model anywhere online. They don't exist. They have been lost forever. I tried to find the next iteration of the shoe (They were called Passing Shot III, so maybe there would be a Passing Shot IV.) Nope, that only exists in the women's model. So then I went to the shoe company, Reebok, to see if they sold any tennis shoes (ie. shoes for playing tennis) at all. Nope, apparently they've stopped making those altogether.

So then I did a very stupid thing. I found a random pair of tennis shoes online and ordered them. They came this week, and last night I tried them out at the tennis workout. They looked good, but they felt like I was wearing boxes on my feet. Uncomfortable, painful, and just plain wrong. I had to leave the workout early, and when I got home I saw that the second-to-last toe on my right foot had been rubbed raw. The skin is coming off.

Sigh. So I found the perfect model of tennis shoe, but they stopped making it, the one pair that was left has been lost forever, and trying other shoes that I found online is a disaster.

Hmm. I wonder if that could be an analogy for anything else in my life?

Nope, can't think of anything.

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A year ago Christmas I got a new cookbook. It's an awesome cookbook. Two out of every three recipes I make from it are amazing. It is one of the main reasons that I've got so excited about cooking in the past year. The recipes are easy and don't require too much effort or too many complicated ingredients, but it does teach me new things. It's exactly my speed. It may not be the best cookbook for everyone, but it's perfect for me.

In the past year I've tried other cookbooks. But the recipes I make from them don't turn out great, or they're too advanced, or too simple, or just not very satisfying.

I think it's clear which is the cookbook for me.

Again, I wish I could apply that metaphor to something else in my life. Can anyone think of something?

Anyone? Anyone?

*****

ONLINE DATING UPDATE: This has been a rough week. I've gotten into a rhythm where I find a new profile, get really excited about it, craft and send a brilliant message, imagine all the ways it would be fun to date the person described, then slowly deflate as no response is forthcoming. Being ignored by several women at once makes the loneliness even worse.

Online dating combines the worst aspects of shopping and love. It's like going to a store with no price tags and seeing a bunch of things you like, but when you try to buy something you're told, "Sorry, you can't afford that."

Here are the current players:

#2: Divorced, 38, no kids, restaurant manager. Every time I think she's lost interest and dropped me, she resurfaces. She'll send a one-sentence message, not answer any of the questions I asked, and tell me how busy she is. Maybe so, but it's hard for me to shake the feeling that I'm not one of her first choices.

#4: Mystery Girl Sighting! Divorced single mother, 23, student at my college. Yesterday she walked past my desk for the first time in months. She was very friendly and smiley and made a comment about the weather, but didn't say anything about seeing me on Match.

She sat down in a chair across the room, facing my desk, and worked on her laptop. (Again, she hasn't done this in months.) I don't know if she expected me to come over and talk to her, but I didn't. Should I have? I still don't know if she's seen the message I sent to her on Match. According to the site, she still hasn't logged on in a month, but you also get an email when someone sends you a message, so she could have seen that. It seems like too much of a coincidence that she would come into the library just a few days after I sent her that message, but maybe it is just that. For now, Mystery Girl remains a mystery.

#5: On Monday I discovered a new candidate. 31, single, grad student. According to Match, we were a "100% match." I really liked what she wrote on her profile, it was clever and witty. Her pictures are also very cute. My only concern is that she may be a little too tall for me. I composed a message to her on Monday, but because it was that odious heart-shaped holiday I waited til Tuesday to send it. She responded, just to say she was really busy and would write more in a few days. Still waiting for that longer message.

In the meantime, I was telling a friend about this, and it turns out he knows her! He sublet her apartment over the summer. Huh. Small world. He said that she was indeed really friendly and cute. Hopefully I can meet her in person and tell her about our mutual connection.

There have been two others I've approached on OKCupid, but neither has responded. One lady approached me on OKCupid, and we've exchanged a couple of short messages, but I don't know if I should give her a number or not. She's not really my type, and her profile says something like "Sorry, guys, I'm spoken for." Then why are you online trolling for guys? Also, her profile pic shows her sticking her tongue out. I'm not a fan of "wacky" profile pics like that. Let me see what you look like, not how silly you can be.

Also, not sure where this fits into the number system, but I saw that FutureLibrarian (FL) is still on OKCupid. Remember her? She's the one I had an intense one-week online affair with, but when we met in person, she wasn't interested. But then K swept in to salve my wounded ego, and the rest was history. So, anyway, FL is still there, 15 months later, so this morning I sent her a message just to see if she'd like to hang out as friends. She's also divorced and single and around my age, and I could always use more local friends like that. She hasn't responded yet.

So that's it. More updates later.

Dating Geography

I thought I was going to take a day off from trying to contact new online prospects, but today I was absolutely compelled to write to a girl on OKCupid who seems like a great match on paper. She lives 100 miles away from me.

When I consider all the different women I've tried to contact on online dating sites, I realize I have created an huge geographic ring around Snarktown.

In driving time, there's one an hour South of Snarktown. One an hour West. Several about 2.5 hours North. A few 2 hours Northeast. One two hours East. And one 3 hours Southeast. That's six surrounding cities. And, of course, a few who actually live in Snarktown.

The nerd in me is fascinated by this dating ring.

Premature

I think one of the things that makes it so hard for me to get over K is that she ended things while we were still in love. Our relationship was cut down in its prime. It never got a chance to run its course.

There very well may be some significant dealbreakers between us. If we lived in the same town, maybe we would have got on each other's nerves or drove each other crazy. But we never got a chance to find out, because she got scared and ended it prematurely. So for the rest of my life she will exist as this ideal, the One Great Love that didn't get a chance to realize its potential.

There were so many things I wanted to do with K, but we never got to them. The moments we had together were amazing, but they were too few and too short. Ten months is not long enough for a long-distance relationship of such significance.

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SnarkEx did the same thing. We only had 2.5 years of marriage. That's a tiny little baby marriage. She hardly gave it a chance. When she left, I heard through the grapevine that she told people it was a "long time coming," but that was news to me. Maybe in 5 or 10 years I would have seen how wrong we were for each other. But I wasn't ready for it to end so soon. Here again, it felt like she was killing something good in its prime. (Although now I can see the advantage of our premature divorce, because it led me to K.)

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I suppose I could talk myself into the fact that K wasn't right for me, but that means accepting some really unpleasant truths. If K wasn't right for me, despite how madly, stupidly, wholly I adored her, then how could I ever expect to find the right one? I'm 39 years old and I've loved 5-6 women. If none of them were It, then maybe I have to give up the idea of One True Love. It's silly to be 39 and talking about the Love of My Life. My life is half over. The best I can hope for now is my Next Love, the Love of Right Now, the Love That Will Probably Die in a Few Years Because They All Do. Which doesn't quite have the same ring of destiny.

This is becoming my Year Of Panic. I'm terrified of turning 40 and being single. Which is not a very good strategy for finding a mate, I know. The thing is, if this story does have a happy ending (which so many of them do), then I'll feel really foolish for being so panicky and whiny the whole time I was single. I will look back at this time and regret that I couldn't enjoy it.

But.

That only counts if I actually do find someone. There are no guarantees. The older I get, the more my options shrink. And they were pretty limited to begin with.

*****

I'm not quite as pissy or downtrodden as I was on Monday. It seems that that was a 48-hour mood. I've gone back into diversion mode: NOT thinking about how the life I lead is not the one I want, and the only way to change that is to find a needle in a haystack.

Yesterday I stumbled on OKCupid, the last dating site I'd used before I met K. Although it wasn't my intention, I ended up reactivating my profile and playing around the site for hours, answering questions and viewing profiles. It's a good distraction, and once again I'm excited about possibilities. The fun thing about OKCupid is that they ask you all these questions and then compare the answers with potential mates. So you can see, mathematically, how you match up with other people. It's great for a numbers nerd like me.

The good and bad thing about the questions, though, is that a LOT of them revolve around sex-- sexual habits and sexual preferences. It's a topic I love dearly, except that it gets me all excited to see, for example, that a girl I'm interested in likes to be woken up in the middle of the night to get it on. Only, it's not necessarily ME that she wants to do that with. It's some hypothetical partner who is, overwhelmingly likely, NOT me. These questions put sex on my brain long before I'm to that point. Talk about being premature! I'm hyper-sexualized to begin with, I don't need a dating site to get me in the mood.

On the Match front, I decided it's time to resume my strategy of approaching one new woman a day until I get some more responses. All my active connections seem to have fizzled out. I did get a one-sentence message from #2 this morning, just saying how super busy she's been the past four days. She didn't answer any of my questions. I don't know what to do with that. I haven't heard from Mystery Girl, but her profile says she hasn't been on the site in a month, so I have no idea if she ever got my message, or ever will.

I sent a message to a new lady yesterday (#5?), and she responded, thanking me and saying she was really busy, but would write a longer response in a few days. I appreciate the note, but I don't think I'm going to put my online dating on hold while I wait. I worry about getting too many conversations going at once, because I don't want to get into a situation where I'm carrying on with multiple women at the same time. Somehow it almost feels like "cheating." Which is stupid, because I know that's how it works. It's just not how I work.

Now I know why I'm not making any progress on my writing projects. I'm too preoccupied with online dating sites. Especially now that I'm on two of them. It really is like a full-time job, looking for a date.

I'm not getting anything done and my brain is scattered all over the place. Is it possible to be overwhelmed and lonely at the same time?