I never thought I’d be part of a marriage. I also never thought I’d live to be thirty. The truth is, both events caught me off guard. I had a lot of relationships before this one– like a lot, a lot. I had done a lot of dating and had experienced most things imaginable as far as human bodies are concerned. But this experience, this feeling, was a first.
Head Over Heels
I should pause here for a moment. I promised you a “tell-all” blog and I do still plan to deliver. That being said, this is one topic where I will hold back a little, out of love and respect for my ex-wife and our marriage. Nonetheless, some personal context is necessary. I want to share how my fundamental beliefs about human sexuality shifted and set the stage for the idea that would become DatingPerfect.
Now back to the torrid romance: For me, the desire to propose was not only rooted in deep love, admiration, and attraction to this beautiful, sexy, smart, and hilarious woman. It was also, for the first time, a basic and primal procreative drive. I knew that we would make amazing children together. As a result, I was brimming with a type of optimism I had never before felt. Those feelings led me to love her even more deeply, and I believe she me. We were off to the races.
The Marriage Paradigm
It was only years later that I realized I pursued marriage for other reasons, as well. I was working from a playbook that I had not written, by authors I never necessarily agreed with. Whatever we want to call that invisible force, it’s pervasive. Perhaps it’s based in patriarchy, certainly influenced by organized religion, and steered, or at least encouraged, by legislation, taxation, and hypercapitalism. Within my version of it, there seemed little room for variation or self-expression. Whether this was real or self-imposed, I can’t say.
In the end, I found I was trying to fit myself into a paradigm opposed to who I was and what I wanted to be. And, after eight years, we decided to split up. We somehow did this in a supportive and loving manner, an experience contrary to every example of divorce I had ever witnessed. We tried to do it with full consciousness, ironically even more than we’d brought to the table when we got married. In the end, she had often wanted me to be more present in our moments together, while I was looking ahead. Ultimately, had I done both of those things – looked inside and looked ahead – our course would have been much different.
Thinking Outside One Box
In the post-breakup aftermath, I really started to rethink my ideas about sex and love. What I continue to learn about myself is that I’m a seemingly inexhaustible ‘handful for a partner to manage.’ I have a big personality and a lot of love to share. As I began to experiment more with sexual and emotional relationships, I started to identify more and more with “Other” as my relationship preference. And I could no longer pretend that I fit into the dominant paradigm of sexuality. You know, the one where monogamy and marriage are the end goals. At the same time, I love having deep and meaningful relationships that expand over time into the depths of myself that can’t be reached via casual encounters.
As I began to unpack and process being single, I started to gain some unique perspective. With a clean slate and a new start, I wanted to get back in the dating game, which had begun its dramatic electronic shift. So I started trying to find the best dating sites, or at least the best ones for me. The experience was abstract, overwhelming, unsatisfying, and messy. The experience of IRL dating didn’t seem to translate into a Google search. I wanted to solve the technology problem, not just for myself but for other frustrated daters. And so the idea that became DatingPerfect was conceived.
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