[Dating Papers]

So,,, this guy and I had met on Jdate and had been IMng and emailing through AOL. It had probably been about two weeks when we finally agreed to meet. My suggestion was to meet on the beach, living in South Florida the beach is always a best bet, when he stated that he had to go to Montreal for a wedding. His flight left at 7pm that day and he invited me to go with him. I admit that it was a little out there for a first date, but he agreed to sleep in separate beds, I promised nothing sexually and because I had never been to Montreal I agreed to go. He told me he would pick me up in two hours.



Of course, like all jdate men, he looked nothing like his picture. He was more round then he was tall, but my woman’s intuition told me he was harmless. With my best friend knowing all the details, off I went to the airport to start my “first date.”



Needless to say, the date turned out to be awful. The man was so big, he bought a row of seats because he needed an extra one. Upon our arrival in Montreal, we went to his friends house and had some drinks. As we left, he bumped down the stairs rather then falling due to his girth. A late snack for him turned out to be a doublesize lumberjack breakfast. Nausea, rather than romance was the only thing entering my mind that night. What should have been a delightful walk in Montreal’s downtown area, turned out to be an eating fest for him. I really did put forth a good-faith effort. I really did try. But, that night had me on the phone with my best friend trying to figure out a way to get home.



The next morning I concocted a story that assured me getting home by the evening hours. I told him that I had an emergency, I must get home and there was nothing I could do. With him paying my change of ticket fee, and after a stop at a famous deli, I was finally on my way back to the states.



A few months later, I get a knock on my door in the early morning hours. I am “being served.” I take the papers, call my father (an attorney) and ask him what it means. My father tells me that Montreal man is suing me for the cost of the trip. I laugh. My father explains it is not funny. I laugh harder. I give my father the papers that day and begin to tell my story of how I got sued for a bad first date.



The kicker? A few weeks later, a letter arrives in my mailbox from Judge Judy. They had seen the papers in court files and want to know if I would like to appear on her show. Appear on Judge Judy because I was sued for a bad first date? At that point, I decided I was done with Jdate, Montreal Man, and blind first dates to foreign countries. I never answered Judge Judy, Montreal Man did not win the suit, but I kept Judge judy’s letter as proof for those who are skeptical…

Recently I got a “flirt” from a relatively cute JDater, who was somewhat younger than I am. After exchanging a few emails and a 3 hour phone call,we decided to meet. I decided to forego my usual meet for coffee first meeting (since our phone call had such amazing chemistry). and invited her to dinner, she suggested a relatively romantic restaurant on the ocean. When I arrived I was suprised to see just how hot she was, much more attractive then her picture. The date was going ok, we obviously didn’t have the chemistry from the phone call, but I was rolling with it. I got paged during dinner and she was shocked that 1. I really was a doctor (she was used to JDate men lying about their careers?) and 2> i would get paged during dinner. I went to answer the call privately and came back to find my date face down in her linguini. Keeping myself from laughing, I gently shook her awake. She apologized by telling me that she had a Jdate (also a first date) last night and they had spent all night having sex (and giving me details) and had to go to work all day so she was exhausted. She was telling me all this with linguini hanging out of her nose. it was surreal. When she finally excused herself to go clean herself up, I had to break out laughing, followed by virtually every other patron in the restaurant. All I could do was to shrug and say “first date”.

I once saw and contacted a woman from outside the U.S.; let’s call her Helga living in Big Dangerous City. We traded Hotmail IM addresses and I tried to chat with her, but she was very non-responsive, so I dropped the effort. If somebody doesn’t respond to me, I don’t push the matter. Some guys are semi-stalkers, but I can easily take “no” for an answer. To quote Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, “There’s always a bigger fish.”

A few months later, in April, I saw another woman on Jdate from the same Big Dangerous City. Like the first, she was in a literary sort of work that appealed to me, and her pictures had that shtetl-zaftig look that drives me totally loco. You know the drill; we started to chat and exchanged emails. Let’s call this second woman Ingrid. Ingrid gave me her last name and email address, and it was the same last name and almost the same email as Helga’s! I had to say something, so I wrote I had been in touch with another woman with the same last name and a similar email. Ingrid said they were sisters. I said we weren’t in touch and it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.

Nothing happened with Ingrid, either, so I dropped the matter. Four months later, in an extremely rare action for me, I tried again with Ingrid and this time we connected much better. I don’t know what made the difference; perhaps she had been involved with somebody before, or she took another look at me and decided I was good green-card material. She badly wanted to relocate to the U.S.

For whatever reason, we chatted a lot, and she invited me to Big Dangerous City. I have had invitations before to visit women in distant locations, and this one came when I was unusually open to responding positively. My post-divorce finances were shaping up, I had vacation time, and the domestic dating scene was in snooze mode. I said yes and agreed on Thanksgiving week.

I started to get inklings of lifestyle differences. We chatted with webcams and she constantly smoked, a turn-off to me. She said she liked to smoke pot, something else that goes against my Calvinistic grain. Then I got her resume, as part of my knight-in-shining-armor effort to help her find a job in the U.S. She entered the work force in the same year that I did. But that made no sense, because based on our Jdate profiles she was four years younger than me (we’re both in our 40s). That discrepancy really rang alarm bells, but I didn’t say anything. I already had my non-refundable ticket.

Soooooo, with friends and relatives declaring I’d gone totally insane, I flew for nine hours to Big Dangerous City. Soon after we met, Ingrid admitted she was really in her late 40s, a year older than me, not younger. She had knocked 5-6 years off her profile and evidently had no intention of telling me. She smoked endlessly. The week was a mixed bag of experiences, with many good memories laced with underlying “what’s next” tension.

I finally met sister Helga on a Friday night, the day before I left, when the sisters’ family gathered for Shabbat services at Chabad (they really are everywhere!). Helga looked far less attractive than her (evidently old) profile photos, and a nasty streak in her personality oozed through.

Saturday night in a pouring rainstorm Ingrid drove me to Big Dangerous City International Airport. We both had strong, mostly unstated emotions about the week and what, if anything, the future might hold. We talked about the sisters’ relationship and Ingrid admitted that she didn’t contact me any more in April because Helga told her I was a pain in the ass who only wanted to chat online.

“That’s not true!” I protested. “As soon as Helga gave me her phone number I called her.” This news stunned Ingrid—she never knew I had actually talked to her sister. For proof of my responsiveness, I pointed out that I called Ingrid as soon as she gave me her phone number. That’s the way I am. How these revelations played out later between the two sisters I don’t know. Something tells me the “pain in the ass” excuse wasn’t the whole story. We shared an emotional farewell at the airport, having talked about her visiting me a few months later, around Passover.

That night in the rain was the end, not the beginning. Another visit never happened. As soon as I returned to the U.S. our chats became much cooler and less frequent. Within two months they ended completely. I sent her a birthday e-card that she opened, but I never got a reply. Ingrid added two years to her profile age, although it still falls years short of reality. For a while her profile said she lived in various beach towns in California, but then she switched back to Big Dangerous City. I suppose the potential green-card providers out there didn’t appreciate her deceptions.

Ingrid, Helga, and I all remain on Jdate. I recently looked at Helga’s profile for the first time in a year and learned that she, not Ingrid, is now living in the U.S.—in the same big city where I work. Helga has not contacted me.

I get along well with women from outside the New York area. Imagine my delight when I got an email from a woman who, like me, is a writer and also a native of Texas. We arranged to meet at a cafe on a very cold night and got along great, for the most part. It turned out she worked for a major rival of my accounting firm. We played Jewish geography, discovering that we may be distantly related. One odd note was that she was very eager to see documents from my company, such as speeches from the CEO. I told her she could find what’s publicly available on our website.

I found one woman in Westchester that caught my attention, so I sent her an email. Nothing happened, and she hadn’t read the message. Then I saw her online and tried again. This time we chatted and she invited me to call her, so I did. She had an odd intensity. She mentioned she had been off Jdate for six months. That’s not unusual, but she seemed to want me to ask why. I finally did, and the answer was not the typical one: “I was incarcerated.” She proceeded to spend the next half-hour stridently outlining the miscarriage of justice that led to her to take a break from Jdate in the Big House. I did not call her after that.