I’ve never visited one of those dating websites you see advertised on TV, but I would guess they try to pair you with someone who thinks, talks and acts pretty much the same way you do. And they probably figure it out by asking some pretty basic questions:
What is your religion, and how serious are you about it?
How likely are you to vote in the next election?
Would your perfect date be a night sitting in a smoky blues club or a day walking through a botanical garden?
The goal, I guess, is to try to find the perfect mirror version of yourself, in whatever gender floats your dating boat. After all, you’ll never get oil and water to mix no matter how many times you huddle them together, right? They’re just too fire-and-ice with each other. Sort of like all the metaphors I tried to mix in this paragraph.
I remember a contrary girl named Gail I met in college almost 50 years ago. I met her through my cousin, who lived on the same floor in the dorm. We both liked to dance, so I called Gail on a Wednesday and asked her to go dancing with me that Friday night.
She turned me down, though my cousin hinted she would accept.
I tried again the next week. Same result. I was majoring in rejection.
She probably had good reasons, because – from a dating profile point of view – we were like oil and water. Different religions, different political parties, different ideas of what would constitute the perfect date.
Her father was a business executive; mine was a steel mill laborer.
Her best childhood vacations were spent in resorts and hotels, slathering her arms and legs with suntan lotion; my fondest memories were of sleeping in a tent in the woods, scanning my arms and legs for ticks.
But – get this – my cousin said that wasn't the reason she turned me down. Gail rejected my advances because I had asked if she wanted to go out "this Friday," and she demanded at least a week's advance time for a date request, just for the sake of propriety. She thought it disrespectful for a guy to assume a girl didn't have a date for the upcoming weekend.
But this was the freewheeling '60s! It was a time of "if it feels good, do it," a philosophy I heartily embraced. Gail struck me as a bit stodgy and custom-bound, in a stuffy Victorian Miss Manners sort of way.
But, hey, she was still cute, possessing all the qualities so prized by a superficial young man. Besides, I had to respect a girl with the good sense to turn me down for a date.
And so, maybe just to irritate her, I called her back and said – in a voice dripping with sarcasm – “Would you like to go out with me on Friday, October 12, at 8 p.m., which would be nine days and three hours from now?”
She said, “I’d love to,” in a voice so pleasant and snarkproof it just irked me all the more.
On the dance floor, we moved together like a perfectly maintained Maserati, so we shared a lot of time in the Student Union ballroom on weekend nights when a band was playing.
But still, whenever the music fell silent and we had time to talk to each other, the differences echoed between us.
Oil and water – a dating-site red flag festooned with yellow caution tape and lit by flares, right?
We got married within a year and a half. To each other. I was 20. She was 19.
Our family and friends looked for a “baby bump.” There wasn’t one. It was just young love, sparked perhaps by the electrifying differences between us – which meant we were hopelessly doomed by dating-site standards.
We’re still married today, 47 years later.
As you might imagine, there have been some interesting conversations along the way, many of them ending with her proposing an “agree to disagree” truce.
Which I wouldn’t agree to.
Other head-buttings ended in compromise: She tolerated sitting in a smoky blues club every now and then (especially if I was playing in it that night), and I walked beside her through countless fragrant gardens, dutifully snapping photos of flowers whose names I can never remember.
And sometimes those compromises became willing changes, for both of us. After 10 years or so of canceling out each other’s votes in elections, I finally succeeded in convincing her which candidate was best. Conversely, she convinced me I should raise the toilet seat before each manly use, and then lower it to the “womanly ready position” when finished. (Guys, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether politics or potty-peace is more essential to a happy marriage. But if you don’t already know the answer, have fun cleaning a bachelor’s bathroom by yourself.)
I don’t know if you could call it a perfect marriage, because there is no such thing. But after almost a half-century of being together, neither of us can imagine spending our lives with any other partner. Seeking out a mirror-double to share your life would just be so … predictable. And boring.
More than that, I don’t see how either of us could have survived being paired with a mirror-image of ourselves. A household with two of me in it would be a disaster. I don’t think a home with two of her in it would do much better. We each brought something to the banquet the other didn’t have the recipe for.
Fortunately, we didn’t find each other through a dating website – which might have been impossible, when you consider the contrary answers we would have given to all of their questions. They probably would have said, “Sorry, you’re just too oil-and-water to get very far together.”
But try driving your Maserati without plenty of both oil and water in it, and you won’t make it out of the parking lot.
• Tom “T. R.” Kerth is a Sun City resident and retired English teacher from Park Ridge. He is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” He can be reached at trkerth@yahoo.com.