My nineteenth anniversary will be here in a week and a half.
So what’s so exceptional about that in Mormon Utah? Just this: I have a mail-order husband. He has a mail-order bride.
Nineteen years ago, there weren’t any dating sites online; in fact, there wasn’t any online to put them on.
So I bought a copy of the Mensa directory and went systematically through every male in the book, looking at the coded information for men within five years one way or the other of my age, widowed or divorced (because a man who is 40 and has never married has something wrong with him), shared my religion, shared at least three interests, and was in biorhythm sync with me at lest half the time.
I wound up with ten names.
I prepared letters to each of them and, despite my fourteen-year-old daughter’s “Mom, you’re not going to mail those letters. Mom, you’re not going to mail those letters. Mom, you’re not going to mail those letters,” I mailed them.
I got four responses: a gay man, a man who had been excommunicated for being caught in bed with his sister-in-law, a teacher who had been in the Peace Corps in Africa and wanted to go back to Africa and “Gee, you must make a lot of money writing mysteries.” The fourth was Tom.
I sat down in the living room laughing as I read the letter from Tom.
When my father asked what was so funny, I said, “Daddy, I think I’m going to marry this man.”
Ten years ago online dating services still weren’t available.
But my favorite college student, out of all the students I taught, met a man from Australia on a science fiction website. They were married five months later. Heidi moved to Australia and so far, has lived happily ever after. I met her husband a few months ago, and I think she’s going to continue to live happily ever after.
Two years ago, online dating services were going great guns. A neighbor of ours, getting ready to move to Alaska and knowing the male-female ratio there, signed up for the dating service. He and his bride headed for Alaska two weeks after getting married and are still there.
What do I think of online dating services? I think good ones are great.
I often hear people say “I fell in love at first sight.” But they didn’t. What they fell into was lust. Good arranged marriages during Medieval and Renaissance times worked better than most marriages spawned in our modern age - online or offline.
A good dating service can do just what I did, only a lot faster because it can use the computer. It can match people for what they identify as important to them. It can screen out pairs that look surface compatible, but have underlying incompatibilities.
When Tom and I married, we were not yet in love with each other. But we knew that we had enough things in common that we could build a workable marriage. That is what we did, and we grow more in love with each other every day.
An online dating service can’t provide someone you can love at first sight, but it can provide someone with whom you have enough in common that you can build a workable marriage. You just have to do the work.
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