YOU’RE NOT MY TYPE – how my idea of the right man changed in my late 40s

I was 48, single, teaching Pilates full-time while raising three sons, ages 11, 14, and 16. At the time, my finances were tenuous at best. In 2008, my ex-husband and I lost our entire net worth when the business we had invested everything in closed because of the economic downturn. But that’s another story. This one is about love.

One day, during a private Pilates lesson, my favorite client—someone I deeply respected—gave me a hard look and told me I needed to get serious about finding someone to help me raise my sons. I remember that moment clearly because it jolted me into reality. Until then, I hadn’t taken dating very seriously. She was my sounding board for dating highlights, funny anecdotes, and epic fails. I wondered whether I had overshared or undersold the ones on my roster at the time. If I had been honest with myself, I felt unworthy of love, so I dated my type—the type I had divorced, the type that wasn’t working for me, the type I would never be vulnerable with.

The guy I was seeing texted once a week to suggest a weekday night, but never a weekend. I found it more amusing than irritating, and I called him out on it a few times, but I kept seeing him because I took the relationship as seriously as he did. When he gave me a Yankee candle for my birthday and thought it was a good gift, I knew I needed to move on. I gave the men I dated nicknames, which, looking back, must have put some distance between us so I wouldn’t feel too much and get hurt again. There was the contractor, the tugboat captain, the fireman, and the list went on. None of them excited me, and my kids didn’t care for a few of them, which was an immediate deal-breaker. But I consistently found myself drawn to physically attractive men who were emotionally unavailable, and ninety percent of them were Scorpios. I don’t know what that means, but I feel compelled to tell you.

While sitting on the bleachers at one of my son’s water polo games, a divorced dad and I got to chatting about dating. He mentioned he was seeing someone he really liked and had met her on a dating website called Chemistry.com. To me, those websites were for desperate people. I had plenty of dates, perhaps too many, which I justified because my therapist had told me it was okay to date multiple men until I found the one. The problem was that all the men I dated fit the box I’d put my type in. After the water polo game, I went home and looked up Chemistry.com on my computer. All the while, my client’s advice reverberated in my head—I needed to get serious about dating. Would using this app be the move I needed to finally find someone to share my life with? I figured the people on the app were looking for a serious relationship, and I told myself I was ready for that, too.

The website offered one free month, and after that I’d be charged a fee I couldn’t afford, so I committed to giving it a month. Chemistry.com’s premise was that you took an elaborate personality test that categorized you as an architect, a contractor, or a builder. There were a few more categories, but those are the ones I remember. Once you completed the test, the site matched an architect with a contractor or a builder, and so on. The premise was to match people who weren’t exactly alike; instead, it paired people whose personalities complemented each other.

I enlisted my oldest son to create my profile and choose the photos, figuring he’d be better with this sort of technology than I would. He picked basic, flattering photos, not too sexy or revealing, and almost all of them proudly showed that I had three sons. One photo in particular had been taken on Mother’s Day. The four of us sat at the counter in a Beverly Hills department store restaurant for lunch, where I had taken them for pretend shopping.

Within moments, I was matched with a television producer in Santa Monica and an attorney in the valley; both were far from where I lived. I told myself I’d give it my all for the free thirty days. The television producer had lied about his age by a lot, which was totally fine, but when I called him out on it on date four, he wouldn’t come clean, and that bothered me. This was a guy you could Google the year he graduated from film school, so it seemed kind of weird that he wouldn’t fess up. After that, I stopped seeing him. By then, I had gone to the valley to meet the lawyer, who lived in a large, McMansion-type home in a development. The weird part about the house was that there was a baby nursery, but he didn’t have any kids. He said the previous owner had decorated it, but I still found it weird that he left it with the baby wallpaper and baby furniture, since he had apparently bought the house furnished. That one really liked me and filled my house with roses on Valentine’s Day. He gave me a navigation system for my car (I didn’t have one back then and was constantly getting lost). He was thoughtful, but I felt as though he was coming in a little hot with the love bombing. I wasn’t feeling any real connection, so when he asked me to go to a sex club, that gave me the perfect out.

That same week, another attorney appeared as a match, and this one lived in my neighborhood. I looked at his picture and couldn’t tell whether I thought he was handsome, and my first instinct was that I didn’t. He was bald, which was hard for me to get past, but something in his profile caught my attention: he’d last vacationed in Maine. I was from the East Coast, and that little tidbit intrigued me. I also figured he lived close by, so I had nothing to lose. I accepted the match, and the next day my brother called to say the website had auto-charged my debit card and overdrawn my account. Panicked, I messaged the lawyer my cell number, told him I was leaving the site, and begged the website for a refund.

The lawyer called my cell phone, and we chatted for a while. I had him laughing, which was my go-to for keeping things light in the stressful world of finding your soulmate. He told me he was super busy because his parents were in town for a few weeks, so he couldn’t see me for a while. I thought that was funny because I wasn’t desperate and had other dates lined up with my usuals. After a nice conversation, we agreed to connect soon and hung up. The next day, he invited me to dinner that night. I had plans with a friend, and I never do this, but I canceled on her and told him I was free for a date.

He offered to pick me up, which I guess isn’t what you’re supposed to do, but my creep radar wasn’t going off. He lived in my neighborhood, and I hated driving, so I gave him my address. The following day, I was leaving to take my oldest son to look at colleges, so I was busy washing his polo shirts and packing. The lawyer, Charlie, knocked on my door as I walked past the window to the right of the front door. He looked over, and I smiled as I passed by. Later, he told me that after a lot of online dating, he had braced himself for me to look less attractive than in my photos. Instead, he thought I was far more beautiful than the photos had portrayed. I didn’t know then that having my son create my profile was a clutch move because he is the ultimate reason I found my soulmate. Later, Charlie told me that when he saw me in the window, he said to himself, “Don’t fuck this up.”

I greeted Charlie at the door, introduced him to my kids, and kept asking myself whether I thought he was attractive. I couldn’t tell if he was chubby. I sized up his clothes and shoes and was super judgy about his overall appearance. I hate how shallow I was back then. He took me to a lovely restaurant, and throughout the meal, my youngest son called me repeatedly, nervous and wanting to know exactly when I would be home. Charlie seemed very understanding and kind about it, which I noted in my pea brain. During dinner, we agreed to share what happened in our marriages to get that out of the way. Since we had both been married and he had a son, we wanted to hear each other’s story. I was wary of men who were extra critical of their exes or did a lot of ex-bashing, because I figured if the person talked shit about their ex, he’d do the same about you. He was very thoughtful when he spoke about the demise of his marriage, and I could tell he had done a lot of personal work since his divorce.

Back in my driveway, we made out in his car for so long that the windows fogged. Time seemed to stop, and I felt happy and safe for the first time in ages. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed kissing him. Six months later, when my lease was up, we moved in together. Charlie asked me to marry him in our first month together, but I was still healing from my divorce and wasn’t ready. I also saw no point in messing with something that felt so perfect. Sixteen years later, we married, and my oldest son officiated the ceremony. By the way, Charlie is a Libra.