Today Is ...

February 15, 2024, at home

Today (February 15, 2024) is Singles Awareness Day. National Singles Day is in September and is listed as celebrated on the 22nd, the 24th, or the 26th.

I was without female companionship from age 20 to age 40 (February 1982 to November 2000) and not by choice, so I have been quite intimate with the (good and bad) aspects of single life. (Please, no pity.)

During my lifetime, I was rejected hundreds and hundreds of times by women. This includes 414 rejections by women in a period of 18 months with a video dating service in New Jersey in the mid-1990s. Almost all of these women said "unattractive" was the reason for not wanting to meet with me for a date. I was able to go on a few dates, but when around 400 women described me as "unattractive," I will admit that I started to believe it. 🙂

Several years after I stopped doing the video dating, I read in a newspaper that a man was suing the dating service to get his money back because there weren't enough Jewish women from which to choose. LOL

When I moved to Florida in 1998, I constructed a personal ad on America Online (AOL). It attracted my future wife. After dating her for about five years, I was finally able to get married for the first and only time on February 4, 2006, which was 22 days before my 45th birthday.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. On November 10, 2024, we will celebrate the 24th anniversary of our first date. I dated my wife for so long because I was waiting for her to dump me. Obviously, she never did.

I must say that it certainly was worth the long, difficult, heartaching, heartbreaking wait of my romantic "dry spell." My wife is absolutely wonderful, and I am definitely blessed and fortunate to have had her in my life for so many years. I think that being alone for such a long time has made me appreciate her even more.

February 15, 2024, at home

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I liked those spiced gumdrops.

February 15, 2024, at home

My wife is from Toronto.