by Ed Dugan

Created on: October 31, 2008   Last Updated: February 25, 2012

Dating today is like watching a horse race, with the women going across the finish line and the men still at the starting gate. Dating, as I remember it, is gone forever. It has evolved from two people meeting and finding out if they are compatible, to an industry available on the internet at the click of a mouse. There are so many people wanting to help you find that significant other, the one that might turn into your soul mate, the one that will love you forever - for a fee of course. The dating services offer hi-tech matching without human judgement attached - your judgment that is. They will test you and they will test the other person and help prepare both of you to max the final. You can fill a small library with books that people have written telling you how to find that perfect match. I always wanted to survey those authors and owners of dating services to find out how many were divorced, separated or in jail for attempted murder of their spouses.

And once you have thoroughly exhausted every possible bit of advice they offer about dating you are still left with both feet planted firmly in mid-air. You want to know why? Because the "magic" that happens when you find just the right person, not necessarily to marry but to have fun with and share interests with can never be programmed. You can't swallow a "dating pill" and be assured you will always make the right decisions. Just as it is with other things in life, if you don't date, and make mistakes, you will never find out who that right person is because you'll never know who the wrong person is! Dates, even blind dates, should be a learning experiences for everyone involved, not a desperate search for a commitment.

But there is another much more important aspect to dating than what I have mentioned here. When I was dating I was considered fairly good looking by most women. Not Hollywood pretty but handsome enough to make other women flirt with me when I was on a date. My "running buddies" at the time had two theories about why I could date just about any single, available woman. The first theory was that, being Irish, I was gifted with a silver tongue and the second was that, in their opinion, I often dated women who did not measure up to their standards. Their standards were generally firmly rooted in the "T&A" category.

They never got close to the truth although there was something to be said about the silver tongue theory. The "gift" I had, and most men did not, was simply a different attitude

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