My match.com experience

When my son was about six months old in 1998, I packed up my possessions in Florida and with the help of my mom, drove a 28' rental truck (ironically noted it was the same size as the boat I lost after my fiance died) from Florida to Chicago. We were proud of our female trucker selves, making a cross-country trip in a truck nearly the size of a semi with an infant. We laughed and felt like brethren to the semi drivers we encountered along I-75 and other interstates along the way.

How I got to that point as a single mother of an infant feeling the need to leave the state I'd made my home and move back to my "birth home" is another story. I was so young too -- 25. See, my fiance was killed when I was seven months pregnant. I thought moving back home to my family (but away from my friends) would provide the emotional and family support I desperately needed at the time, as well as get me out of the environment where ghosts haunted my every move. I also thought my son needed the influence of grandparents in the way my grandparents positively influenced me growing up, and he wasn't going to get that living 900 miles away.

I initially moved in with my dad in the suburbs and found a job with an independent Chicago franchise of the medical software company I had worked for in Florida. My son's crib took up residence in my brother's old room, replacing the bed. I occupied my sister's old room and had ISDN installed. At 25 years old, I felt funny living with my dad. What if I wanted to date? Would someone judge me for "living with my parents" after I had been independent for so long? Plus, the commute from Crystal Lake to an office near O'Hare airport was brutal, costing me over two hours of each day that I would have rather spent with my baby.

So I bought a car (sold my impractical 2-seater Florida car to my babysitter before leaving) and rented a house the owners were waiting to bulldoze and rebuild in Park Ridge, IL, mere miles from my office. Also mere pennies from affordable for me -- I mean, the guy in the mansion across the street had a Ferrari day at his house! And then the loneliness set in and about a year after being widowed, I decided I was ready to date again. But I had a child and wasn't really in on the bar scene. So where does one in my situation meet people?

That's where the relatively new-at-the-time site match.com came in. I lived the internet life, so sure, why not? I'd been on CompuServ since 1994. I designed a website for the ticketing software company I worked for in 1995. I frequently inhabited IRC chat rooms. How different could it be?

Vastly.

I signed up and set up my profile. The first few potential matches did nothing for me and I didn't even grace them with a response. One, however, caught my eye. The guy's photo was gorgeous and his profile was perfect. Until that point, I had not sent anyone a message, only received (and rebuffed) them. But this one... I summoned my courage and sent out a feeler message.

We spent the next several weeks chatting on the phone every night after my son was in bed. He was funny, charming and a little bold. Eventually we set up a first date. He said he'd take me to the restaurant on the top floor of the Hancock building in Chicago. I mean, wow! Fancy! So I dropped my son of at my mom's and squeezed myself into my old homecoming dress for a fancy night out on the town in the windy city. I had given him my address to come pick me up.

So I applied makeup I hadn't done in a year. I dressed up. And then I sat at my kitchen counter on my laptop and eagerly waited my first date in a year, jumping every time headlights swept across my living room. But they all drove on by. And time ticked on.

He didn't show up. He didn't answer his phone. And he had my home address. And I had a baby to protect. After a couple hours, paranoia set in and I fled to my mom's house and spent the night there, shedding the dress, and suddenly afraid to return to my "grown up" rental in the near 'burbs of Chicago. So *this* was what I had been warned about the internet.

The guy never answered his phone again. I became pretty confident his profile pic was a magazine model scan. But nothing bad ever happened from it. He just disappeared. Eventually I got sick of the Chicago winter and traffic and not being close enough to family for that help I thought I'd get, so I returned to my friends and familiar Florida where I'd made my adult life. A friend set me up with an IT contractor she had worked with in DC who owned a house near me. We've now been married 11 years (next week) and ended up moving to DC. He adopted my son and we have a daughter together. So a happy ending after all.

After we met, his brother met a woman on match.com. While I was initially skeptical that anything good could come from that site, they eventually married and had two kids together and are happily married to this day.