Chugga chugga choo choo

Internets, I owe you a few stories. At some point I may get to them, or maybe not, but I probably will, just not tonight. I tell you this just so you know that I'm skipping over some of the details of life that happened during my three month (or five month, depending upon how you count it) blogging hiatus. Those stories are relationship stories and for the sake of today we'll just say I had one and then it ended and now I'm back online (both in the blogging and dating sense).


I find myself turning online dating into a science and I now have several tricks up my sleeve that I can employ to increase traffic to my profile. The real art would be increasing the traffic of the guys I actually want to date to my profile--I'm finding that part slow-going. I'm also finding some very interesting patterns. Actually, they've been happening in pairs so they probably can't be considered patterns, just coincidences, but they are interesting enough to make me take notice. In all the years I've been involved in online dating I've probably screened well over 1,000 profiles of potential mates and never have I come across a locomotive engineer... until last week, when I was matched with not one, but two. That's right, two train conductors ON THE SAME DAY. And then the next day, I was matched with two postal carriers for the first time ever. It's like I'm being matched with secondary characters on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.


Another thing I'm finding are the number of men with kids out on the market. I'm getting to be of an age where the possibility of dating a divorced father is more the norm than the exception. I'm keeping an open mind about it (just like I'm keeping an open mind about dating people in careers that are on the brink of extinction), but what frustrates me is that on the dating site, people don't have to declare their parental status, but they do have to answer the question: "Kids at home?" Over the past couple of weeks, I've been communicating with two guys who have kids, and have them at their homes 50% of the time and guess what? They both answer "No" to question "kids at home?"


Am I crazy in thinking that if you have kids (who are considered your dependents) and they stay in your home at any regular frequency (be it 10, 50 or 100% of the time), the answer to that question is "Yes?" I understand that answering yes to that question is probably a huge liability for you and would make several prospective women not give you a chance (just like maybe some of them wouldn't give Mr. McFeely a chance), but it feels like false advertising. If you have to postpone your dating life for a week every other week because you have to "be a dad that week," or you can't talk because you are putting the kids to bed... uh, buddy? YOU HAVE KIDS AT HOME. Plain and simple. And this isn't about me not wanting to date dads (not my preference, but they aren't all bad, and I'm trying to keep my mind open) it's about me wanting to know who I'm dating and not being misled to think it's someone else.