Blog : Finding someone

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8/16/2023 8:35 am

Finding someone

It was a Sunday. Just an ordinary Sunday. She and I went for breakfast as we usually did on Sundays. We went to our usual haunt, a coffee shop in Milwaukee that has several locations in the area. We talked about music we were hearing playing in the shop and as we talked I studied her face. We’d been together over 15 years and despite a lot of water flowing under the bridge, she still looked so beautiful to me. I thought to myself she looked as beautiful, maybe more so, at that moment as she had the moment I first laid eyes on her in July 2004.
It was December 1, 2019.
Later that evening, she felt a sudden, sharp pain and collapsed in the kitchen. By 11:30 that evening, the aortic dissection she suffered had claimed her, and after removing her from life support, she lingered until just a few minutes after midnight on December 2nd.

I was grateful for the support from friends, family and co-workers as I began to try to move forward without her as she would have absolutely wanted. But soon, whatever support I had was pretty much reduced to electronic communication as we were plunged into a pandemic. Having to grieve in isolation was incredibly challenging.

Once we all began to live life again, I’ve started to try to find someone again and things have certainly changed since 2004 when I was last single.

With both vanilla and alt dating sites, it has been a struggle to actually connect with real people. But eventually you do get to learn when a “profile” is genuine and when it’s been hijacked by a scammer.

Some telltale signs of a scammer using a stolen profile are things like poor grammar in their messages, such as, instead of “I would like to get to know you better.” will instead read, “I WILL like to get know you better.”

Another sign is the scammer will very quickly want you to leave the site you’re on. They will immediately want you to text using your private number. Or they want you to immediately go to Google chat, WhatsApp or some other texting application, or they want your<b> email </font></b>address.

Then they start working on you. They start to love bomb you in an unbelievable sort of way. Love rarely happens at first sight. Yes, you can sometimes truly connect with someone quickly, but then if that’s the case, meeting for coffee within a week or so, should not be an issue.

A scammer will not want to meet for a variety of reasons especially if the profile is reasonably within driving distance from your location. They will send photos of “themselves” which you can do a reverse image search on Google, Yandex or TinEye and almost always, you will find these photos all over the internet.

Then the shoe drops and they start requesting you send them money.

In the 2 and a half years I’ve been looking, I have met some nice people and some not so nice. In my next blog I’ll talk about some of those encounters.

At the end of the day… I remain unattached. I’m hopeful that I will meet the right person and for as discouraging as it is sometimes, some stubborn part of me refuses to accept there isn’t someone out there.


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