DIBs

Longtime readers of this space (should you actually exist?) might recall a period in April last year where it seemed every man I encountered on Match.com was strange and every woman who was reading had met the same strange men. One of those women, Random Blog Reader, went so far as to find my profile on Facebook so we could discuss our similar encounters off-blog.

Craziness. It it birthed the cliche "Greater Boston -- a smaller town than you'd think," and inspired an idea:

Maybe I should start a support group for 30-something female online daters contacted by idiosyncratic Bostonians with hankerings for (respectively) older ladies, certain types of their clothing, and certain varieties of chat function.

Or, as RBR dubbed it: the Daters of Idiosyncratic Bostonians Support Group.

(I like "DIBs" for short.)

On Tuesday night RBR and I finally met in person. She's about my age. She's single. We closed down Upstairs on the Square (in Harvard) over a couple glasses of wine, our conversation much less a bitch session than just frank talk about the scene, such as it is. For example: as Jewish, in her practice she has not found herself to be Jewish enough for the men of JDate. She's wary of dating guys from her swing dancing group, even though some could be viable, in case it were to go badly and ruin her enjoyment of a favorite hobby. She finds it ridiculously easy to get to a 3rd date ... and ridiculously hard to get any further.

As for me, well, I talked a lot. I tend to talk a lot. RBR was a good listener .... considering how vomitous I get when sharing woes, compounded that she already knew much of it from her daily reading. It was a good lesson in how to listen.

And the upshot? RBR and I departed in agreement that forming a DIBs group is a most necessary item of business for this blog. How and when, TBD. (lol!)

Watch for the details.