When I woke up the morning after my second appointment with
Trish, something felt different. I lay there listening to the morning traffic
and trying to work out what it was. Then it struck me: the feeling of impending
doom had gone. Not only that, I didn’t feel depressed either. I lay there for a
while, luxuriating in my newfound freedom. It was a rare feeling of euphoria.
When I was up, dressed and breakfasted, I celebrated by calling a friend and
arranging a game of golf with him.
Now my mind was clear it was time to get serious about
finding myself a partner, so I logged onto the dating site. They had changed
the home page since I last logged on. It now displayed a photograph of an
attractive young couple with a caption reading: ‘When I saw his profile he
seemed too good to be true…and he is!’ REGISTER NOW and take a sneak preview at
3.5 million singles.’
I entered my password and clicked on search. A page containing photographs of six women popped
up. I didn’t find one of them remotely attractive, but I read their profiles
anyway because it would give me some idea what to put in mine. All six were
divorced, two of them more than once. I was more interested in finding a widow.
Someone who had loved and lost, as I had, or was about to. I clicked on page
two. Six more pictures, six more divorcees. And they all seemed to have an axe
to grind about men. No thank you! I clicked on page three, and encountered
exactly the same thing.
When I clicked on page four, a box popped up informing me
that if I wanted to go further I had to take out a subscription. The options
open to me were a seven-day trial, thirty days, ninety days, and a year. Thirty
days sounded about right, so I clicked on that. I was then asked to enter my
credit card details, which I did. A box popped up informing me that my
application had been successful, and that the management wished me success in
finding the lady of my dreams.
I realised, as I manoeuvred my way round the site, that when
I wrote a profile on myself I was going have to indicate whether I was single,
widowed, or divorced. This was compulsory. And after a good deal of
soul-searching, I decided to tick the widowed box. My rationale for this was
that, if I said I was divorced, I would be telling an outright lie. Strictly
speaking, of course, it was also telling a lie to say I was widowed, but all
things considered I saw this as more of a technicality than an outright lie
because I would be widowed soon. And I figured I had sufficient nous to explain the situation when I needed to.
Extract from my book WILL YOU TELL HER, OR SHALL I? A true
story. My story. The story of how I lived with the ten-year terminal illness of
my wife. Also available on Amazon Kindle. www.amazon.com
Twitter: Maximillian19
FB: facebook.com/Booksthepublishersmissedcom
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