48th Year, 10 days.

So I am now officially “old” being summarily rejected based on my age by young (if mid-thirties can be considered young) women who also hang out on a dating site; which would be quite a sad situation for me were it not for the fact that such a place as this one is where I chose to intellectually belong when I was, in fact, still young – if pubescence in a man can fall into the same category as a thirty-year-old woman. It still hurts me emotionally if not my male ego.

In fact, the situation ruptures my Christian "Order-from-Chaos creation" sensibilities when I realise, as I march onward to fifty and begin the downward slide to centenarian, I will not find someone in my youth who was created to be my complement (Genesis 2:18), my soul mate (Plato’s The Symposium), or the person who is simply right for me (a line used by my mother, my father, and a consoling number of suitors). I know this same realization can horrify you. You are well within your reality to reject what my experience revealed me. Nevertheless it is 100% accurate for me to state, even as information on The Internet, that I will not be rejoicing in the wife of my youth (Proverbs 5:18) though I truly did seek her out while I was still very young.

I was not one of those young men who objectified women; never a calculating lothario slaking my desires and exploring myself through the eyes, mouth and hands of another. Knowing myself was my task and a matter of my disposition and my self-determinism. This is the intellectual self-honesty of existentialism, rather than biological determinism, that won the West! The Age of Reason was borne on great introspection, and the only person I needed to manipulate in order to know myself was I. Who am I? What am I? Why am I? I am not denying the pleasure it would have been to share my life, looking back on the nearly half century of it that has past, with a woman who would have been there to partake of my many firsts and offer her own firsts to me; we, sharing the wonder of living. And I am not saying I am some 40-year old virgin who held back on principle awaiting my ideal of perfection to arrive, while floodwaters rose around me and I rejected the ones God sent. ( You know that old joke, no doubt.)

But, alas, I regret so many of those wonders are now behind me and shared with people whom I will never see again even in a photograph.

It pains me to realize how mistaken I was to take the women of my past so seriously. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” is a philosophy that does not best serve the naïve no matter how sweet the teaching. Teaching such thinking is downright dangerous to the thinker. It does not carry the practicality of appeasement framed by “do unto others as they would have done unto them,” which is less naïve and in practice in politics the world over. Thinking everyone wants the same treatment at their incorrupt core is, according to my nearly half a century of experience, unwise.

So a long time ago I chose to be on sites like this where I focus myself on what I want and my articulation on what I have to offer in return. On my profile is my emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, and even physical representation; and my eyes become attracted to your profile and trust in the integrity of your words and your intellectual honesty to know thyself. Yes, mine can be classified as a theory of exchange, or pejoratively called computer dating; but it is not so simple as that as anyone who would know me would also know. My wisdom in this matter comes from a lesson I learnt from my father when I was 6 years old....