Dating services and foreign women

You've received some good advice and I hope that what I have to add to that advice will also be good and will help. I would start with a recurring line in the 1980's cop show, Hill Street Blues, that the sergeant would always end his morning briefing with: "Hey! You be careful out there!"There are a great many scams operating on the Internet. Yes, some of the offers and adverts are legitimate, but many are not. The wisdom we need to develop is the ability to tell the difference. If it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't.You express the desire "to catch them in the act of their deception" (Message 13). That would be self-defeating. Even most of the profiles posted on local dating sites contain some amount of deception to various degrees. Even meeting someone face-to-face is not completely free of deception. Nor are you immune from committing deception as you seek to put your best side forward and to not reveal your bad side -- if anything, that could be seen as necessary for the process. Relationships require trust. If you enter into every potential relationship suspecting the other person of deception and wanting to expose that deception, then you will doom each and every potential relationship to failure. Besides, what would exposing a deception accomplish?Personally, what I went through in my divorce augmented by what I personally observed has left me extremely distrustful. I myself look for and see deception in most women I meet. I personally accept that that means that I will not enter into another intimate relationship for the rest of my life (at 61, that should not last long). You are young and have the rest of your life to build, so my cynical perspective is not one that you should adopt for yourself. So don't!To my mind, using a local dating site (which includes a national site such as match.com that allows you to filter by locale), would make more sense. As I had been taught, the recommended procedure is to read the other person's profile to get a feeling for whether you would want to meet that person. Then you initiate contact through the site by various means which should eventually culminate in an exchange of messages (when it goes to email, you are advised to create an email address specifically for this purpose -- a special one for corresponding with prospective partners and your regular one for the service to identify and communicate with you). If that all goes well, then you will arrange for a face-to-face meeting, preferably in a safe public place such as a coffee shop -- this is presented as being more for her protection, but we guys also need to guard against the old badger game. Up to this point, there has been no exchange of phone numbers nor of home addresses; that will come later when and if the relationship progresses that far. A friend of mine (female) who had used match.com with some success told me that it would take about 300 on-line contacts to result in one face-to-face meeting and tens of face-to-face meetings to result in one second meeting.As you read through that basic procedure, consider how it would apply to an international/foreign dating site. The on-line communication would proceed somewhat the same, but how do you handle the first face-to-face meeting? Locally, you would lose about one hour of your time and so could easily enough work your way through the tens of such meetings that would be needed. Internationally, one of you would have to travel thousands of miles to make that meeting and that would very likely be you. Are you prepared to do that kind of travelling?Also there's the question of whether this kind of approach is ideal for you. As I was going through my divorce, I saw a counselor. She wanted me to get on all the dating sites and to end up juggling three women at the same time. For one thing, she didn't want me to fixate on one woman. For another, she had warned me about a number of women's "borderline personalities" that I would need to look out for, so I was to report my experiences with these women back to her so that she could analyze them and point out the problems and presence of those borderline personalities. I found that I could not do what she wanted me to do and her stories of borderline personalities only served to reinforce my suspicions.My main problem with on-line sites was that none of the women appealed to me. I am unable to shop through a catalog for dates. I need to actually meet and interact with someone before I can determine whether I could be interested. Lacking that, all I could do was what we do when we're in a restaurant where we don't like anything that's on the menu; we pick through the menu and eliminate possible choices because it contains something that we don't want or like, until we have eliminated everything except for one, the least objectionable. Similarly, I would read through each prospective partner's profile looking for anything that would eliminate her as a choice. And, of course, I would always find something. The lesser-of-all-evils restaurant analogy of course assumes that I must make a choice, whereas the reality of the dating sites was that I could reject them all, which I could not help but do.Now, with your self-described shallowness (Message 1), that might not be a problem for you. But keep in mind that they also have a choice, one that they will base on your profile. You have expressed a desire to expose the deceptions of others; will you yourself not employ your own deceptions in your own profile? Mind you, I'm not encouraging you to post all your worst warts for all to see. In your profile, you do need to present your best side while you also need to be as honest as you can be. That may prove very difficult for you. Or not; all we have to go by is what you have posted here.What are your other choices? The number-one rule of meeting women is that you go where women are, just as their number-one rule of meeting men is to go where men are. Decades ago, I obtained the messages posted by the venerable UNIX program, fortune, which would display a random "fortune cookie" message whenever you ran it. Here is one: Lonely men go to bars. Lonely women stay at home. They never meet.More than one of your respondents mentioned dance classes. I had started dance classes as something to do together with my wife, though she quit for whatever reason. I continued anticipating her return, since I knew that I had to work on it so much harder. Than after a horrendously traumatic experience, nearly two years before the divorce, the challenge of the dance classes helped to take my mind off of the hell of my daily life; the novelty of a room half-full of women happy to see me also helped. Dance classes had such a therapeutic effect that my counselor's desire for me to give them up did not make any sense and contributed to me inability to follow her advice.Is part of your problem that you have no confidence when talking with women, especially with beautiful women? Dance classes will help you develop that confidence. While actual dance events can be stressful *, dance classes are not. In a group dance class, men and women pair up and then, when the instructor tells them, they rotate to the next partner (usually, it's the women who rotate). Within the structure of the class, you automatically get a partner. This gives you the opportunity to become comfortable in the company of a woman and of interacting with her comfortably. Also keep in mind that a dance is "a three-minute relationship." On the dance floor, don't try to make it anything more. But with your experience in dance class, you will become more at ease with women and more confident. I myself feel very inconfident, but my counselor's initial assessment of my demeanor was one of confidence.{* FOOTNOTE:
Before my time, in the early to late 1960's, all men in college were required to participate for two years in the Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC); subsequent volunteering for two more years of ROTC resulted in a military commission upon graduation. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the student protests of the 1960's, one of the first targets of the protesters was the ROTC armory on campus. By the time I graduated high school (1969) and started college, that requirement was changed to a required two years of physical education (each PE class was typically 1/2 unit, hence 2 units in four semesters, but when I earned all 2 units with a scuba diving course, much to my dismay I learned that it wasn't the units but rather being younger than 21). So to avoid sports (which I cannot stand with a passion), after scuba I enrolled in the dance classes.In class we had a guy who was experienced in dancing. He told us of he would go out to a locale. The girls would all be sitting there waiting while all the guys would be sitting at the bar drinking all the liquid courage they could in order to ask a girl to dance. So in the meantime he was able to get in dances with all the girls there.BTW, dancers are notorious for not drinking. Because they don't need it. And because alcohol will only impair their performance.
}You are a Christian. I would assume that you attend a church. I would furthermore assume that your church has some kind of singles ministry which has some kind of events for singles (this may be a reach, depending on your congregation's size). Have you considered that?A local mega-church has a singles' ministry that ministers to about 15,000 singles. Part of that for the singles in their 40's and older were dance classes, which a church member recruited me for. The senior pastors had a problem with this. There's an old joke about Baptists: "Why do Baptists prohibit having sex while standing up? Because they're afraid that it may lead to dancing." Of course, such an attitude is ridiculous, but many non-dancers think that and have a problem with it.Seriously, learning to partner dance should help you a lot. PM me about this if you want.

I would assume that you are not familiar with dancing.For a very long time, there has been partner dancing. This is dancing with a partner. Partnership implies communication between partners. That means that one partner leads the dance while the other partner follows. To reiterate, one partner leads while the other partner follows what the first partner is leading.Lead and follow. Lead and follow. Do you get the basic idea?On match.com and, I'm sure, many other on-line dating sites, women will post in their profiles that they love dancing. But what really are they saying? Do they know how to follow a lead? Or do they just wiggle on their own? What many women would call "dancing" is not what a partner-dancer would call dancing.If you learn how to dance, you will then need to learn how to decipher what the women are saying to you.PS
Leading is a skill. 25 years before my first real dance lesson, I learned much about leading from my Aikido training. From my very first dance lesson in 2000, the women praised me on my clear and strong lead.Following is no less a skill, an even more elusive skill, one which is so great as to elude me. A salsa teacher lists 25 skills that a leader must have and constantly employ, but only 5 for a follower. A ballroom teacher told me that "men dance in the future, while women dance in the present." The leader must always be thinking about what the next move will be, while keeping in mind the other couples on the floor. The follower must do the impossible: in real-time, know what the leader wants her to do.Edited by dwise1, : PS

No, not really.I had already found a coping mechanism, the dance classes.As I encountered various women, how was I supposed to understand what they were up to?Now, the earlier encounters were while I was still married. I did not understand what was happening, if anything, so I simply wrote it off.Now, what I ended up doing while I was married is that I assumed that there was nothing to it. I had been married for 28 years. I had no idea what flirting was. Even if I were to suspect flirting, I still could not have any idea that it was going on. I was married, no flirting was going on, no questions about it!Now we come to post-divorce.To be honest, I'm not sure that my time with that counselor was strictly post-divorce. For one thing, let's face it, California law is "divorce on demand", so once that bitch filed for divorce, for no fucking reason, it was a fait accompli.I believe that the counselor's motives were right. Observing my ex's friends in their divorces before my own, the experienced divorces counselled them in how to latch onto an unsuspecting man and to drain him of all his worldly possessions that you can and, once you have thus drained him, to dump him and seek out the next carrion. My counselor's intent was to steer me away from such predatory females and from other types. However, I was unable to stay the course.

There is a dance forum, danceforums.com , which discusses partner dancing and has a lot of dance students on it. They can be very helpful.Basically, a class in ballroom, country, swing, or salsa would be what you would be looking for. Jazz dancing or line dancing would be more solo work, as would ballet (which I assumed you already knew).Having been a listener for decades, I was used to listening to everything that was happening in the music, which meant that I had difficulty isolating and hearing the basic beat. Most dance music (waltz being a notable exception) is in some form of 4/4 time. What you will do is to count the beats according to the rhythm of the dance; eg, swing is 1-2-3&4-5&6 and 1-2-3&4-5-6-7&8, foxtrot is 1-3-5-6 (slow, slow, quick, quick), cha-cha is 2-3-4&1, salsa is 1-2-3-5-6-7 (quick, quick, slow, quick, quick, slow), etc -- many count the rhythm in quicks and slows, in that a quick is one beat while a slow is two beats. You only step (transfer weight from one foot to the other) on a count, so a slow is a single step taken during two beats of the music.In order to learn to hear the beats, start listening to popular music and count out the beats. While 4/4 music will have 4 beats to a measure, dancing uses phrases of 8 beats, which is also two measures. That means that in dance you normally are counting from 1 to 8. A phrase has a definite start, though it takes time to learn to hear it; normally it will be when a vocal line begins or when an instrument starts. Just getting your ear adjusted to listening for the beats and counting them out to yourself will be a good start. And if you know somebody who dances, even if it's free-style (which is not partner dancing), then you could enlist their help in hearing and following the beat.Have fun!

Looks like it could be interesting and it would satisfy your GE requirements as well as enhance your knowledge and appreciation of dancing -- I started college as a foreign language major and then much later switched to computer science; CS is my money degree and my interest, but I got a lot out of the cultural history I had learned as a language major and still cherish it. By all means, take the class, but it's not really what I had in mind.What I had in mind was a class in which you would be working on and directly applying the social skills that partner dancing affords you.Is PE still required? When I went through college, you were required to have four PE, but in reality the requirement was PE every semester until you're 21 -- a couple years before I started in 1969, two years of ROTC was required of all male students, which was apparently one of the reasons that the student protests seemed to always converge on the Armory with the intent to burn it down.I have seen dance classes offered under PE, though other departments might offer them. These would be the classes where you actually learn a dance and practice what you have learned in each meeting of the class. The fine arts class would augment these dance classes as the dance classes would augment the fine arts class.

I would add to that that there is more than just college PE classes to learn from. For example, I started with an after-work class in salsa that my company supported, but then we took some classes through our city's parks and recreation program. After, it was through dance studios, though some teachers will also teach at dance venues.When we first started, we had no idea where to find classes; we just happened to stumble upon the first two. We found some through word-of-mouth from friends, while I found some through Google. In our area (Orange County, Calif), there's a website that lists each week what dance classes and events there are here. There could be something similar in your area, but you would need to look or ask around. The dancers in the area form communities that are good sources for information, so the challenge is to make those first contacts.Of course, you should be able to find local dance studios more easily, but it's caveat empor. Some chain studios have a reputation for trying to make as much money off of their students as possible through questionable practices. That tends to be mainly ballroom studios and Arthur Murray comes to mind, though I have no personal experience with them. One aspect of ballroom is proper technique and serious students work on preparing for competitions -- immediately grooming you to compete is one of those practices.Furthermore, you will have group classes and private classes. It's mainly the group classes that I'm thinking of in recommending this route for you, because that is where you will be in a more social setting. However, privates can be very beneficial and even necessary for you to work on problems you have with technique. For example, one problem that students have in the beginning is connection and for leaders is how to use connection to lead. I was lucky to have had training in Aikido which had already taught me the nature and feel of that connection and experience in leading someone else with my own body's movement rather than by trying to muscle them around. But most new leaders do not have the benefit of such previous training and need some personal time with the instructor to begin to learn it. So you need to balance between groups and privates according to your needs and your goals. Prices will vary, but here it's $12 - $15 for a single 1-hr group class, $40 - $50 for a 4-6 week series of group classes (1-hr each), and $75 for a 1-hr private (though if you bring another person in then the cost remains the same and you two can usually split it).As I said, technique is very important in ballroom dancing. Yes, you can learn about ten dances, but for most of them technique can be very important, though you could get by in a casual social environment. Hence, privates are more important in ballroom. In swing, country, and salsa, technique is not as critical, though you're learning fewer dances. And another consideration could be what kind of music you already like. Of course, you could just learn them all (as I have), but right now you're thinking about the first one. Plus, the decision might end up being based on what is available in your area.Now, if you were to just go out doing free-style (dancing in the vicinity of your "partner" as started happening in the late 60's) and that would get you into a social life. The reason I recommend partner dancing is that group classes provide you with a safe social environment should be much less stressful than going to a dance by yourself not knowing anybody and being afraid to ask anybody to dance, made worse by not knowing how to dance, etc. In a group class, you automatically have a partner and will rotate partners regularly. In a group class, you will have the opportunity to meet others. There are group classes for partner dances, but I have yet to see one for free-style -- I'll usually fake free-style by using salsa footwork, but then isn't free-style just faking it anyway? Plus, in partner dancing you're actually interacting with your partner.

A couple reading selections: Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. It can get dark, especially the first part. Partially auto-biographical, a middle-aged writer (50) named Harry Haller feels completely alienated after he loses his readers because of his pacifist views and his wife goes crazy and kicks him out. When he turned 50, he promised to have an accident while shaving before he turned 51. He starts to learn to live again in part by learning to dance to jazz music (it was written in the 1920's), but even more importantly from starting to learn "Man mu lachen lernen" ("One has to learn to laugh"). Harry takes everything so seriously that he has to be taught to laugh at things instead. You don't even have to read it in German if you don't want to. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Michael Valentine Smith born en route during the first Mars expedition was the sole human survivor having been raised by Martians. After returning to earth as a young adult, he tries to understand humans, really understand them, as in grokking them (the Martian practice of understanding something absolutely thoroughly). Yet laughter and humor completely eludes him for the longest time. Until one day at the zoo he watched a monkey catch some food thrown at him only to have it taken away from him by a larger monkey, so the first monkey takes it out on an even smaller monkey. Smith started laughing uncontrollably because he finally grokked laughter. Laughter isn't about nice things nor do we laugh at nice things happening, but rather at bad things, at somebody's misfortune perhaps even our own. As Smith explained it, "We laugh to keep it from hurting."In my own case, early in our relationship my girlfriend "tried" to teach me how to dance (free style) by which all she did was tell me to follow the music and do what it told me to do. No steps or practice listening, just that one instruction and she expected me to right out there an apply it immediately. And of course I didn't know what to follow since I was a listener and always heard everything and couldn't isolate the "beat", so she declared me completely devoid of any sense of rhythm and unable to ever learn how to dance. I married her and for the next 25 years she kept brainwashing me about having no rhythm, etc. Then we started going to dance classes (salsa, then West Coast swing), but she dropped out and I continued. Already "knowing" that I could never ever possibly learn, I entered into dance classes just for the challenge and activity and the social atmosphere. In order to keep myself from becoming frustrated by my inability to ever learn, I decided to not take myself too seriously and to laugh at myself and at my own mistakes, plus I was and am always ready to accept personal responsibility when a move went wrong. Without trying, I developed the reputation among all the women of being the guy who's always laughing and smiling.Now, smiling for a photo is something that I cannot do. A few years ago I was on a dance team that competed at the US Open (the real one, the swing competitions) and although I had the dance routine down solid the one thing I could not do was to have a stage smile. Just cannot do it. I assume that I smile when I interact with people; it's just something I'm not aware of nor can I turn it on an off.You say you're a dark person inside, well so am I. I just have the attitude that that is for me to have to deal with and that it isn't something I should inflict on others.

And you're telling us that you have no sense of humor? Onifre is a comedian and since when has being serious ever been part of their job description?Though comedians will deal with serious stuff, but they try to present it from a different perspective, even if only slightly different. And from that slightly different perspective, we can learn to laugh about it, you know, to keep it from hurting so much. And maybe to teach us to not take everything too seriously. In so many movies, such as with Maj Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) in the movie, M*A*S*H, and Niedermeyer in Animal House, who is it who winds up the butt of all the jokes? The guy who takes everything too seriously, so don't be that guy.How do you relax? What do you use to relax? Many people use chemical means, but that can lead to problems so, seriously speaking, you are wise to avoid them (and I am wise because I was born that way, seriously). Life is stressful, which is good because that helps to motivate us, but we all still need some way to deal with that stress and to find some way to relax.Also, what onifre was referring to is basically changing your mental state. Or as a Frenchman said on the train into Paris as he picked up a comic book a kid had left behind, "Pour changer des ides." ("for changing ideas"). Drugs make people see things differently, though their side-effects are a downer. New ideas and new perspectives do the same, which is the comedian's stock-in-trade. If the way that you see things is what's causing you problems, then perhaps you need to see things differently.Even there there's a caveat. Returning to the creation/evolution "controversy" (in quotes because I see it as artificial and made up by the YECist side), I keep seeing figures from conservative Christian sources of 60% to 80% of youth raised in conservative Christianity of some form losing their faith in early adulthood, and especially if they go to college or public school. My own personal bias for more than three decade is that that is because now they learn what science really says and what the scientific evidence really is; I think you are starting to relate to that now. But according to a blog that was linked to through Facebook (and the linker, Ed Babinski, a former radically fundamentalist creationist who has been very anti-creationism for decades, cannot find the link anymore; I asked him for it), the real culprit in college is not science, but rather the humanities. In the humanities, even in English literature classes, the experience is one of viewing things from a different perspective and of being exposed to new ideas. This is something that is new for a fundamentalist who has been raised thinking that everything must only be viewed from one single perspective.Now, how you individually as a believer must deal with that is up to you; I've been a non-believer for about 50 years now even though was a fundamentalist fellow-traveller during the 1970's "Jesus Freak" movement. I'm sure that a common reaction is to reject one's religion, but I do not believe that that is the necessary decision. I was taught that apologetics deals in part with harmonizing the real world with one's religious beliefs, so you would need to make the attempt to do that harmonization (as I'm sure you have been regarding geology). I personally feel that one thing that should be kept in mind is that most of theology is Man-made and hence is subject to error. I do not feel that questioning your theology is the same as questioning God and I feel that it is necessary to question one's theology in order to weed out the parts that are wrong and to hold to those parts that are true, as it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:21.

I hate it too, but it is also part of me. I cannot cut it out of me, so I need to deal with it, even try to channel it to something more positive.If you start partner dancing, one thing you will invariably have a problem with in the beginning is the connection and how to move your partner without trying to muscle her. I never went through that myself, because about 25 years prior to my first dance lesson I had practiced Aikido, the Art of Harmonizing Ki (life energy, mind, The Force). Really freaky stuff if you get into the right school that emphasizes Ki training. Ki flows through us all, so we control our own ki through four principles: 1) stay relaxed (not the same as being limp), 2) remain centered on your one-point (your center of gravity which is about where your belt buckle is), 3) keep weight on the under-side, and 4) extend your mind. If you have one, you have them all, but when you lose one you lose them all; the secret only advanced black belts learn is not in keeping the Four Principles at all times, but rather in regaining them when you lose them -- our sensei taught us that from an experience in his own advanced training. When you do start dancing, we can discuss how Aikido had taught me almost everything I ever needed to know about dance connection.The basic "combat" principle in Aikido is the idea that the attacker (AKA "uke") in the act of attacking is projecting his ki towards the defender (AKA "nage"). If the nage tries to block or fight against the uke's attack, then the outcome is very likely to go to the physically stronger of the two. Therefore, the nage should "join forces" with the uke, in that he "blends his ki with the ki of the uke" and then redirects that ki keeping your own center while throwing the uke off of his center, such that in Aikido you never throw the attacker, but rather you "lead him into falling". In more Western terms, the defender does not seek to clash with the motion/momentum of the attacker, but rather he blends his motion with the attacker's such that the defender remains in control and in balance while the attacker is off-balance, such that the consequent motion sends the attacker flying. Though I have participated in exercises where I was able to "throw" the attacker without ever even touching him and had the same thing done to me; in Aikido we called that "leading the mind."We went through several exercises. Rather than describe the more interesting ones, there is a simple one where the uke has both his hands clasped firmly on your wrist. Now, the best situation for the techniques is when there is already motion, but this starts from a stand-still, which makes it harder. If you push towards the uke or pull away from him, then that he can use his strength against you and it's muscle against muscle. But if you move at right angles between you, the uke is weaker. Now for the principle of extending your mind. If you try to move your wrist, then your mind stops at your wrist and you usually cannot move it. But if you extend your mind beyond your wrist out through your finger tip, then you are stronger; move your finger tip instead of your wrist and he cannot stop you -- a circular motion to start the motion usually helps.The point I was trying to make there is that instead of confronting a strong force, such as your dark nature, you could accomplish more by blending with it and redirecting it. A counselor should be able to help you in that endeavor.Picking a counselor. "America's most prominent atheist", Dan Barker, was raised a fundamentalist Christian and served several years as a fundamentalist minister. Back in the mid/late-1980's, I first heard of him when a local atheist group played his presentation to them on radio (simmer now, 15 minutes per week compared to how many hours of fundamentalist Christian broadcasting per week?). In that he described how he grew up listening to his mother singing in tongues while doing the housework. The point he was making there was what he described as "when your theology becomes your psychology." Basically, he was making an argument that fundamentalist Christians (and fundamentalists of other faiths, I would guess) psychologically think differently than non-fundamentalists do. What I have experienced and witnessed tends to support that view. During my divorce, the second most horrendous experience of my miserable life, a friend talked me into going through her mega-church's DivorceCare program. Because I had eyes to see and ears to hear (refer to Mark regarding the parables teaching about the mysteries of heaven, then read up on the mystery religions), I could see how that appealed to believers, but to a non-believer it was almost all pure rubbish. Far worse than rubbish because the recurring message was "you cannot possibly recover on our own but rather you need Jesus' help", which tells me, a non-Christian, that there is no possible way I could ever recover. Rather counter-productive, wouldn't you agree? Oh, it did have some kernels of wisdom in it, but those kernels were buried until mountains of sectarian religious nonsense -- nonsense to non-believers at least.A second indication that Dan Barker was on the right track is the simple verifiable fact that there are basically two different types of counselors: regular counselors and Christian counselors. The very fact that there is a definite and separate market of "Christian counselors" serving a clientale that normal counselors are deemed unable to serve. What other reason could there be for so many Christian counselors unless there were an actual psychological difference between fundamentalists and normals?A third indication was the long-running series of presentations at a second local mega-church (oh, but Orange County is so "blessed" by these mega-churches -- my friend was so incredibly surprised and pleased when she learned that I'm not only not a Republican (far too many Republicans here inside this Blue State) but also not a fundamentalist Christian like far too many other guys here, and women too judging from the listings in match.com), that were presented by two Christian counselors for singles. Singles are a big market here; Saddleback Church alone has a singles ministry serving about 15,000 singles. Oh, those two Christian counselors used several of the same principles as did normal counselors, but then they'd always twist it back around to a Christian perspective -- not surprising, since that was the audience that they were playing to. You need to set boundaries and do these things to make your life better. Why? Because that's what Jesus wants. OK, I'm not a Christian, so why should I make my life better? You're telling me that there's no fracking reason. You need to surround yourself with positive people who will influence you and lead you in the right direction. In what direction? To God. OK, I'm an atheist, so what does what you're saying have to do with me?You see now, Christians and non-Christians (or at least non-Fundamentalist/non-Evangelical/non-Conservative Christian types) are being treated as having different psychologies.What kind of counselor should you seek? Christian or normal? A normal counselor may not be able to deal with your religious concerns. But if your problem is precisely because of your theology, would a Christian counselor be the right pick for you? Would he be motivated to lead you back to "the light" (though I suspect that you are yourself suspecting that there is more darkness in your theology)? But then instead he might be able to help you harmonize your way through your problems.In short, I am dark, you are dark. The blind leading the blind. I am not qualified to help you. You have to find your own way, but you can find help from others. Your dark is part of your; you would not be complete without it. Learn to deal with it. Learn to use it, to redirect it. To complement it with light. To grow by developing the other, non-dark parts of yourself.Develop your social skills. I had one of the worst times in high school which almost thoroughly alienated me. But in college I formed friendships and acquaintances. I would hang out with fellow students and chat with them. I was usually more well-read than they were, having been a loner before, and I was told by one friend that what I said was often too deep for most. But you are now in the ideal place to start to develop your social skills. Hang out, chat, try to keep it light for the most part, but do argue your point when you do have a point and can support it.Also, judging from your interactions here, learn that disagreement with your ideas is not equivalent to hating you. In your face-to-face discussions, don't take any of it personally. Even if it was meant to be personal, don't take it personally. Keep it all as academic as possible. In the process, learn to deal with others, both when they're behaving properly and when they're behaving improperly.This is perhaps out-of-line, but it might help. There is a process called "socialization." No (as my friend's right-wing brother from Arizona mistakenly took it), it has nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. Rather, it is what every member of society needs to learn, how to learn to deal with everybody else in society. Part of the concern of home-schooling is that part of the school experience needs to be socialization, learning to get along with others. My friend once took a look at the Red-and-Blue map of the USA and noticed that the blue (Democratic) regions were on the coasts and centered around large population centers where you absolutely have to learn to get along with others whereas the red (Republican) regions were the sparsely-populated "fly-over" parts of the country where hardly anybody lives or has to learn how to get along with others. That is her own personal conceit, but she may nonetheless have a point.We need to learn to socialize. I think you are very strongly expressing that need now. Socializing is where our strength lies as a species. Alone, we are nothing, but together we can reshape the face of the earth and beyond. And we are driven to socialize, which is why we are gregarious (wanting and driven to form into groups and find enjoyment in being in a group, in the company of others). Learn how to socialize, how to function within a group. You've described people who are trying to include you socially. People do care for you. Work with them, learn from them. They are trying to help you, so help them to help you.You created this threat with the intent of finding an intimate female relationship. OK, that's one goal.What I have found is that I form friendships with women more easily than with men; my father told me that it was the same for him. In my 61 years, I only had one intimate female relationship for about 30 years, but that ended in disaster; before that, there was another of some months, but in the end it didn't work out. Since the divorce, I've had three close female relationships, none of which were intimate. My point is that you are looking for an intimate female relationship, but most of the female relationships you will have will not be intimate. From your other message, you do have a female relationship and from my experience it is likely to not be intimate -- ruddy poor logic there, I'll grant you!A lot has been made of the difference between men and women, perhaps much more than necessary, perhaps not enough. For example, my own life experiences have led me to be extremely distrustful of women's motives, even though I do like women. What do women want? What do they think? How are we men supposed to ever figure them out? There are the romantic comedies (which I enjoy but my friend hates), but who's writing them? There was even one, "Friends with Benefits", in which the female lead complains about romantic comedies being responsible for the unrealistic expectations people have. Steve Moffat's UK series, Coupling (available on NetFlix streaming), made a point of juxtapositioning male and female perspectives on the same issues/events. But ultimately, your best source of perspective is from your friends, especially your female friends.When we graduated with our Computer Science degrees (but I still had two years of active duty before me), a friend (male, this time) sent out nearly 80 resums and only got one offer, but that is all it takes. Another friend had more experience with match.com and she said that it took about 300 hits to come up with one potential date. Bottom line: you only need one intimate relationship, but that never keeps you from having large numbers of other non-intimate relationships with either gender. Until that one intimate relationship comes along, your other female relationships can help you to figure out your various female contacts. You know, there's a thing called "flirting". I still haven't figured it out. At first, while I was still married, some of the women in class were doing things that I didn't understand. Now, when you're married, you learn to be blind to flirting, so when something happened in class that I wasn't sure of, I simply wrote it off as nothing. But now that I'm divorced, I'm still doing that. There's a funny episode of Coupling where one of the guys is keeping his phone line open while he's with a woman from work who likes him (but he has a girlfriend) so the women are there to translate what the woman is saying. The bottom line is that you will need to become more socially aware and conversant. Do make the fullest use of your female friends.Back to dark for a moment. If you watch Doctor Who, review the 10th Doctor episode, Blink (if you have a friend with a NetFlix account, have him call it up). Early on in that episode:
Kathy Nightingale: "What's so good about sad?"
Sally Sparrow: "It's happy for deep people."Just a parting thought.

What does she expect you to do, be on the alert for advances from other women?I felt that blindness was partially due to our faithful attitude of not being alert to or sensitive to such signals from other women because we're not supposed to be interested in them. Though it also occurred to me that our relationship with our wife served to more strongly attune ourselves to her signals, which are not necessarily similar to those of other women; indeed, her signals no doubt also changed in the course of the marriage.Of course, within the context of the dance classes, whenever I wasn't quite sure what to make of something that could have been flirting, I consciously took the position of writing it off as innocent and just a case of my own misinterpretation. In the spirit of Ralphie's little brother in "A Christmas Story" whose response to bullies was to just lie down in the snow and not move, I felt that that carefully cultivated cluelessness was my only defense. Plus I learned that whatever I did would be wrong anyway; I think that's in the marriage contract somewhere.

But that would still require the guy to be able to detect the flirting. Honesly, how many guys can do that as readily as a woman could?For example, about a year after my first dance cruise, I got a call from one of the women who said she had broke up with her boyfriend that she was on the cruise with and was wanting to get back into dancing west coast swing but needed lessons, so could I please go to her place to teach her. While all the women in class think I'm a good dancer, I know that I come nowhere close to being able to teach, so I told her that and tried to think of a teacher I could refer her to. She kept insisting that she was too shy to be in a class and wanted me to teach her privately at her place. I knew that wouldn't work out and she'd not learn much so I kept trying and she kept trying and finally we ended the conversation with me having provided her with some possible teachers. I didn't learn what was really going on there until a few months later when I mentioned it to a female friend who immediately explained it to me. She also finally clued me in on what various women in dance class were really doing when they'd ask me which one there is my girlfriend. Well, when somebody asks me a question I assume it's a honest question and I try to give them an honest answer. How am I supposed to know there's subterfuge afoot?

We all have dark parts in our nature. Parts that we don't like or that cause too much trouble. So what do we do about them?What I want to do with it is to lock it up in the deepest darkest possible oubliette (a dungeon cell where you lock somebody up and forget about them, comme le mot franais, oublier, "to forget") and bury it under concrete. But it never remains buried, but rather always resurfaces in ways that are worse than the original darkness and which always makes a far worse mess.That, foreveryoung, is why you need to learn to deal with your darkness and to redirect and rechannel it to something better. I know that trying to bury it is a mistake because I have already tried that! It is important to learn from your own mistake, but what is far more important is to learn from other peoples' mistakes.There is a famous quote that used to be on my site from Sun Tzu's The Art of War:

quote:

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Scroll III (Offensive Strategy):
31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."
(Sun Tzu The Art of War, translation by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963)

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Knowing yourself includes knowing your own faults, weaknesses, and dark side. Edited by dwise1, : dBCodes thingee

Good luck, but gotta warn you that she might be a Trekkie. One who likes Kirk.A friend of a co-worker was doing missionary work (fundamentalist Christian type) in the Ukraine. TV stations there will broadcast programs in their original languages, so people will practice their English comprehension by watch USA shows. Star Trek was rather popular. They especially loved Captain Kirk. With all his dramatic pauses, they had more time to figure out what he was saying.But seriously, hope it works out.

Sollte das doch nicht so geschrieben werden?: "Meines Vaters Groeltern zog nach Russland um Windmhlen zu bauen und mein Grovater waren dort geboren." Tja, seit sechsunddreiig Jahre studiere ich kein Deutsch. Und seitdem haben sie auch die Sprache verndert.
(Shouldn't that have been written as: ... . Oh well, it's been 36 years since I've studied German. Plus they've changed the language since then.) Not just to Canada. A lot of them also settled in eastern North Dakota, where I was stationed, where they're known as the "Germans from Russia". The history that I was given there was that Russia needed settlers to immigrate and develop the Ukraine, so they offered land to German farmers who were too many and didn't have enough land. The best part of the deal was that the Germans wouldn't be treated like Russians. Serfdom existed in Russia until 1861 when the serfs were finally freed. I think it was under Catherine the Great that the Germans settled the Ukraine. They thrived until a later Tzar decided to start treating them like Russians, which is when they decided to emigrate to the plains of North America.Also, talking about Ukrainian women, the best known one in the US is Mila Kunis.