Kim’s Big Week
Every once in a while I can’t help myself and I must write a story about my lovely Kim, the love of my life. Kim and I met in the summer of 2005. I was six months out of a three year relationship following my second marriage and only days since breaking it off with a woman I had met on match.com. I also met Kim on match.com under circumstances that always amuse people to whom we tell the story. This was the second time for me on match.com and I must say with no small amount of pride that I was pretty good at making match.com work for me. Where many men might find using the written word and even the spoken word by phone to be awkward, they are mediums that play to my communication talents. I find it relatively easy to read a woman’s profile and compose an interesting and compelling message that will entice her to engage further with me and perhaps go on a date with me. I gave myself several rules for the process beginning with only looking for women of like age (plus or minus 5 years) and promising to always be 100% forthcoming and truthful. Nothing good can come of deceit in computer dating, just as in life overall. On my first venture into the world of match.com , I was on the system for about 48 hours before encountering a woman I found interesting enough to delist myself from the service, something I think is critical to show commitment to wanting to be in a relationship rather than just playing the field incessantly. On this second reactivating of my match.com membership I barely had time to do my usual scan of counterparties when I got a message from Kim. She had noticed my profile in a teaser sent out by match.com to those members like her who had deactivated their accounts. She had been frustrated by her lack of success online, but was intrigued by my profile, which fit her criteria and was sent by match.com to her to entice her to rejoin. She did so and mentioned that in her message to me. I told her I was impressed since I could not recall any woman paying good money to meet me. Her response was that I shouldn’t get too excited about it since it had only cost $9.95 to rejoin.
I made a tentative date with her for the next Saturday night and explained it was only tentative because I was invited for a round of golf with a friend in the Hudson Valley and didn’t know when that would end. She agreed to keep it open and I went off to play golf. After our round, we were swimming in my friend’s pool with his college-age son who was very interested in the whole topic of online dating. I regaled him with stories from my two times (72 hours so far) on match.com, and he and his father encouraged me to keep the planned tentative date for that evening and then to report back to them about it. I called Kim and suggested that I would pick her up in my car on the way south into Manhattan. She lived in Hell’s Kitchen at the time and that seemed convenient all-around. Since she lived in a sixth-floor walk-up we agreed I would call when I was on the block and avoid a long and winded double parking situation. She came down and was wearing a very bright fuchsia top that made her blonde hair really stand out.
Over the course of a dinner at a restaurant on 10th Avenue in Tribeca called Park, in honor of the sign that remained on this old parking garage that had been converted into a fine restaurant, we got to know one another. I am not being melodramatic by saying that talking to Kim just once and looking across the table at her made me fall instantly in love with her. I told her she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. At the time, Kim was 47 and too worldly to believe me, but I was telling the truth and feel the same way today. But much more than her looks, I was in search of a kindred soul and our talk made me feel like I was talking with someone who had shared my years on earth and had the same worldview and same sense of humor as me. She also ate with gusto and seemed unaffected in the most fundamental of ways. One of the things we talked about was what it was like living in the South Street Seaport. She couldn’t imagine it, so I suggested as we left to get in my car that we stop by and she could see where I lived. I’m sure this sounded like a “come up and see my etchings” line to her, but she came with me and I showed her around my downtown Seaport penthouse, which I was quite proud of, less because of its sizzle, and more because of its down-to-earth style. She noted by glass-front subzero refrigerator with all its neatly aligned Perrier and Orangina bottles and told me it was like a showroom rather than a lived-in home.
One of the things she told me that night was that no straight man had ever sent her flowers in her 47 years. I decided to correct that the next day and arranged to have roses sent to her apartment. Due to some delivery issues, I actually had to reorder them and she finally got both sets of roses, which, with hindsight, was an appropriate overstatement of the impact she had on me. We have never looked back since that first date and within about six weeks, she had agreed to move in with me, much to the chagrin of some of her more cautious girlfriends who thought she should not give up her apartment deal in that sixth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. Since then, I have fallen more and more in love with Kim and thank my lucky stars that match.com had such a good client retention protocol, that Kim was willing to risk $9.95 on a bum like me, that my golfing friend’s son was so intrigued with the whole online dating phenomenon, that I am such an inherent storyteller that I loved spinning a tale of dating foibles to him, that he induced me to stay the course for that first date, and that Kim was flexible enough to put up with such a flaky first date offering as a last minute decision to have dinner.
I have told this story many times, but have never written it down. I feel it deserves to be recorded for posterity since it has been such a life-changing event for me and I write about many lesser events every day. That was nineteen years ago and I can honestly say these have been the best years of my life. That has almost nothing to do with work or where we have lived or gone. It has everything to do with the connection Kim and I have to one another. I do what I do and she does what she does and yet somehow we are always on the same page together.
For all that time we have lived off my earnings and resources and yet I feel that I have gotten way more from Kim than anything I have ever given to her. But this has been Kim’s big week. Every once in a while she does work as a model for print jobs or commercials. This week she had two print jobs that will pay her some money which she will put into her kitty for whatever she needs. Since I have no work on the hoof at the moment, this is the first week since we met all those years ago when she is earning more than me, which strikes me as noteworthy. But then again, since Kim’s output is so vast and hard to quantify in cosmic ways, maybe I best say that for the first time she is generating more than me on every level and by every measure.