I said in yesterday’s post that my friend Mark’s online dating experience had been good and bad and I shared the bad parts in the last post. We left off with Mark saying “I wanted someone who was gentle and easy-going and that’s what I’m afraid I’ve had to go abroad to find.” We pick Mark’s story up from here.
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I stumbled across a site on the Internet called Cherry Blossom. They’ve been going for a number of years and basically, it’s where foreign women look for foreign husbands. I went on there and I’ve never had so much fun on a dating site. I’ve never had so much interest in me. Yes, there are scammers out there. You have east European people trying to get money out of Westerners and you’ve even got Asian girls who try to get money of the arrangement. But there’s also people you can meet, many of whom are very nice.
I actually went on two dates – I could have married them both! In the end, the first one was too young. She was 28. I had chatted to her for about a month beforehand so I knew what we had and the actual meeting was just going to reinforce our feelings. I saw her on the Internet with the cam and she was drop dead gorgeous. Going to meet her, so long as she turned up, was going to be what I thought was a good experience. And it was. We had a brilliant week together in Hong Kong. She said to me afterwards, Mark, it was just like being on honeymoon. It was just fantastic and we just clicked straight away.
I spoke to my kids [aged 21 and 18] about it when I got back and they just said Dad, we think she’s too young for you and I actually took their opinion on board.
So I thought OK, I’ll have a look a bit older and that’s when I met the girl I’m with now – Helen. She’s 38. She’s such a sweet girl and hasn’t got one bad bone in her body. I’ve met her twice now, once in Singapore and then nearly a month in Manila.
I’ve spoken to my kids about what I’m doing. Although my daughter said ‘oh Dad, you met her on the Internet, how would you feel if I met someone on the Internet,’ I said, ‘At my age there’s not many options for me to go meet someone.’ I honestly feel you have to go on the Internet to meet someone. I run a business and I’m not going to get involved with my staff. I wasn’t going to meet someone in the workplace and so what do you do?
I’m hoping to marry her. We just want to be together now. I talk to Helen for four or five hours a day. You talk to someone for that long, for eight months, you do get to know them. The other nice thing is it’s not just a sexual thing. As much as we’re sexually compatible, we’re not just in out of bed. We are actually talking – we talk about nothing and we talk about everything. By the time, I probably marry her and she’s able to come to England, it will have been a year.
If Helen comes to England and settles with me, I won’t be complaining about where I’m going from here on.
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I think I must be a more guarded, cautious person by nature than Mark. I can’t see myself getting on a plane on my own, flying thousands of miles to meet someone I’ve met over the Internet. What if he didn’t turn up? What if he turned up and we didn’t like each other? But then, I haven’t had the dating experience Mark has and may be that gives you more confidence. I do think Mark is right when he says that the amount of time he spends talking to Helen means he truly knows her. Maybe one of the advantages of their long-distance romance is that their friendship can’t be confused with having a fun activity partner.