Purple Trans Ams, White Lies & Green Cards

Posted on by Midwest Mark

If you read me regularly, you know that my life is full of joy. My wife, Tara, says she has never known anyone with so much joie de vivre. This French phrase means a cheerful, hearty, or carefree enjoyment of life. Yep! Totally me!

I owe much of this zest for life to Tara. I often say she saved me from myself, and based on my dating history, you’d probably agree.

As alluded to in my “eye of the tiger” post , I never expected to be dating as an adult. I’d met my ex at the tender age of 17 and married her five years later. The concept of high school sweethearts sounds romantic, until you wake up one day in the future and realize you have nothing in common anymore. 

I was still young when we divorced and hadn’t completely soured on the idea of love so, with a mix of trepidation and excitement — but mostly sheer terror — I plunged headfirst into the dating scene. Talk about a fish out of water. Where to even meet women was a mystery; I wasn’t into the bar scene and didn’t have any friends attractive enough (or single enough) to date, so I turned to the internet.

Online dating was in its infancy then, but sites like OK Cupid were all the rage, so I created an account and started chatting with a woman named Jennifer. She looked pretty enough in her photo, so we agreed to meet up at a Starbucks in the mall one rainy evening. I got there a few minutes before our scheduled 7 p.m. rendezvous, and within seconds she texted, letting me know she was running an hour late. 

Things only went downhill from there. 

When she finally arrived after I’d made about a dozen laps past Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, the first words out of her mouth were, “So, have I aged much?”

Has the Colosseum aged much?! I was tempted to reply, but bit my tongue. To be fair, she had warned me that her OKC profile pic was “a little outdated.” Honey, disco is a little outdated. You are Big Band Era. The photo, it turns out, had been taken a decade earlier and the intervening years had been less than kind. I wanted to sue her for misrepresentation but decided to give things a go anyway.

As she leaned in close, I caught a whiff of her scent. Perfume? Nope…cigarettes. She reeked of tobacco smoke, a major turn-off. I clearly remembered under the Smokes? section of her profile, she had written N/A. Apparently, that meant Nicotine Addict. 

Our initial topic of conversation revolved around the fact that she had lost 300 pounds and had contemplated buying an electric wheelchair to get around. While I like women with a little meat on their bones and applaud her efforts, she had about that much more still to lose. When she asked me if I’d like to see her tattoo, I nodded politely, expecting to see a tiny butterfly on her ankle or something. Instead, she rolled up her pant leg, showing off the gaudiest-looking dragon I had ever seen. It was gargantuan, wrapping around most of her leg, the fire-breathing head swallowed by her thigh. 

Clearly this was no love connection, but I’m a polite guy, so I soldiered on. I asked Jennifer where she lived, expecting to hear something like an apartment or Taylor Street. Instead, I got, “With my parents.” Not just her folks, though. Jennifer, her  21 y/o son,  14 y/o daughter, and grandkids were all living under the same roof. 

I wasn’t even remotely attracted to this chain-smoking, Full House-worshipping tattooed grandma, so it was time to cut the date short. I offered to walk her to her car, and she gladly accepted — but when we reached the parking lot, said car was nowhere to be found. 

“Oh, shit,” she kept muttering as we searched the dark parking lot in vain, getting drenched because it was pouring rain. This went on for a solid 20 minutes.  

“Are you sure you didn’t park on the other side of Macy’s?” I finally asked.
“Oh, wait,” she replied. “There’s another side of Macy’s?”

Of course, this was exactly what she had done. Relief washed over me as we finally located her car, a purple Trans-Am I’m pretty sure you could have spotted from the moon. She offered to drive me to the other side of the mall “so you won’t get wet,” which was laughable considering I was already soaked to the bone.

This casual dating stuff is for the birds, I told myself. What I need is a relationship. 

What I didn’t need was a relationship filled with deceit and a side trip to Crazy Town, but that’s what I got. She was a fellow blogger who lived in another state but, two months after we started chatting, moved to Washington to be near me after ostensibly separating from her husband. 

Key word: ostensibly.

Our relationship was a strange one involving numerous break-ups and reconciliations. Furtive phone calls out of earshot. Lots of trips to visit her parents in California that never involved me because she kept our relationship a secret from them.

You know who else she kept our relationship a secret from? Her husband. I didn’t learn the fact that they had never actually divorced, as she’d assured me they had, until reading her obituary years later.

The icing on the cake? Every time I tried to end things for good, she pulled out all the stops to win me back. The woman faked pregnancies twice just to keep me around while also stringing along a husband in another state. I feel bad because she passed away from undetected cancer at age 37, but holy hell. Did I dodge a bullet or what?!

(Weird side note: the husband and I later became friends, and still are to this day. We were mutually duped. I feel worse for him.)

Hmm, I thought. Maybe a relationship ISN’T the way to go. 

There was this woman who lived in Australia. A cute, witty, and fun single mom. She was an entire hemisphere away, so I figured a little innocent flirting wouldn’t hurt anybody. A little turned into a lot; let’s just say we were both into the idea of improving foreign relations.

Her dad was an American citizen and she had long yearned to move back to the U.S. but couldn’t get a visa. One day she was lamenting this fact, and I let those three little words slip. No, not those three little words. These three little words:

“Marry me, then.”

Spoken, of course, in the heat of passion. I thought it was obvious that I was joking, but the next day she started researching flights from Sydney to Portland, talking about the logistics of blended families, discussing interior decorating ideas for the living room. OUR living room. This went on for weeks, but I found myself unable to delicately extricate myself from the misunderstanding. She was so damn giddy! Finally, when she was getting ready to book a flight, I had to break the news that I had no intention of marrying someone I’d never met for a green card.

She did not take the news well and we never spoke again. 

One month later I met up with Tara, and the rest — thank God — is history. I may be biased, but if ever there was a fella deserving of a little joy in his life, it’s gotta be me.

39 thoughts on “Purple Trans Ams, White Lies & Green Cards”

  1. Oh….the trip you take us on, Mark. The suburban American mall. Auntie Anne’s? Hot Topic? Spencer’s? You set the mood for your misadventures. So happy that you lived to tell the tales…and that you found Tara. Maybe the blogging world is the new hot spot for love connections? Certainly it was a better bet than the mall! 😉

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  2. Your writing is always a hoot, Mark! Dating really is an adventure, isn’t it? And your particular journey had fire-breathing dragon, witches, nicotine addicts, and the works. I’m so glad you finally made it to the castle and found your queen.

    Revisiting your “eye of the tiger post,” you’re coming up on 10 years? Happy anniversary to you and Tara!! And cheers to (hopefully) no more side trips to Crazy Town… I think the dating scene is even more dismal now than a decade ago.

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  3. Joy?? Tara may bring out your joyful side but she saved your romantic a** just by being a normal person! This story, in my humble opinion, has and will always hold top place for an HoTM post. Honest, real, hilarious and truly life changing events told to highlight a perfect ending.

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    1. I’m not ashamed to admit you’re 100% correct. I’m just wondering why it took me so long to find a normal woman, because I left out two others that easily could have made the cut…I just didn’t want this post to be any longer than it already was!

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  4. As an ADHD poster child, I can identify Mark 😁 . . . an adventurous, humorous testimony of traveling lofty mountaintops and through cavernous valleys along life’s joie de vivre path, fueled by copious adrenaline . . . never a dull moment.😄
    There are some rabbit trails I definitely regret going down, but overall it’s been an exciting, ‘Just Do It’!, joyful journey, and my ever lovingly patient, gracious, forgiving Abba still has me here fogging a mirror . . . Joie de Vivre!

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  5. Those are wild stories! What an adventure with online dating. I have friends all middle-aged or past who have some very interesting stories to share. One good friend of mine was shocked when a married man to one of our friends connected with her online! He had just done work for her in her home and he knew she was close friends with the wife!

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  6. So, so funny. Why is it that dating gone wrong provides so much great fodder. But thank goodness for Tara – you’re right, she saved you and these stories are so much fun especially because you have a happy ending! ❤ ❤ ❤

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    1. I think you just reach a certain point in your life where it’s not worth it to jump back into the dating pool. If I found myself single again now, I wouldn’t even bother. Congratulations on 33 years together!

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  10. On-line dating adventures make for great blog posts! Living them isn’t quite as much fun. I too have been through a few “interesting” dates. However, Match. com did allow me to meet my very wonderful boyfriend of 5 years.

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  12. Oh this is the best story about dating I’ve read in a long time. A trashy dragon tattoo? Oh my. And I’m laughing about reading someone’s obituary and discovering they’d lied to you. Is it wrong to find that funny? Doesn’t matter. I’m glad you and Tara met, that you knew she was normal [enough] for you, and that you two and your joie de vivre lived happily ever after.

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    1. Crazy, huh? He reached out to me a few years after she passed away. He’d been reading my blog and wasn’t sure if I knew she had died. We had some very interesting conversations in which we essentially “compared notes” and were able to fill in a lot of blanks for each other. It was sad, because it really showed us both how deceitful she was being. He’d been very angry with me at first, and even admitted to thoughts of coming up to Washington to make my life a living hell, but he accepted the fact that I truly believed she was divorced, and I realized he wasn’t the monster she made him out to be. We ended up FB friends, and I have an open invitation to meet up with him for drinks in Vegas anytime. It’s something I’d actually consider.

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      2. He knew about me right from the start, way back in 2007 when she first flew up to Washington to spend the weekend with me. Craziest thing of all: that was three months after their wedding!! I am not at all proud of what transpired during that period in my life, but I refuse to beat myself up too badly because she was very slick with the lies and had me believing they were over.

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      3. Whoa! Three months in?! Sounds like she had some psychological trauma from her childhood to make her want to behave that way. I’m not blaming you at all. I’m just shocked/impressed that the husband knew right away. I guess she wasn’t great about hiding her tracks.

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      4. And if he knew about you, why didn’t he get a hold of you and say something like, “Stay away from my wife,” as generic as that is. That would’ve saved you both a lot of pain.

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