mid life crisis

my first experience with online dating should have, in fact, been my last. but i was inexplicably drawn back, time after time. my first experience goes as follows:
if i was going to pay money for an online dating service, i was going with "the best" - eHarmony. how did i figger them to be the best? well the price of course! also, they use science! i mean hell people! science! anyway, so i sign up, pay my money and start getting matches. i got matches by the hundreds. apparently, my inner qualities are shared by half of the upper midwest. so, i sift through most of them, closing all matches that say anything about "jesus" or "god". don't ask me why because that brings up a whole other set of issues and we are currently discussing online dating. anywho, i start communicating with a match who we'll call larry. larry was the last of the good guys. he was 34, divorced for 3 years, had a son with his ex-wife who died from a childhood accident. talk about tugging the heart strings. his ex-wife cheated on him with his best friend, of course. what a sad tale of woe. so larry and i talk for a couple of months through e-mails and phone calls. i'm thinking "hey, i really like this guy, maybe even love him". we get to the point where we think it's time to meet. arrangements are made, nerves are put on edge, and we're all in a general dither. a week before the agreed on meet time i see him online and start a conversation. the person on the other end says "this is not larry, this is his daughter, ann". i have heard of ann before, but she has always been a niece. so i tell her "you're not his daughter, you are in fact his niece" and she tells me "no, i'm his daughter". we have a short conversation and i decide to do some internet super sleuthing. through my not so extensive research, i am able to view larry's divorce decree on his county's records website. turns out larry was less than truthful (shocker, i know). when larry divorced only 18 months previous he, in fact, had 3 living children. perhaps they just slipped his mind... also, he was actually 44 not 34, his birthdate being in 1960, not 70. when confronted with this new information, larry's response was that the birthdate was a typo (yeah, uh-huh. i may be dumb but i'm not stupid!) and the kids... well the kids he was trying to protect. see, he didn't know what kind of person i was. you know what kind of person i am? the kind that doesn't like to be lied to! you know the kind, normal people. obviously this person was not one of us. i mean, it's really sweet that you were going through a midlife crisis and all, but why don't you do like the rest of them? go buy yourself a sports car and get a toupee. and please don't feed me this bullshit about wanting to protect your kids. i have two kids whom you knew all about. whom you pressured me to want to meet. and do you know how many times i heard the phrase "well, i can do for my nieces and nephews because i don't have kids". it had to be in the hundreds. what a load of shit. these were not the only lies i had been told, but they are too numerous to get into here. just let me say that "larry, i hope you die of dysentery"
after a couple months recuperating from this disaster, i decided to try my hand at the online matchmaking again. more fun stories to follow.