Bitter: It's not just a gal thing

“You’re not like other fortysomething women I’ve met.”

These are interesting words to come from a man I barely knew. For a moment, I panicked. I mean, I like being different, but only in certain ways. The good ways. What was he getting at?
“What do you mean?” I asked dispassionately so I didn’t come off tweaked, too eager or neurotic.
“You’re not bitter.”

I drew a sigh of relief. But I could tell we were on to something, and it was infinitely more intriguing than even my green papaya salad.

It was my first date with Peter, a fiftysomething guy I met online. He was tall and lanky, cute in a face-that-grows-on-you kinda way. We agreed to meet at E&O Trading Co. He showed up in a thrift-store Versace leopard print shirt, funky jeans, a large silver hoop in his right ear and a goofy smile. I had a feeling I was going to like him right away. Now I wasn’t too sure how the night was going to go. But I mustered up all my best people skills and got at it.

“Bitter? Do you find that women are bitter?”
“Most of them,” he said as he munched on a corn fritter.
“Why is that?”

“They’re angry. Angry at their exes, at the last boyfriend who dumped them, at the guy they gave their number to who doesn’t call, at the guy they slept with and then never see again ...”
I started to squirm a bit. I thought of some of the experiences my divorced girlfriends and I have gone through lately, and some of the things we’ve said. Were they bitter? Was I bitter, too, but better able to mask it — at least for date No. 1?

Jennifer, a newly divorced mom who gets hit on all the time, has been wondering why the guys she’s not interested in keep calling but she never gets calls from the ones she really likes, even though they say they will.

Mia, whose husband went through hundreds of thousands of their life savings and never told her (and ended up with their house!), is just barely over the guy who pursued her even though she kept insisting she didn’t want a relationship. Two years of hot-and-heavy dating later, when she finally started thinking, “OK, I’ve found The One,” he announced that he couldn’t commit. He split.

Nadine, a talented, smart, genuine and sassy gal not only hasn’t had a boyfriend in five years, but she hasn’t been able to muster many dates either, despite going online, trying speed-dating, volunteering and hanging out at all the happening music places from Petaluma to San Francisco.

Anna was seeing a dashing man who actively wooed her. They were fast approaching boyfriend-girlfriend status and then one day, out of nowhere, the fateful words: “I just don’t want to get too involved.”

Lara dated a man for a year, a man she talked about having babies with, when he just kinda disappeared one day. She hasn’t heard from him since. No goodbye, not even a “It’s not you, it’s me.”
I’ve had a head-scratching experience, too. Dave was one of the hottest-looking men I’d seen online, a former model with blue-green eyes and an amazing body. But much more important, he wrote an enticing profile — and with no spelling errors (a rarity among online profiles). He said he was seeking honesty, a soul mate, a woman with depth, intellect and character. Plus he was a dad, so I knew he’d be empathetic to my single-mom status.

He was charming and gracious in person. We hit it off on our first date and had two more. He was gushy when he talked to me, complimenting me on everything, wanting to make more plans. I started to feel a little gushy myself. And then ... the e-mail. I don’t remember exactly what it said anymore, but he basically told me we just weren’t a good fit. I was a little surprised but, OK — I know it takes more than a few dates before you really get a sense of someone, so I didn’t feel too disappointed or give it too much thought. But a few weeks later, while goofing off on Craigslist, I saw some chatter about him in the Missed Connections section.

“Anyone ever go out with Dave from Yahoo? He wines and dines you, sends you flowers and then dumps you with an e-mail,” one woman wrote.
And then a whole chorus of women chimed in with their Dave experiences, and one even reprinted his e-mail. As I read it, I shuddered: He sent the same Dear Jane e-mail word-for-word to each of them — and me!

I just coudn’t resist. I still had his personal e-mail address so I sent him an e-mail letting him know that he was a hot topic among the women he’d left in his wake. “What goes around comes around, I guess,” I wrote. He didn’t write back, but he’s still online, probably with the same M.O.
Sure, these are just bumps in the dating road, but are they enough to make a gal bitter? If a woman has several experiences like this — on top of a messy divorce, dealing with a deadbeat dad, feeling overwhelmed by her full-time job and mommy duties, struggling to make ends meet
because the divorce blasts her level of living — does that make it OK to become a bit jaded? Is it any different if a guy gets rejected over and over?

Some men seem to think “bitter” and “divorcee” go together like that old love and marriage, horse and carriage ditty. Author and former psychotherapist R. Don Steele (“How to Date Young Women”) who writes advice columns for men on www.mensnewsdaily.com, www.menstuff.org and his own site, www.steelballs.com, evidently is one.

“Are there very many women who can overcome their bitterness?” a male reader writes in to Steele.

Steele’s answer? “No, not many. Most women fester there until after menopause. About seven years later, many women are able to accept that the world is the way it is and that they were operating on a faulty set of principles. ... The rest are grumpy, angry, bitter old ladies.”
If this is what most men think about us — you know, the soon-to-be grumpy, angry, bitter old ladies — we have a much bigger problem here than I thought. And, perhaps something to really be bitter about.

As for Peter, we went out a few more times, and although I liked a lot of things about him, there was one area that we were just not a good fit (so to speak): Sex. But this is a really touchy topic to approach with a guy, especially when no amount of Viagra, tantra or sex therapy sessions were going to help.
I’m a very honest gal, but there was no way to tell him the truth. So I told him a “mistruth,” cringing inside as the words came out of my mouth — that I just wasn’t emotionally ready to commit so soon. He didn’t take the news happily, and for weeks he kept trying to get together. I felt pretty awful, but we were done, and I didn’t want to lead him on.
I’ve seen Peter around since, and he’s been standoffish and curt. One might even say bitter.
I guess he knows now that bitter can go both ways.