Guess I had that coming

I've been amusing myself with eHarmony.com recently -- I don't really expect that there are lots of devout single Christian women out there eager to find themselves a middle-aged divorced guy with nine kids, though I suppose with 3 billion women in the world one never knows...but it's still interesting to see whom eHarmony thinks I would match up with. So far, for example, eHarmony, not content with having matched me up with one girl from India, one from Botswana, one in Slovakia (but I think she's American so maybe that doesn't count) and two from Brasil (hey, at least I had already started learning Portuguese, right?) thinks I'm a great match for the following two (apparently very nice) ladies:

1. A lady living in Cambridge, MA (i.e. Harvardland) pursuing some sort of challenging career that involves the doctorate she has already earned; and also...

2. ...a lady living in Missouri running her family's bison farm.

Apparently eHarmony thinks I'd make a good husband for either of those two estimable women... [scratching head] Seems like they'd have to be wrong about at least one of those two matches, wouldn't you think?

The second lady -- whom I don't at all mean to make fun of, because she seems like a very kind person and because heaven knows I've never worried too much about being conventional my own self -- has a specially-trained-for-therapy toy poodle named Mr T Rex whom she takes around to hospitals and nursing homes to help cheer patients up with...and her list of things she "can't live without" includes "bison." Somehow I'm thinking that if she's the girl for you, you'd better grab her, 'cause I don't think there's another one.

Look, I'm not going to blog my dating relationships (should I ever have any) because that would be most unfair to the lady in question; you ought to be able to date a guy without starring in his little mini-reality show. All I'm saying is, I just think the whole process has been very amusing. And this brings me to the story that the title of the post refers to...

eHarmony sends me four or five matches a day, and of course there's a reasonable percentage of them (most of them, actually) that by the time I've gotten to the end of their profile I already know, "Um, no, not this one." So you can "close the match" whenever you want; which I in most cases do. But when you close a match, eHarmony asks you to give them a reason that they can pass on to the other person in the interests of closure -- you have to pick from eHarmony's list rather than making up your own (this limits the cruelty factor, which is a good idea). Well, the least insulting one on the list is, "I think the physical distance between us is too great," which certainly makes a good excuse for, you know, the Botswanan. I generally just check where she's from, and if it's anywhere but Texas, I say politely, "I think the physical distance between us is too great."

Then a couple of days ago I get a notice that some woman has closed the match with ME, before I even got around to reading her profile. I pop the thing open to see what her reason is:

"I think the physical distance between us is too great."

I look to the top of her profile to see where she's from:

League City, Texas.

[grinning] As I say, I guess I had that one coming.