Dating Madness DOT Com

Driving down San Francisco Street one December morning, I saw a friend on her way to work.  She prefers to walk, but on this bitterly cold morning she readily accepted a ride to her store on the Plaza.  I will call her Alice  because she has the same views as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.  She thinks Santa Fe is Wonderland and everyone who lives here is completely Mad.  If we were sane we would live somewhere else.

I told her I had met a woman online and thanked Alice for telling me about her brother's success with internet dating.

She was horrified.

"But all the woman on the internet are crazy," she said.  "I never meant for you to do it."  She was serious.  Alice said her brother had met, married and divorced three different women on the internet.  All of them had been crazy.

"I've met several of those," I agreed, without mentioning that such women are my cup of tea.  One of my early love objects suffered from a personality disorder.  Put me in a room with a dozen women and I will zero in on the one with the most prominent symptoms of borderline personality organization.

At the local community college I was immediately attracted to a woman who said she had moved here from Massachusetts.  For our first date, she asked me to pick her up at her therapist's office.  I immediately recognized her therapist as a national authority on the treatment of Borderline Personality because I had read her book.  Santa Fe is Mecca for women with BPD.  They are everywhere in this city.  No wonder Santa Fe has more therapists per capita than any other city in the world, Buenos Aires included.

"Dating women on the internet is like picking up prostitutes on the street,” Alice said.  There was some truth to this as well.  Promiscuity can be a symptom of borderline personality.  The first woman my dating service matched me up with said she had hooked up with ninety-two partners online. She kept all their photographs and E-mails in a folder on her computer. She also liked to pick up men at Whole Foods.  Another early match was a state employee who said she had gone online to meet a better class of men than the ones she had been picking up at the Tin Star.   Going to bed with her was two-for-one, because she would pass your number on to her a young coworkerl at the state finance office who liked to date older men.  She had abandoned her young children in Dallas and moved to Santa Fe to discover who she really was.  In my experience, borderline women who are sexually promiscuous have all suffered horrendous childhood abuse.

I told Alice I met a local artist on the internet, whom I will call Ann. I said Ann and I were moving in together.  Naturally, I did not mention that Ann had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse or that she struggled with borderline personality organization.

We arrived at her store and I asked how she was doing.  She said the economy was not good and she had not made any new pieces, but she hoped to start a new project in the spring.  She said her partner, a carpenter, was working at a job in Artesia.  He came home every weekend.  She talked about a few of her artist friends.  Then she returned to her concerns about online dating.

“You have to be very careful with people on the internet,” she said with genuine concern in her voice. "People online really are crazy, especially if they live in Santa Fe."  

"Like you and me?" I asked.

 "Yes, just like you and me."  Alice had to move out of her family home when she was still a teenager after her schizophrenic brother literally chased her around the house with an ax.  Her mother wanted to keep her son at home and out of an institution, so she put her daughter’s things out on the front porch.  Alice definitely was on the spectrum, but she was already in a committed relationship.

 "Please be careful," Alice said, as she leaned across the center console and gave me a kiss.