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Deanna sat pensively behind her computer as she stared at the bewildering list of questions on the dating form. She had never tried computer dating before. All her friends had made fun of it. But the house was empty now, her husband Bill had died almost nine years ago, and her two children were living on their own.
Her work as an administrator filled her days, but nights were quiet and lonely. She either read or watched TV. For a while, she had joined the Red Hat Society and it had been great fun dressing in Purple and Red and genuinely bonding with her friends, but still something was missing.
She scrolled through the pages of men on the dating site, looked at their pictures, read their profiles, and wondered quietly to herself why they were there. Was it the same for them, she wondered, the kind of loneliness that she felt deep inside.
She brewed herself a cup of tea and resolved finally to answer the questions. The last section required a couple of paragraphs about herself. She stopped writing. How honest she could be?
Everyone else said something about romance and long walks on the beach, but that just wasn’t her. What she would really like was to have her feet rubbed the way that her husband had. But could she put that in there? She smiled. It just sounded dumb to tell somebody that you liked your feet rubbed. It was after all downright unromantic. No, she wouldn’t do it.
Three weeks later, and after several close encounters of the male kind, she found herself having breakfast with Donald. He was her 100% match according to her computer profile. And after meeting him in person, she could do nothing but agree. He seemed perfect.
In the week just after Labor Day, they’d gone to the lake and spent a day on her boat. They’d brought a bottle of wine and talked for hours about little things. And then this curious thing happened. Donald pulled her legs into his lap and began to gently massage her feet. How did he know? She was sure that she had not included it in the profile. Or could he possibly know that the sensations in her feet shared the same real estate in her brain with her most intimate body parts? Could any man know that, she wondered, of the kind of pleasurable spillover effect that she felt deep inside? The warmth from his touch was immediate.
Deanna was falling in love, and a natural bonding chemical called PEA surged into her bloodstream, but that is a story for another column. Later that night, they fell together in a warm bliss, but I’m not sure Deanna can tell you if it was the sun and warm air, the wine, or perhaps the foot massage that took her there.