Someone I don’t know very well just posted on FB a request that others share how best to meet a potential partner in the Catskills. I didn’t comment, but did laugh out loud reading one response, a divorcee who said the Catskills are a BYOB region, as in Bring Your Own Boo. That’s because – in my opinion – otherwise, you’re on your own, the pickings are that slim, particularly if you’re a college-educated woman, which both she (the OP) and the divorcee are, so, um, good-fucking-luck. You will find any number of married or deeply intertwined with a partner type men who want to stray (including those with children), consequence free, preferably, cake and eat it too dudes, plenty of those around, as is true everywhere, but single men over 30? Not so much. Rural single women will also find that other women, the ones with ‘boos’, do not want your available ass hanging around socially or otherwise.
But is this true in the bulk of rural place and spaces? Maybe. I merely speak from my own limited experience. I did try the on-line rural dating thing, ages ago now; it was depressing, more so in upstate than it was in NYC, but – much the same, as men my age in either area sought women fifteen to twenty years younger than they – than we – are. Yay! In upstate, those same fantasy-prone men exist along with – and this was not a small cohort – ZZ Top-resembling boomer boys living off or semi-off the grid. These men were looking for females who were equally interested in not paying taxes or anything else to ‘the man’ while raising chickens, maybe also a pig or two, getting milk from a neighbor down the road in exchange for cutting wood, mending fences. You know. No, I do not, I’m happy to tell you. These individuals tended to enjoy seasonal hunting and trapping – on their own land, mind you – no license fees to NYS paid here, ma’am. Hobbies are a good thing but living off game? No, thank you.
Still, love is out there, so they say, whoever they are. Those instances when I did go on dates with men I met on line – they’re less comical than sad. One man, two years sober after a twenty-five-year heroin addiction (he’d said he was working in the recovery sphere, not working his recovery) was interested in making an instant connection, the kind I assume you get when you’re shooting up with a fellow addict? He’d brought, he told me over sushi, a change of clothes with the intention of returning to my home for a night of co-ed wrestling. On a first, blind date. Poor guy. He was angry with me for directly saying, um, no, that is not going to happen.
Then there was the guy who asked me to meet him for lunch at a local Speed Way, a common gas station slash snack shop in upstate New York. I got the sense he was working toward a free cup of coffee reward for buying five lunches type deal. I begged off. No, thank you. Or the guy who had abandoned his wife and son twenty-plus years earlier. He was just being up front and honest, and no, he didn’t feel guilt, or any particular responsibility for his having abandoned his family. He’d also never done anything to reach out, not to his son or ex. Boom. Gone, baby, gone. Nuh-uh. People are, of course, entitled to make their own choices, but the consequences might include no one else wants to get or be involved with you, Mr. Upfront-Honest.
Yet I did ultimately have a relationship as a result of one of those on-line meet-ups, although calling it a relationship might be going too far. Let’s call it an arrangement between two consenting adults, one of whom (me) was in the process of burying both parents over a four-year span after a decade of their having circled the drain. I was in need of a break, a treat, a distraction. He was separated from his wife of many years, and very, very angry, but also very smart, fully employed, and ZZ Top beardless. Life is full of compromises. I made one then, and, not long after my dad’s death, I stopped making it.
I wish my FB friend the best, and happy hunting. She’s a poet, a Buddhist, a lover of obscure Japanese and French films; perhaps she can find love at a local Zen center or within a Buddhist group after attending meditations or readings? These things are out there, somewhere. As may the perfect rural-living man for her. Y’never know. Rural dating. Rural living. Bring your own boo, or – be prepared to grab someone else’s, if you can get close and familiar enough to try, and that’s a big If.