Yesterday, I found myself in the enviable position of having free time. Now, you may read that and say “how can a person not have free time”? Well, that’s simple: I work for myself and my boss is a dick. When I’m not working gigs, I’m looking for new gigs, promoting myself, and conducting the humdrum that goes with running a business. Rarely, I have dead-time, and usually, I spend...

Yesterday, I found myself in the enviable position of having free time. Now, you may read that and say “how can a person not have free time”? Well, that’s simple: I work for myself and my boss is a dick. When I’m not working gigs, I’m looking for new gigs, promoting myself, and conducting the humdrum that goes with running a business. Rarely, I have dead-time, and usually, I spend that reading and studying. But, yesterday, I was stymied by the stillness of everything—I did a lot of work Sunday night—and I found myself cleaning my office and ordering pens before I called it a short day. I was able to do two things I love to do, but don’t do enough: play my electric guitar and veg out listening to Bob Marley. I was playing along to “Redemption Song” in a self-induced hypnotic trance and finding bliss in the Jamaican chant, until the song ended and “No Woman, No Cry” started. That was when I got up and took out the trash.

I have nothing against the song, mind you. It just hit close to home. I recently had a nightmare, and typically my recovery posture is to spoon against the woman I’m sleeping with. So, I rolled over and pushed into a woman that wasn’t there and haven’t been there in two years. I ended up sleeping on the couch with the TV showing late night reruns on the Discovery Channel that night.

I’m the type of person that likes being in a relationship, which makes my current draught so unbearable. I think this incurable condition I have—maturity—limit the range I so famously farmed. I stopped going to the bars when I was 30; drinking became more of a hang-up and less of a social lubricant, especially after I developed a medical condition whose medication directly interferes with alcohol. Hitting on drunk women sober is just about as much fun as it sounds, so I abandoned the bar scene. I never did the club scene, and the prospect of doing it in my thirties terrifies me. The last thing I need to be is “the old guy in the club”. So, I had to make due with coffee bars, the occasional church hook-up, and the prospect of an office relationship—which evaporated when I became a freelancer.

This leaves me a stranger in a strange place, an addict desperately in need of a hit. This leaves me desperate, and desperate men do desperate things.

When I was in college, I studied computer science, and I interned for a few companies—sometimes for money, other times for meaningless stock…more than a few times for weed. Usually, I beta-tested, or try out the software and report any bugs in the coding. One of the companies I beta-tested for was an up-start date matching company which had no money to pay its testers, but, instead, gave me an undeletable profile and membership in their service for life. For a very long time, I ignored it; I’m not that pathetic, I told myself.

Until, I was that pathetic.

Now, I have used online dating before, but it was more of a gaffe than a honest-to-God lifeline, and I had decent results: two girlfriends and a fiancée (I couldn’t leave New York because of my ill father, and she was only licensed to practice in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, so, it couldn’t work). But, this time around: nothing, zip, nada. It was as if I went fishing, and waited, and waited, and waited until the worm crawled up the line out of the water, looked at me and said, “Are we done here?”

I think the problem with online dating is the same with real-world dating: you can’t be desperate. Confidence matters. In fact, it’s the only thing that does matter. You can be penny-less, charmless, and physically revolting, but, if you carry yourself with confidence, someone will look your way. Men always complain that once they are in a relationship, women start to find their way towards them. The reason for this is simple: in a relationship, you are no longer hunting; you are confident in your status, and that confidence is what attracting other women.

The word of the day is faith. You must believe in yourself, first and primarily. You must believe in your purpose in this world, and believe in your strength and resolution, and believe that you are beautiful and worthwhile. You have to believe in all that is you. You have to have faith if you want others to have faith in you.

So, I sit, with my fishing line in the water, waiting for a bite and jamming to Bob Marley. That’s the way things are for me right now, but I have faith.

You never know what the river may bring.


Frederick Reese is the reason New York State is the only state that has a law specifically regulating squid wrestling. No, seriously, he is a comically large man (2 meters tall) that lives in the frozen tundra of Central New York State. He is a political and financial contributor for Yahoo!, a political and societal analyst for B. Coleur, a culinary blogger, and a novelist with multiple novels in post-production. You can follow him at his FaceBook page—www.facebook.com/fdreese—or e-mail him at content@bounceback.com.