From Chapter Nine

No, I wasn’t wowing every woman I came across.  Who does?  But even if I sparked an interest in only half of the women I was meeting, still, I was meeting a lot of women—and half of a lot is still a lot.  The problem was—whether I saw someone once or half-a-dozen times, whether we slept together or not—nothing seemed to be taking hold.  The chemistry necessary for any genuine, long-term adhesion just wasn’t happening.

And I wasn’t the only one experiencing this phenomenon.  Not only was I hearing the same lament from the women I’d been meeting, I was gleaning the same story, albeit indirectly, from the dating service itself.  Many—no, most—of the women whose profiles I’d noticed when I first signed on, those many months ago, were still on the service, logging in on a daily basis, signaling by their presence that they, too, were coming up short in the hunt for something long-term. 

As I drove home from yet another first date—Bonnie, 43 years old with a 12-year-old daughter—a notion started swirling in my head.  Maybe the problem wasn’t a lack of chemistry.  Maybe the problem was the whole notion of chemistry itself.