Over the years, I’ve looked for love in lots of the wrong places.

I’ve met future ex-boyfriends in classes, bars, at work, through friends, at conferences and even on the freeway. Long story, but he’ll always be remembered as Mercedes Man.

Before I gave up the hunt a few years ago, I even had a brief fling with online dating. E-Harmony, match.com, Seniorfriendfinders (yep, I’m in that category, barely).

The strangest response was from someone I dated for a few months many years ago. From his online description, he sounded interesting. I wouldn’t have recognized anything from his picture. He was standing in a trout stream at the tip of South America with waders and a hat on, casting his fly rod.

It could have been anyone from Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It to bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons.

But I’m game. Somebody who goes to Patagonia to fish has my kind of sense of adventure…although I’d really rather go to Argentina and tango.

We exchanged a few emails and I was gradually feeling as though I knew him. It was comfortable until he asked a question about the house I’d lived in.

Whoop, whoop, flashing lights and alarm bells. I remembered him…and I’d dumped him. He went on to marry a friend and now they’re divorced.

We shared a couple more of the “where are they now” emails, but we both knew this wasn’t a match made in heaven, or in exotic foreign countries.

I’ve taken myself out of the dating pool, probably permanently, but that hasn’t stopped interested parties.

Now I get proposals and “friends” from facebook. I wonder about all these guys who started with “I saw your picture…” Right. It’s not a glamour shot, it was taken at a friend’s birthday party several years ago.

When the facebook conversations starting popping up six or so years ago, I answered one or two from Florida and Texas (at least that’s where they said they were). After one “Hello, how are you” that, in the next communiqué turned into an invitation to spend my money and visit for Christmas, I unfriended and stopped responding to the requests. Delete, delete, delete.

It did give me a great idea for a murder mystery, though, that I’m going to write someday.

As a novelist, I’m curious who these guys are. I had a run of soldiers stationed overseas. Young guys who posed with their Humvees or guns or in the weight rooms, lifting. Big muscles straining against the camos or bare-chested showing off the tats.

A lot of them looked to be my daughter’s age.

Then I started getting into the officers’ ranks. Guys in dress uniforms with chests full of medals, standing in front of a class or speaking to what looked like the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Now the military has stepped down and I’m in the middle-aged civilian population. Guys on boats. Guys on yachts. Guys by airplanes. Guys on the beach. There was a friend request recently from a guy who’d gone to the hair stylist before he had his portfolio shoot.

His photo collage, all dated the same day, included a head and shoulders of him. A shot of him in a suit. A shot leaning against a deck rail with a sweater casually around his shoulders. A shot of him with his pant legs rolled up strolling on the beach. A shot of him at a small table on a deck with roses, wine, cheese and grapes. The kicker was one of him in a big chair reading, with HIS GLASSES ON.

Think he read “What Women Want?”

I’ve also moved overseas. The guys from Ukraine are in competition with the ones from England and Wales.

In truth, the age of social media is kind of creepy. Because I’m an author and need to use these sites to market my books, I’m visible on line.

But this is the wrong place to look for love.

*~*~*~*

Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz and is a fifth generation Californian. She’s lived and worked all over the state, calling both Southern and Northern California home.  During her career in journalism—as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers—she won awards for producing investigative series.

SNAP: All That Jazz, Book Eight of The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, was awarded second place by the Paranormal Romance Guild’s reviewers for best paranormal vampire book of 2014. The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles also won for best series in 2014.  The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles include SNAP: The World Unfolds, SNAP: New Talent, Plague: A Love Story, DANUBE: A Tale of Murder, SNAP: Love for Blood, SNAP: Happily Ever After?, SNAP: White Nights and SNAP: All That Jazz.  SNAP: I, Vampire, Book Nine in the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles is scheduled for publication in 2015.

She also writes the Amy Hobbes Newspaper mysteries, Edited for Death and Labeled for Death and Delta for Death, published May 2015.