Online Dating, The Geneva Convention, Unconditional Love & The Silent Treatment

Online dating. Like everything else on the internet it is amazing and confounding at the same time. Let me tell you about the woman that I met from an online dating site. She emailed me one day and said she reviewed my profile and wanted to meet. So I figured ok I could do that. She then proceeded to use the internet equivalent of the water board torture in questioning me about everything. Despite informing her of the Geneva Convention rules which were enacted in 1949 regarding ethical treatment of prisoners of war which 194 countries agreed to she continued to torture me with point blank questions about religion, family, hobbies, who invented liquid paper and why etc.



At one point I cut her off and said "hey maybe we can just visit and get to know each other...and can you please take that spotlight out of my face...". After my grilling she then lightened up and said "We should do this again!" She apparently had a biological clock that was attached to a nuclear bomb and she was looking for someone to pull a McGyver and grab a tooth pick, duct tape and a safety pin to come to the rescue.


Obviously this woman was not the answer. So the question remains how does one find the person they are destined to spend their life with? How will you know when you do find them?


An obvious point of reference would be my parents who have been married for 58 years. Were they the perfect match including all 29 dimensions of their personality as Neil Clarke Warren of EHarmony would have you believe has to be the case? Clearly the answer is no and yet their marriage has never been stronger. On a side note have you ever noticed that the only people that use all 3 names as their moniker are generally famous murderers (John Wayne Gacy, John Wilkes Booth, Lee Havey Oswald)? Just sayin' that Neil Clarke Warren gives me the willies...




So what is the answer and how does my dad an introvert who grew up on a farm, and my mother an extrovert who grew up in a city (San Jose) stay together so long?
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<----- The Happy Couple

My father is an introvert with very few friends to call his own. He does know many people but he does not let anyone into the inner circle. My mother is in the inner circle and that's it. Yes as kids my sisters (3 of them) and I love our father very much but my mom is the core of his life. With my father communication consisted of talking about baseball and then relating that to life. Because baseball is just like life. You have many people on the same team as you (work) that you don't necessarily like or would associate with but you need to learn to work with them for the good of the team (company).


<---Japanese symbol for Honor

With my father the only thing that matters is honor. Written agreements mean nothing all that does is to allow you an escape from your commitments. For instance my parents are holding on to a piece of farmland (the rest of the farm has been sold) solely because of a promise that was made to my fathers ranch foreman years ago. That promise was that he could live in the house on the land we owned until he died. I asked my dad did you write that down? He said "I don't have to write it down I told him he could stay..."

My mother is a social butterfly who has a memory that is unbelievable. An example of this was when my father had a stint put in a few years ago. As visitor after visitor came to see my dad my mother would rattle off facts about each person that came to visit. This person has 2 daughters and they moved to Parlier etc. The ultimate was a lady that showed up and my mom saying to her "you made my wedding dress for me". The astonished lady could barely remember having a job in a seamstress shop much less who she made a dress for.



My mother was the 2nd oldest of six children in a family (post depression) that was about as poor as you can possibly get. Clothes were a luxury during the post depression era. In the picture on the left is 4 of my mom's siblings (my mother is 2nd from the left). If you notice the shirts that the girls are wearing were the dresses from the prior year. What you did is cut off the dresses from the prior year to become this years shirt to wear with your overalls. Does money make you happy? I don't know they look pretty happy and they are plenty poor...

The family was so poor that when my mother became a junior in high school she got a job as a live in maid with a family in Fresno (her folks lived in Parlier). Money was tight there were 8 mouths to feed and something needed to be done. So every Sunday night my mother would be driven out to live with the Cottmans and would come home on Friday. Mom would cry every Sunday (although she will never admit it) because she wanted to be with her brothers and sisters at home. Living out in town also required her to go to a different high school from her siblings. For two years my mother ate her dinner in the kitchen. Choosing to eat over the sink or in the kitchen is one thing...being required to is another altogether. The money she would earn would go to the family.

Has my parents marriage been a fairy tale? Far from it. There were many years of poverty when the kids were young as farming is often a feast or famine existence. There was no such thing as medical insurance; if you got sick you either had to pay for it or you didn't go see the doctor. There were the years when inopportune rain storms would ruin an entire year of work on the raisin farm. At that time there was no such thing as "crop insurance" in case you lost your entire livelihood to a rain. There was the trip to Japan where my father made an unfortunate (for him) joke about my mother and their marriage in front of the ancestors during dinner.

The one thing that stuck out for me was the fact that I never heard my parents say "I love you" to each other. As a matter of fact they never really told us as kids that they loved us. I would hear other people say those words all the time. Once I walked up to my mother and told her "I love you". My mother was clearly uncomfortable at that moment and gave me what I now call the "silent treatment". She did not just say "I love you to son". For the next 10-15 minutes my mother explained to me (as a 15 year old) that love is not telling someone you love them constantly. Love is about taking care of your family. Love is about making sure your family is safe. Love is knowing that your friends will come and go but your family is forever. She explained to me that there are husbands who beat their wives and parents who beat their children who say they love their spouses and their kids all the time. The axiom "Actions speak louder than words" was her message. I knew my parents loved my sisters and I but for our family it was an unspoken truth.

From that point on I was happy to receive the "silent treatment" from my parents. Because that meant that they would always support whatever decisions I made...yes love me unconditionally and always be there for me.

As the years passed into adulthood the word "Love" did creep into my vocabulary but it is neither trivial to me or used carelessly. It is something I will reserve for those closest to me, including my daughter and the woman that I want to spend the next 58 years with.

So the next time I am at my parents home and I see them both sitting silently I will know inside that my dad is giving my mom the "silent treatment" and that they will make it to wedding anniversary 59...