Lonely Hearts Club

Pat Boone turned 77 years of age this week. How well I remember, at the Army hospital where I was on staff, walking into the coffee shop, the magazine rack filled with magazines, Pat Boone on the cover in his white buck shoes. I remember buying a pair of white buck shoes, hoping that the Pat Boone image would rub off on me. Pat, like the rest of us, has aged, and we are living in a different world.

I hired a woman to work for me, doing secretarial work and book-keeping. She had arrived from England just a few months previously. In this different world, through a online dating service she had met a local man. They had corresponded for a long time, become friends; and fool of all fools, against the wishes of her mother and children, she had sold her house in England, moved to North Carolina and married this man. She thought that she knew him, “he is so nice when he wants to be”, but she had truly married a “Jekyll and Hyde”, bipolar, dual personality.

He had been a prisoner of war during the Vietnam campaign, warped forever from the experience. On returning home, so totally mentally-disabled; his wife became a suicide victim, his sons left home forever. Lonely, he had resorted to online friendships/dating. He wanted to meet me, a fellow disabled veteran; and after I met him, I can fully understand her dilemma. She very foolishly let him get his hands on her money, then she had no way of returning home. He told her to get a job...a woman without even a green card. That did not affect my employment of her, and I would have used her longer if not for the excessive baggage she was carrying. She needed someone to sympathize with her, someone with whom she could talk, someone to give her advice.

As early as 2004, there were 844 lifestyle and dating sites. In 2008, $957 million in revenue was generated by these online dating services. One out of each five marriages and one of each three dates now results from online friendship/dating services. Some of these websites are free, and you get what you pay for; those that charge, usually do a background and identity investigation. Another single woman who worked for me, university graduate, one of the most capable women I have known, working for me part-time, as well as working as a dog trainer, used one of these services. She thought the service was exceptionally good, providing a very good dating service, but became disillusioned after one very bad experience.

Of course, you can have a bad experience dating someone you have known for years, in school or otherwise, but you should be very careful in dating someone who could be a total “con job”. Most con men and women are extremely likable, that is where they get the name.

To the uninitiated, everything is obscure. We believe that an online “Lonely Hearts Club” -type service is for liars and losers, the desperate. Make up your mind to ask for God's direction in this method of meeting people as well as with any other method. Long before I owned a home in Manhattan, while visiting a friend there, he took me to a “club” in New York, membership-required, set up just for singles, where you could meet others. I well remember in this metropolis of lonely people from all corners of the world that you see the desperate standing around , “looking for Mr. Goodbar”. (Looking for Mr. Goodbar was a movie about such which came out in 1977)

It is so much easier to search for such online. You can exchange pictures, really get to know people. Someone said, “They will lie to you, looking you straight in the eye, always up-front and personable.” One divorced woman said to me, “marriage is like walking straight from the light into the dark. If it works out, fine, but if not, it is expected.” In America, 50% of all marriages end in divorce, this is true even among fundamentalist Christians, even pastors. Single parent, female-headed families account for 50% of all families found in poverty. The total number of single-parent families has doubled since 1970.

The old-fashioned way of courting/dating is mostly limited to western countries. In most of the world, marriages are arranged, couples are brought together because of family, parents. Even in America, many religions promote match-making...some of my Jewish friends were married through parent match-making or hired matchmakers. These marriages usually work out real well.

For years there were social-personal services offered by magazines. This was a system for the meeting of homosexuals, bisexuals, and those involved in the selling of sex. In large cities, under codes such as “message therapy” introductions were arranged which lent to the intrigue and dangers preferred by some individuals like gay men in a bath house, anonymous sexual activity; like lonely, disillusioned, straight professional men visiting a house of ill repute.

Traveling the world, particularly in Mexico and the poorer resort areas such as Acapulco, you easily recognize young bisexual men hanging around hotel swimming pools, selling themselves. You would see an older, unattractive woman leave with one of these younger, attractive men. As one of these grand-dom “Perle Mesta” wealthy types told me one time, “I have the money to buy anything I want.”

The great actress Bette Davis said, “sex is the biggest joke God played on human beings.” Sometimes sordid, sometimes dangerous, often callous or crude, we might as well admit that we are all here because of it; an online dating and finding activity is probably as reasonable as any of the other methods. Particularly when you consider the actual expense of eating out, gasoline, etc. It is better and easier to check people out online than any other way. When you have met someone, dated someone, think you know someone—ask any of us who are divorced—it is so easy to have been fooled, and we might as well admit it, most of us do not want to know the truth! The truth is the truth whether anyone believes it or not, in our relationship with Christ and in our relationship with others, especially with those for who we have a sexual attraction. I truly believe that in all our personal relationships we want to believe the best. We even want to believe their lies.

One of the worst places for the mating season, the church house, mostly full of pretenders. In mate finding, date finding, all Christ-centered activity, do not let your heart function entirely as your sight. The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes. (Psalm 19:8)