Ute's ShadowBlog

Quite a few of my dating encounters in the Seattle area belong also to my uncommon experiences. But I’m coming to the conclusion that these experiences are planned acts and are part of a system that is exercised here in this area.

Since the divorce from my ex-husband I’m single and I live alone. I’m actually living alone since 1994, but my divorce from my ex-husband had been in September 1997. Though I would love to meet a compatible person whereby we complete each other, I’ve not met anyone here with whom I could imagine being in a healthy and joyful relationship. However, I haven’t met any single people for many years due to focusing on other things than dating and/or the lack of opportunity to meet eligible healthy single males in this area.

There were times when I subscribed to different online dating sites. I exchanged a lot of emails with other singles, but that was about it. A few times I met someone for a cup of coffee, but nothing serious developed from these meetings. I have never gotten into a closer relationship with any person whom I had written an email with the exception of one person who I had met during the summer of 1997. And that time had actually not been a good time for me to date anyone because I went through a divorce. But I didn’t know better then.

Though my ex-husband and I had already been living separate for 3 1/2 years (he had moved out of our apartment in Jan/Feb 1994), I was still married to him on paper. And as the psychologists say, being divorced is different than living separate. It certainly pertained to my situation. I still had emotional ties to my ex-husband when I started to date in summer of 1997. And pretty fast it became obvious that I neither was ready for the dating scene nor for any other close relationship with another male partner. I had been married on paper for 18 years and for the next few years my goal was to heal myself from past wounds and getting rid of unhealthy baggage.

Coming back to the statement at the beginning of this post that I believe that many events here in this area are planned, I’ll describe a few incidents that I experienced while subscribing to online dating services. I firmly believe that some people I had met for a cup of coffee were not always the people with whom I had exchanged emails. Some may have been hired or were sent by their buddies as a substitute for someone else.

My first subscription to an online dating service here in the Seattle area was with Matchmaker. A female program manager in another business group at Microsoft had sent me the URL address for this online dating site in July 1997. While communicating with different people through this service, I had some weird encounters while being a subscriber of this service.

For example, Matchmaker organized periodically a social get-together for people who subscribed to their service. One time an event was organized in my neighborhood, while I was living in Tukwila. The social event took place in a bar at a hotel in the Seattle Southcenter vicinity. At one of those planned get-together I met in the hotel bar with George, with whom I had communicated through Matchmaker. At least I thought that he had been the person with whom I had exchanged some emails at that time.

Not many people were in the bar and only a few people from the Matchmaker’s group showed up on that evening. I found it quite unusual to see a group of women showing up there at the same time and performing some kind of a dance with each other on the dance floor. But due to the event being organized, this show had been a planned act. About nine women were dancing together, and from nine of these women one woman stood out. She had long blond hair and was quite pretty. All the others were pale in comparison to her. While dancing on the dance floor they rendered homage to her. It reminded me of priestesses paying homage to their queen. This whole episode seemed almost surreal and somehow farcical.

When I subscribed to Matchmaker, I communicated a lot through email, and I met for some time a few so-called single men for a cup of coffee. But each time that was the end of our communication with the exception of a short-lived relationship with George in August/September 1997.

The people I met were quite often so weird that I started to think that these people were not the ones that I had exchanged emails with. One time I met a man—who according to his own words had a feisty mother—at a chamber concert in Bellevue. This man actually showed up for the concert smelling like he had been doused in alcohol. His speech was quite slurry, too. After my first meeting with him I surely didn’t feel like meeting him again, though I may could use his service. He said that he works as a detective. But who wants a detective who douses himself in alcohol. I certainly wouldn’t want a report that is clouded because of the person’s limited observation and judgment due to excessive use of alcohol. After the concert I was glad to get away from this person and not having to sit next to him anymore. I actually felt embarrassed being seen with a person who smelled like a larva in a bottle of Tequila.

Another time I met a subscriber from Matchmaker in the same bar in Tukwila where the organized Matchmaker event had taken place. As soon we sat down on the bar stools, he ordered Wiskey, and pretty fast I had the impression that he cared more for Wiskey than anything else. Though he had told me that he works in the health care industry, I thought that he may confuse that with working in the intoxicating field and adopting their products.

While communicating through Matchmaker, other people knew, too, that I was on the dating scene. Therefore I encountered situations where I was lured into certain situations or to certain places.

For example, I visited quite frequently the Yarrow Bay Grill at Carillion Point in Kirkland in 1997. There I met a married man, Stan, who worked in the insurance industry. One time Stan told me that he knew a restaurant in Bellevue where a music band was playing music that evening. I told him that I was interested in going there, and he offered to show me where this place was in Bellevue. In my car I followed him and his female friend who accompanied him on that evening. At the Yarrow Beach Cafe he had told me that she is his masseuse.

The restaurant, he showed me, was a Chinese Restaurant in the Commons building in Bellevue on 12th Avenue. I had to pay $5.00 to attend a dingy show at a mediocre restaurant. At that time I didn’t know the area, and I was pretty much on my own.

When we arrived at the Chinese Restaurant, only a few people were at the restaurant’s area where the music band played. I still have the room in front of my eyes. The room was at the left of the main restaurant and had the form of a hallway. It had no nice decorations and looked pretty murky. Little by little a few more people showed up during the evening.

The couple who had brought me to this place kept to themselves, and after a while I talked with a man standing next to me who said that he worked for the Salvation Army. I pretty much conversed only with him while I was at this place.

Not many people came to this place and I remember a black skinny tall woman entering the room with an elderly white man who had a lot of gold jewelry on. Though they stood close by me, I talked mostly with the guy from the Salvation Army with the exception of dancing briefly with someone else one or two times.

After I had been in this dingy room for a while, a tall attractive man in his forties showed up. He sat on a table next to the entrance door like a rooster on a perch. Several times I saw him on the dance floor with one of his dancing accomplices. When I left this back room to leave this establishment, I was suddenly confronted with a very strange action by this prancing man.

Shortly before I reached the door, I had to walk near by the table where he sat. When I was about four feet away from his table, he forcefully stood up and took on a bolt upright position and at the same time he stretched out his right arm in the kind of salute that had been a dominant force during the Third Reich.

Instantly I was stunned by this man’s behavior. And I made automatically a defensive gesture with my right arm, like ‘drop it’, and hurriedly walked out of this room. Outside the building I noticed a white Rolls Royce parked on the sideway next to the restaurant. I didn’t pay further attention to my surroundings at that time, I just wanted to get away from this awful place.

Since this area was pretty new to me and I didn’t know what to make of all this, I kept quiet, but I felt very uncomfortable about this and other incidents that seemed insulting if not to say threatening.

I like to mention another weird encounter of my dating experiences. Lori, a woman who I had met while working at Microsoft had introduced me to a man who invited me to the Seattle Opera and Symphony. In one of our conversations he told me that apartment managers go into people’s apartments and place poison in their food. At that time I was living in an apartment. Additionally, I had found things in my apartment in a different order than I had left them. Therefore I pretty much knew that someone had accessed my apartment without my knowledge. A couple months later, after I had moved to a different city in this area, I noticed that two small things were missing from my household. Since I had not thrown these items away because I had received them as a gift from my mother, someone must have stolen them out of my apartment when I was living in the apartment in Tukwila.

Lori suddenly sold her house, wrote me that she got the money, and moved with her husband to Wisconsin. Anyway, that is what she wrote me in one of her last emails. Afterwards the whole situation surrounding Lori seems like an act. Her sudden departure and disappearance including her last emails call forth questions, which I cannot answer for her. I may should add here that Lori’s last name was the same name like my ex-husband’s name before she married Ulf.

Putting all this stuff aside I’m at a point in my life where I’m emotionally balanced and ready to start a healthy relationship with someone I would like to be with. Therefore I subscribed again to a dating service. But this time I know that Dr. Phil is watching the scene.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Dating, General, Pacific Northwest, Wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.