Romeo’s Dilemma is a love story.
Well, that and a year’s worth of the online dating advice columns I’ve written.
You see, I write an advice column for the newspaper – they call me The Online Dating Coach. My audience is mostly women (but also quite a few men, more than you’d think) and those women often write me to ask why we guys do some of the confounding things we do. For instance, why do we keep our dating profile up long after she has taken hers down? And why is it we need to date more than one woman concurrently? And why can’t we slow down long enough to see – and truly appreciate – the woman who is right in front of us?
The reason I can answer those questions for women is because I’ve done those things to women. I’ve kept my profile up too long, I’ve dated more than one girl at a time, and that last one? The one about getting yourself so busy that you can’t slow down and appreciate any one girl? Well that’s the question this book is pretty much about.
It’s what I call a “Romeo’s Dilemma”. The dilemma occurs when a guy gets himself so busy on the dating sites that when the right girl does come along he’s too distracted to even understand what’s happening. So he keeps right on dating around when that’s the last thing he should be doing. And the last thing I should be doing.
Romeo’s Dilemma is like no book you’ve read before. It’s a memoir, a self-help book, and a true story of love and redemption – but it’s something else too. It’s a year in my life that starts when I get a job as a newspaper advice columnist.
But here’s the really fascinating part of that little development: My weekly columns, though written for and about others, end up describing my own struggle to get back to the guy I used to be - a good man worthy of a good woman’s love. The columns are organized into the months of one year. Each month is an ‘Act’ which also describes how the tragicomedy I call my life was going at the time. The early months are pretty much a series of bad habits and blown chances.
But even though I’d become a bit of a romeo, whose life was getting away from him, fate tossed me a break. I met someone who maybe saw something in me that I thought just wasn’t there anymore.
With the funds raised, I will polish my book, make it look as good as it reads, and get it in front of the people who need and want to read it. And that’s anyone who’s ever used, or considered using, online dating sites.
Oh, and all their married friends...