A Real Story

My daughter Debbie set up my OurTime profile for me because I couldn’t figure out how to crop a photo on my phone, three years after Frank passed. I picked the pictures myself though, and I was proud of them — a decent one from a cousin’s wedding, one of me holding my grandson at the lake. My first match was a retired electrician named R., who messaged that he loved crossword puzzles and had two grown sons in Ohio, same as my situation with my kids being scattered. His photo showed a trim, silver-haired man in a golf polo, maybe sixty. We planned coffee at Ruby’s Diner off Route 9 on a Tuesday morning.

The man who walked in was easily seventy-five, heavier, with a cane he hadn’t mentioned once in three weeks of messaging. I’m not shallow enough that the cane bothered me — what bothered me was realizing his “recent” photo was from a family reunion a decade back, and he’d just never bothered updating it, like time had politely paused for him on the internet even though it hadn’t anywhere else. We had coffee anyway. He was pleasant enough, talked mostly about his late wife’s garden, and I drove home feeling more tired than annoyed.

What I took from it wasn’t bitterness, just a new rule: before I agree to meet anyone now, I ask for one photo taken that same week, ideally with something in the background that proves it — a newspaper, a specific outfit I can ask about later. Two men balked at that request and disappeared, which told me everything. The third one, a retired school principal named W., sent me a slightly blurry selfie from his kitchen with his cat in frame, no filter, no flattery, and I liked him more for the blur than I would have for a perfect shot.

We’ve been seeing each other for about five months now, mostly Sunday dinners and a trip to Cape May in October. I’m not naive about what’s out there on these apps at our age — plenty of outdated photos, plenty of loneliness dressed up as romance — but I stopped taking it personally once I understood most people aren’t lying to trick you, they’re just stuck seeing themselves the way they used to be. Doesn’t mean I skip the date-stamped photo request though.