L.A. Affairs: Online dating in search of her wife-to-be leads to a system error

L.A. Affairs is our weekly column about the current dating scene in and around Los Angeles -- and finding romance in a wired world. If you’ve got a story to tell, we want to hear it. We pay $300 per published column. Past columns and submission guidelines are at latimes.com/laaffairs

Karen and I had just bought a three-bedroom house and gone to our first WeHo “Maybe Baby” meeting — a sperm bank seminar for gay parents — when we broke up. It was messy. I suppose all breakups are messy, but this was one for the books. The Hong Kong airport. Five in the morning. A kicked-in bathroom door and a misplaced passport. And that was just the beginning.

When I took stock of my newly single self, I realized a lot had changed in four years. None of my friends were meeting significant others the old-fashioned way. Everyone was on JDate, Tinder, OkCupid, Dattch. So I called my literary agent and promised him a home-cooked meal in exchange for help setting up my profile. The pasta was undercooked and oversauced, but within a few weeks, I got an email from OkCupid explaining that they had “just detected that you’re now among the most attractive people on OkCupid” and that I would soon “see more attractive people in your match results.” The mathematics of it all baffled me, and quite frankly, offended my inner feminist. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t secretly flattered.

Now I’ve always shied away from the typical lesbian U-Haul thing — you know, moving in after the first date. It sounds ridiculous (and it is), but the term exists for a reason. As most platitudes do. I take relationships slowly. I’m mindful of those big steps. But then I got a message from Marie. “I really love that you love Patsy Cline; I may or may not have a Patsy-Dolly playlist going as I write this.”

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We started with OkCupid messages, then emails, then texts, then calls, then FaceTimes. We talked every day. For hours on end. For a month. Marie was still living in Brooklyn and getting ready to move to L.A. after her law school graduation. I could feel our courtship picking up the dangerous speed of a bad Sapphic cliche — which, if you’ve ever read an Ann Bannon novel, you know will crash and burn in the end. But I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t want to stop it.

She finally made her way out west and we had our first date. We carved our initials into my tree a week later. And said “I love you” just a few days after that. She met my parents. We picked our song. Before you could say Meredith Baxter, within a month, rings were exchanged and we were planning a life together. She was ready to give up practicing her rare niche of law for an academic job that would allow her to stay in L.A. I was contemplating an eventual move back east for the political career she’d always dreamed of. Our love was the stuff of lesbian fairy tales.

Then one night, she wasn’t feeling well and canceled our date. “Just a stomach bug,” she said. I offered to bring her soup, but she declined and we rescheduled for the next evening. I sent her a few emojis — a smiley face with a surgical mask, a steaming cup of tea, a beet-red heart — and settled in for a night of Netflix. A few hours later, I got a call from my friend Lisa, telling me she saw Marie at the Thirsty Crow in Silver Lake, “downing cocktails with a girl who probably drives a Subaru.”

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What should have simply been the end became the beginning of the end. She lied some more. I forgave her some more. We fought and cried and processed the hell out of every interaction we’d ever had. My imagination left no stone unturned. Was it because I was the first femme girl she’d ever dated? Was I too gender-conforming for her? Did I wear too many dresses? Were my politics too center? My identity not queer enough?

If our story seems to end abruptly, that’s because U-Haul relationships fall apart as quickly as they’re built. Before I had even begun to sweep the pieces of my heart off the floor, Marie packed up her car and moved back east. Never to be seen or heard from again. Our relationship a mere blip on the radar of my life’s landscape.

After a few weeks of mourning the loss of my future wife and erasing any evidence of her existence — deleting all the pictures, giving away her forgotten belongings, letting her plant die a slow, waterless death — I got my sea legs back. But to online or not? The jury was out.

Until now. Tonight I’m going on a date with a girl I met on Tinder, who shares my love of whiskey bars and Hillary Clinton (some lesbian stereotypes are simply unavoidable). Her name is Rebecca and she too is a lawyer. Wish me luck; I’m going to need it.

Sobol is a television writer and lives in Los Angeles.

L.A. Affairs chronicles dating in and around Los Angeles. If you have comments or a true story to tell, write us at home@latimes.com.