After a long, hard day at work, Roxanna had very little energy left. It was all she could do to drag herself over to the office of the dating service she belonged to, to resume her search for that perfect man. It was a cool, gray March day. It looked like rain was coming soon. So that was all the more reason it was so difficult for Roxanna to feel motivated about driving over to the dating service on that day. But Roxanna hadn’t had a man in her life, nor in her bed, since her husband had died over a year before. At 45, she was still an attractive, curvaceous woman with a very healthy sexual appetite. She knew in her heart that she deserved better than the drought her love life was going through—especially since she’d already endured a 17-year marriage with very little love, affection, and yes damn it, not enough sex! So that thought alone was motive enough now to propel Roxanna over to the dating service’s office on that evening. She was terribly lonely. And often desperately horny. “Damn it, why is it so taboo for a woman to admit she gets downright desperately horny sometimes? More often than most men would ever realize!” And besides her unrelenting and unquenched horniness, Roxanna had another reason to want a man in her life. Raising her 8-year-old son by herself, ever since her husband had passed on, was damned hard. Roxanna told herself that she deserved to find a man who would be good to her. And to her son. So even though the dating service was in the opposite direction from how she normally drove home from work, and even though she was dog tired, Roxanna was determined to at least try to find a good man to date. That’s why she’d shelled out 300 of her hard-earned bucks to join the dating service in the first place! Roxanna well knew that you couldn’t find a good man by picking up guys at a bar. By dating a coworker. By letting friends and relatives fix you up on blind dates. She had tried all of those methods. And they had all been disasters. At least with a dating service, Roxanna could read what a guy has to say about himself. She could watch a video of the guy, and could read his body language. So when they finally would meet, at least she would already know something about him. And before their first date, Roxanna’s date would have already read what she had to say about herself. And he would have seen her body language on her own video. “Yes,” Roxanna had told herself when she decided to join, “this whole dating service concept seems like the best way to find the right man. And to avoid unexpected surprises about each other.” The dating service was in a small office in a three-story, mixed-use office building. On the ground floor were a small sandwich shop and a local branch bank. Roxanna wearily climbed the outside stairway to the second floor. She passed a lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, and trudged down to the end of the hallway. She pushed open the big glass door to the dating service, and she stepped into the small, familiar room. Two walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of red binders, containing various women’s written profiles about themselves. She briefly thought about the fact that her own profile was somewhere in one of those binders. Roxanna made a beeline directly to one of the other two walls of the room. A wall whose floor-to-ceiling Escort Göztepe bookshelves contained green binders, filled with written profiles of single men. She flipped through the plastic-covered pages of many of those binders. She even found a few men to date. But none of them seemed good husband material. At least not so far. As she reached up on tiptoes to pull down yet another green binder, the curvaceous 5’2″ Roxanna wondered, “What’s the point?” Was it really worth hoping that maybe this binder would lead to a husband—or even to a really memorable fuck—when none of the other binders had so far succeeded? Still, Roxanna had suffered a terribly lonely year since her husband had died of a progressive three-year illness. She no longer had a man to spend time with, to talk to, or to help raise Bobby, her adopted 8-year-old son. And worse, she had no man to wrap her achingly lonely arms around in bed at night. So she sat at one of the dozen small tables in the center of the room, cracked open another green binder, and once more began flipping through the plastic-covered pages. Roxanna was trying so hard to find Mister Right. A man for her to love. A man who would love her. And to love Bobby as his own son. Her last boyfriend, Jack, had been, not Mister Right, but Mister All Wrong. Jack had found her through the dating service. He had asked her out. She had looked up his written profile. Quite frankly, she hadn’t been particularly impressed with what he had written about himself. But she hadn’t dated much lately. So, against her better judgment, she had accepted a date with Jack. She should have listened to her own instincts. Because Jack had turned out to be a total loser. She couldn’t imagine herself ever wanting to go to bed with him. Much less spending the rest of her life with him. At that time, Jack was 43 and still lived with his mother. He drank too much, smoked like a chimney, and was a real cheapskate—he was reluctant to spend money on her, not even to buy her a fast-food burger without strings attached. And he pretty-much ignored her son Bobby, showing no interest in even meeting Bobby! And certainly no fatherly affection for Bobby. But Roxanna had consoled herself with the thought that at least Jack was someone to go out with on an occasional Saturday night and dance with. Even without the sex, even without him taking and interest in her son, a date with Jack had been better than no man at all. One Saturday night, Jack had shown up for their date already drunk out of his mind. And then he had spent most of their date drinking still more! Roxanna had just had too much of Jack. So she had broken up with Jack over dinner that night, and she had called a taxi home from the restaurant. She wasn’t about to risk her life getting in a car with the drunken Jack driving! Back home after that breakup date, Roxanna had told her son Bobby that she had split up with Jack. Roxanna and Bobby then both had spontaneously broken into a chorus of “Hit the road Jack.” Yes, Jack had been a true disaster. In fact, most of the men Roxanna had dated recently had turned out to be real jerks. She had accepted their smoking and heavy drinking, even though she didn’t like it, just so she would occasionally have a date on a weekend. It wasn’t easy Caddebostan escort to find an eligible man willing to date a flat-broke 45-year-old single mom. Roxanna felt that she couldn’t see herself becoming very intimate with any of her recent dates, much less becoming serious enough to marry one of them. She actually had let herself be talked into sleeping with one of these dates. The guy had been her first lover since her husband died a year earlier. That man had been good looking. For some unknown reason, Roxanna had been particularly horny that night. So she had said yes to this man. But although this guy had constantly boasted to her of his sexual prowess, actual sex with him turned out to be awkward, clumsy, and slightly painful. So Roxanna had resolved to keep all future dates strictly platonic. She would go out and have fun, but no romance. And no sex. Platonic dating really hadn’t been enough for Roxanna. She always enjoyed the thrill of intimacy too much to have only platonic relationships with men. It was always such a nice, comfortable, cozy feeling to wake up in the morning, naked in the arms of a naked man. And to feel his love juices still fresh and warm deep inside of herself. That feeling hadn’t happened for Roxanna very often. Only a very few times, ever, in her whole life. So she had cherished what few opportunities she had found to enjoy feeling so filled-up with a man’s warm love juices. She knew that if she couldn’t find love, she would settle for that. So here she was again, at the dating service. Looking for a man who might give her that filled-up sensation. And who might accept, maybe even grow to love, her son Bobby. And so Roxanna flipped through yet another green binder full of men’s written profiles about themselves. Hoping against hope that today she might finally find a man who isn’t a jerk or a creep. A man who would be good to her in and out of bed. And who could accept her son Bobby into his heart, too. But as usual, she wasn’t having a whole lot of luck in her search. One guy wrote of how he likes a cold beer at a baseball stadium. Yeah, like that’s the image the average woman thinks of when she pictures the guy she wants to marry! Another man wrote that he was smoking 6 packs a day. But hey, at least he felt bad about that. To atone for his sin of smoking so much, he spent 8 hours a day in church, every day, praying for the strength to quit. He hadn’t tried one of those 12-step quit-smoking programs. He hadn’t bought a patch. He just prayed he would quit. Which so far, hadn’t worked for him at all. But he kept praying. So, Roxanna wondered, spending all his time smoking and praying, when would this guy find time to date? “Hey, this guy sounds like a great catch! Divorced four times. Not looking for a serious relationship. Just wants lots and lots of meaningless sex. Required by law to admit in his profile that he’s a registered sex offender.” “Yeah, buddy!” Roxanna laughed. “You’re the man I want to marry!” How did this guy even get through the dating service’s membership screening process? Another guy boasted he knew the score of every baseball team in every major league game all the way back to 1932. He didn’t have a job. But hey, he was a fountain of sports trivia! “Do these guys honestly believe Bağdat Caddesi escort bayan this is how to win a woman’s heart?” The next guy was trying too hard. “Do you like flowers? If so, I’ll buy them for you by the truckload.” “What?” Roxanna wondered, “Is this guy in the flower business? Wholesale flower discounts by the truckload?” “No,” Roxanna thought. “A truckload of flowers won’t impress me. How you treat me as a person…how you touch my body…and how you treat my son…that’s what will impress me!” On the back side of every written profile were pictures of the man described in the profile. Roxanna knew that she’s supposed to read the written profiles first. And then look at the photos of the guys afterward. But these profiles were so frustrating! These men, writing to present their best features about themselves. All trying to impress women. Yet they all sounded like such losers! So Roxanna flipped all the way to the back of the book. She started flipping backwards, through just the backsides of each profile page. Just the photo pages. “OK,” she laughed to herself, “I admit I’m cheating by looking at the photo first. But who doesn’t?” Roxanna was tired, and perhaps being overly picky. “Too short”. Flip. “Too fat.” Flip. “Too muscular. He would spend all his time in the gym pumping iron. Instead of in my bed, pumping me!” Flip. “Too glamorous looking. Probably spends all his time looking in the mirror. He would never tear himself away from the mirror, to look at me!” Flip. “Hey, I like these photos!” Roxanna thought, mostly subconsciously, when she saw the next guy. “This guy may not be Hollywood’s ideal of handsome. But he has a warm, genuine smile. I like that high forehead, and his glasses. Makes him look very intelligent. I’ve always liked smart men.” After all, Roxanna had married a nerdy man who had worked with her in an electronics lab. And she had stayed married to that smart man for 17 years. Besides, few women ever went for smart men over good-looking men. Which meant that Roxanna wouldn’t have to worry about some tramp trying to steal her man away from her. In one photo, this man had his arms folded across his chest. Even through his sweater, Roxanna could see in this photo, that he had muscular arms. Not the exaggerated muscles of a body-builder. But exhibiting obvious upper-body strength nevertheless. Strong, muscled arms that would no doubt feel all nice and warm and comfortable and snugly if they were wrapped around her! So now Roxanna turned the page over, to read what this nice-looking guy had written about himself. And to try to figure out if he was as smart as he looked. The man’s name was Dan. He had checked the boxes beside both “Non-smoker” and “Non-drinker.” “Two points for Dan!” Roxanna smiled. Under religion, Dan had joked “Never touch the stuff myself!” That made Roxanna laugh. She had been raised a Catholic. Then in her twenties, she had discovered that much of what Catholicism had taught her didn’t match her own observable reality. So Roxanna had to agree with Dan: she had little use for religion, either. So that, too, sounded like a good match to her. Under marital status, Dan had checked “Never Married.” The other choices were “Single”, “Divorced,” or “Widowed.” There wasn’t a box for Married. Because after all, if you’re married, what the hell are you doing being a member of a dating service? Under children, Dan had written “One. Adopted daughter. Caroline. Age 14.” That seemed an amazing coincidence to Roxanna! They both knew the challenge of not only being a single parent, but parenting an adopted child, which comes with its own unique challenges.