Findawife.com

appy 37th birthday to me and what a grand birthday it is. Divorced with two kids. A brat spoiled piss-ant for a son who doesn't want to play football because the helmet will mess up his hair. And a debutant runt for a daughter. She takes after her mother and not in the good ways, the few she has, but in the many bad. I spent the night dancing, drinking, and mingling with the grace and perfection of a trained actor. My face was sheer falseness at its greatest. A sham. A lie. A mask of happiness. My performance was worthy of an Oscar or at the least a SAG nomination. My ex was an actress or tried to be at one point, but never let the title go even after a decade of inactivity. She only auditioned twice and those were for local commercials. She didn't get either gig. She was an actress in name because she felt it carried a certain level of, je ne sais quoi, her words. She was many things by name only, good wife, great mother, loving daughter. Around others, she could weave tales of herself so grand and luxurious I'd find myself believing them too. Then we'd get home. My ex was a cheater, lazy parent, and neglectful daughter. Before her mother died she sent my ex the twenty-four beauty baskets she had gotten her. One for Christmas and her birthday for the past twelve years. The note with it read… "these took up enough space when I was alive I refuse to have them with me in death, have your thoughtless gifts back. It'll be the best thing you've ever done for me. Thanks. I already feel better. Love the woman who gave birth to you." Near the end, she stopped calling herself my ex's mother. She said it tarnished the meaning of the word. She was no mother to that woman or selfish entity with tits, lips, and a vagina. Sitting here half blitzed off wine and shots of Canadian Club I realize my ex was indeed an actress, a great one. Her stage was life, not the screen, and her greatest performance was fooling everyone that she was what she wasn't. We, her family - the supporting cast - were merely fodder for her act.

As I sit battling a raging hangover with eggs, bacon, toast, and a glass of wine, I remember something my friend's wife told me about last night. Findawife.com. The woman in the video tutorial is pretty but not gorgeous. She's attractive enough to be above average but not so much where a normal fella like myself or my buddy Dahl would feel out of her league. A good marketing tactic by the company. It got Dahl to hang around searching. That's how he found his wife Zora, who was the one who recommended the site.

Findawife.com is pretty straightforward. You search for a wife. There's one mandatory meeting which is essentially a mix between a date and job interview after that you both decide if marrying one another would be a good idea. If you both decide marriage isn't on the table you part ways and look for your next meet-up. If wedding bells are in the forecast then you two set the whole marriage machine in motion. The site has affiliates for every need you could have for a wedding. Jewelry stores. Wedding planners. Florists. Bridal gown stores. Tuxedo stores, equipped with tailors. Chapels. Hotels. Caterers. They have it all and you can get forty percent off if you show the stores your findawife.com certificate of the marriage proposal. You click the "will you marry me" button on your searched future wife's page then she's sent an email notification with two options to reply - yes, I'd love to marry you or I'm sorry, I don't think we match for a lifetime commitment. I noticed how they took particular care to not use the word, no, and to craft the rejection to be as light as possible. I guess if you were sent a single word, no, it would be demoralizing enough to make you cancel your subscription. You'd be out of the $150 sign-up fee but self-dignity can have no price. Well, it can but it's a lot more expensive than one hundred and fifty dollars. If you receive the - yes, I'd love to marry you - response, an email certificate is sent congratulating you and making your proposal official by setting a wedding date. The date can be changed but you have to get married within twelve months or the certificate is void and you lose all discounts and your three free sessions with a wedding counselor. If you cancel your subscription before the wedding you lose all the discounts as well. I read a review online where a couple complained that they canceled their subscription a week before their wedding and was notified the next day by the findawife.com affiliates that their discount was no longer effective and they would have to pay the difference before the wedding if they wanted to continue with their plans. They had to pay a thousand-dollar reactivation fee to have findawife.com re-approve all their discounts.

I signed up for the free 48-hour trial. I'm not particularly interested in getting into another marriage, one accident was enough. But I am lonely. And looking around can't hurt. First, you have to choose what country you'd like to search in. The out-of-country fees are exorbitant. The free trial doesn't even cover non-US residents. It's $9.99 for a two-day trial if you live outside of America. After country, you pick a state. There's a little meter that pops up when you scroll over a state that tells you how popular that state is. Who knew Milwaukee was such a hotbed for wife scooping? The site allows you to add specific details for your search. Age, height, body type, weight range, fitness level, sexual level, there are three choices - missionary, reverse cowgirl, whips, and handcuffs - smoker, drinker, and hobbies, which is broken down into - art, sports, fashion, miscellaneous - there's a subcategory for specific sports - baseball, hockey, football, basketball, soccer, swimming, racing - and movies. They also have a section for ethnicity. You can click on more than one ethnicity. There's even a button called, mix, which then searches the site for brides that match any combination of the chosen ethnicities.

I put in the search information I was looking for. State, Maryland. Age, thirty to forty-five. Height, 5'4 and above. Weight, 130–160 pounds. Very active. I'm not into whips or handcuffs or being spanked. I made my ex do all the physical disciplining in the house, she'd spank the kids over spilled milk, literally, spilled milk. This is for fun, so what the hell. Whips and handcuffs it is. I checked, no, for smoking. Yes, for drinking. I left everything else blank. Wasn't too much of interest to me. I'm not picky. As long as she's attractive, willing to cook, is nice, laugh's at my jokes, works out, and doesn't mind doing the occasional blow job - my ex loathed the act said it was beneath her - it wasn't beneath her when we were dating - then I'm set. I hit search and waited for the results. It took thirty seconds.

The very first person on the list is my daughter's fourth-grade teacher. Third, from the bottom, I see Katy South. We dated for three months in tenth grade. Or maybe it was the eleventh? I click on her profile. She has pictures of her with her daughter. Says she's been divorced for three years. She has lots of photos with her and her daughter. The food she's cooked. And some workout selfies. She got a ton of likes for the one of her doing a one-arm pushup. I wonder if I can do a one-arm pushup…. nope. Her, About Me, is five paragraphs deep. Too long for me. My hangover headache seems comfortable sticking around. A few more glasses of wine and it won't matter. A rectangular box slides out of the right side of the screen and in bright blue letters the word, "recommendations," is written in the center of it. What the hell, I click it. Five profile pics pop onto the screen. Smack in the middle is my ex-wife. I click on her photo. It says she's been divorced for five years, we got divorced two years ago. She has photos of her and our kids that I can tell were family photos that she cropped me out of. Photos of food she's cooked, bought, she can't cook, unless you count oven baking frozen pizza. And of course, she has a ton of selfies. A photo of her in a bikini at the beach holding a surfboard has eighty-four likes. I took that photo ten years ago. Under a photo of her reading a screenplay - for one of the commercials she did not get - it reads… actress, entertainer, and all-around performer. I "liked" it.