I was a recently divorced man at the age of forty-five when I first tried Internet dating.

Back then, in early 2001, on-line dating wasn’t quite a novelty any longer but it also wasn’t something everybody had grown up with. In that period before Tinder, Instagram, and smartphones, people were still trying to get the hang of meeting partners through their desktop computers.

At first, it was quite exciting for me, not being the most extroverted person in the world, to start approaching and chatting with women online. I’m a little vague now on the technical details, but messages were sent through a site’s server like those on a message board, I suppose. I think I did have my first email account by then. I was soon was also using text messaging (or instant messaging as I knew it) for the first time.

I found out about a few sites from my ex-wife, of all people. There was a new boyfriend in her life, a guy I had met when picking up my kids for a visitation. She admitted to me that she had met him through a certain site and advised me that I should research others.

LavaLife was a big one, and they used to advertise in the New York subways. There was even something called Love at AOL. I did arrange a few dates in the early months. Perhaps I would have done better if my financial status was more in order, but I was impressed that, after two decades of marriage, I could talk (or write, really) women into meeting me.

None of these dates went beyond the first, and I got that I’d have to be patient and bide my time until I found someone suitable (or who found me suitable). It became clear that this was a game of numbers, and I usually had several prospects going at once. It was particularly pleasing when I was able to write a better than average profile for myself on one site and I got women contacting me. Unfortunately, one of my favorites was in British Columbia but we still chatted for about two months.

Back then digital photography was just getting started and a lot of profiles, at least half, in fact, had no pictures attached to them. It took a while for me to get around to scanning a couple of prints, and initially I only sent them out by request.

There was a distinction between sexually explicit profiles and ones that were simply “conventional.” Some sites specialized in the former, some restricted them, and others accepted both. One woman told me that if she posted a regular profile she might get five messages per week, but if she put up one describing sexual preferences – even without a photo attached – she might get seventy. By comparison, I’ve heard that women now on sites like Tinder can get at least seventy per day.

In 2002, I backed off the Internet for a while to deal with other issues, mostly job-related. By the fall, I back to using the “spray and pray” method of contacting whatever profiles seemed to have even the slightest potential. I would even contact women in their twenties, although I knew I didn’t have the money or the looks for that to have much of a chance.

In November, just around Thanksgiving, I threw a Hail Mary pass, and a woman caught it.

I’ll call her Miriam here. Her profile was on a site that may have been Adult Friend Finder, which still exists. She did have a photo, a nude one. She described herself as a BBW, which was fine with me because I liked women of various body sizes.

It was definitely her photo that drew me in. She was a big – no, let’s be blunt – overweight blonde lady. She was in her thirties I think. Miriam had set her Rubenesque self on a table, facing sidewise to the camera, and she was up on all fours. She had short blonde hair at one end and white high-heeled shoes on the other. In between was nothing but a lot of zaftig creaminess. I found out later than white shoes were supposedly unfashionable after Labor Day, but maybe she didn’t know or care either. I seem to remember her wearing a brimmed white hat too.

Her text was sparse, which was a downside, because I often contacted women who had a witty profile, with or without an attached photo. In fact, I searched for those precisely because by then I had read so much uninspired dating prose. There was way too much about “fine dining” and “walking on the beach.” I got to writing things in my profiles like, “I can’t afford fine dining, but mediocre dining is fine” and “I don’t have a beach house, but if you do, I’ll definitely visit it.”

I read male profiles at times to see what the competition was up to, and if anything the men were even more inept. I was reminded of an Andy Warhol quote, “Someday, we will know what everyone else is thinking, and then we will find out that everyone else is thinking the same thing.”

There was a notable aspect in Miriam’s advertisement for herself. She claimed to enjoy being spanked with various implements and she wanted someone who was up to that. I had briefly experimented with that once as both a top and bottom and I was eager to try it again.

Beyond that, I only knew that she lived somewhere in Suffolk County on Long Island. That was another downside because she was a long way from where I was in New York City. Miriam did send back some desultory messages but she told me almost nothing about herself and in turn, asked almost nothing about me.

Her contact with me started to dry up but her photo stayed in my mind and I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I used a tactic that went against my usual low-key nature. That tactic, which obviously depended on the content in the lady’s profile, was sending an explicit, rude, or ridiculous message and then seeing what happened. Sometimes it would be the initial contact. At other times, it would in response to something rude or ridiculous from the woman.

On the day after Thanksgiving, I tried the rude approach. “Why don’t you put down the turkey drumsticks and talk to me again?”

She wasn’t offended that I had referred to her weight; maybe she was even amused. In any case, it worked, because I got a response. “Obviously, from my photo, you can tell that I like turkey drumsticks.”

I even got another photo from her. She was a hairdresser, and this one showed her from the chest up while wearing her gown from work. She had a nice smile as she faced the camera. Maybe my heart melted a little bit, because I wrote back, “You’re just the cutest little sub any guy could ever ask for.” Already I had fantasies of this being far more than a one-night stand. She could take the train into the city and I would meet her for good times in Manhattan.