EP 33 - To Venus and Back, Part 2 – From One-and-Done Coffee Dates to a One-Year Relationship

In Part 2, we leave the “organic” dates behind and dive into Turner’s first years of online dating. That means profiles, one-and-done coffee meetups, and learning about the stereotypical Three-Date Rule.

Turner and I talk through the patterns he began to see: the job-interview dates, the “Daddy interview,” the woman whose dogs were better than any man, and how all of that slowly pushed him to a clearer filter for who was really a fit.

From there, we step into his first year-long relationship in midlife — what drew him in, why it felt promising, and how he realized he didn’t want to go back to full-on parenting again. If you’re a Boomer or Gen Xer who’s newly single, this episode gives you a realistic picture of what those first years online can look like, and how to start making better choices with clearer boundaries.

In this episode, listeners will learn:

• How Turner eased into online dating (starting with eHarmony) and what he actually put in his first profiles.
• Why a simple detail like “ballroom dancing” changed the quality of matches he attracted.
• How he began to recognize patterns in a long string of one-and-done coffee dates. 
• What the “Daddy interview” and the “my dogs are better than any man” doctor revealed about hidden agendas on dating apps.
• How his first serious, year-long relationship (Emily) started, what felt right, and where incompatibilities around kids and life stage started to show.
• Why midlife daters often discover they don’t want to go back to full-time parenting, even when the chemistry is good.
• Concrete examples of how to recognize when a relationship is good but not right — and how to walk away without feeling like you failed.

About Turner Grant:

From the Book's Back Cover:

Two Years after the Unexpected death of his wife, Turner Grant was ready to consider love once more. Yet everything changed, and he soon found himself adrift in the digital-dating world.

At age fifty-one, Turner Grant became a widower and single parent to his twin boys. Deep in grief, he often found daily routines difficult and his work arduous. But after two years,

Turner embarked on a journey to find his future, both in life and love.

What Turner discovered shocked him. After tentative steps into the shallow dating waters, he was quickly immersed in a deep ocean filled with unexpected riptides and crosscurrents within a digital-dating universe that didn’t exist when he last dated decades earlier.

In three years, he met fifty-four single, middle-aged women who took him to a totally different world—Venus. It was a journey—a journey that’s, well … complicated.

Website: https://tovenusandback.com/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKS8GQHQ/ 

About The Midlife Dating Podcast / 50 Dates at 50

Paul Nelson is the host of the Midlife Dating Podcast and creator of the 50 Dates at 50 website. Helping Gen X and Baby Boomer singles learn to date smart, enjoy the process, and move from right swipe to real-life meetups with frameworks like the 3-1-1 Rule and Right Swipe Discipline.

• Learn more and grab resources at 50 Dates at 50 – https://50datesat50.com/

Questions, Comments, or Podcast Topic Suggestions: questions@50datesat50.com

Transcript

EP33 - To Venus and Back, Part 2 – From One-and-Done Coffee Dates to a One-Year Relationship - Transcript

The transcription below is provided for your convenience. Please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.

[00:00:00] 

Part 2 Introduction

Paul: Welcome back to the Midlife Dating Podcast. This is part two of my conversation with Author Turner Grant, whose book To Venus and Back Chronicles the three years of dating a midlife after the loss of his wife. 

 In part one, we covered Turner's Rookie year, the grief, the Awkward Organic First Steps at the Spring Gala, and the Washington Post Date Lab experience. Opening the door to what midlife dating is like.

In this episode, we move into the online dating [00:01:00] years. That means first profiles, one-and-done coffee dates, hidden agendas, the three-date rule, and the beginnings of a longer relationship that forced him to get honest about compatibility, parenting, and life stage.

 If you've ever wondered why dating in your fifties and sixties can feel so confusing, this episode gives you a very real look at the patterns that start to appear. Once you've had enough dates to stop guessing and start seeing what's really going on, here's part two of my conversation with Turner Grant.

So you're getting now into the mode of online dating, and you talk in the book about it, and everybody that gets into online dating goes through this, but it's the one-and-done dates. And do you want to elaborate a little bit on your experience with 

Turner: Sure. Well, you know, it seemed like there was a preordained process for online dating, and it was like, you know, you dip your little toe [00:02:00] in the water, but you don't do anything more on the first date. So they were typically coffee dates. Now, not being a coffee drinker, I would find tea or something else that, whatever Starbucks that they suggested. And I talked to my friend Abby in my office, we were always talking about this because she was about ready to go through a divorce. So she was getting back out in the dating world, and we debated, are these dates or are they dating interviews? We agreed. It sort of depended upon the context of how it went, but most of the time, it felt like a dating interview. Okay, you got the boxes that need to be checked. When I'm with him, do I feel like he's a serial killer snake under a rock scumbag? And so I really hated, I came to hate those really quickly. The other analogy I gave was that there was one at a Starbucks on a busy October day, and it was hard to get a table, but she was on one side.

I was on the other end. And this particular Starbucks, there was this long row of tables put [00:03:00] together, and it reminded me of an old movie with a prison visitation room, and you got the people coming to visit the prisoner, and I was the prisoner, and she was the, you know, the one coming to see the prisoner. It was awful. I swore after that I was not going to do that again. I also realized that it wasn't; I wasn't giving them a chance. So I, it sort of felt like, and again, I debated with both my cousin and Abby, you can't do this in one date. I mean, if it's, it's a real disaster, you might get that sense, but you've got to give this a chance. That's when I decided that I would always go out on a second date unless the first date was really just awful. And then when I did the second date, it kind of, and I came to this, to this conclusion of my own, but then I realized it was actually the third editor of my book who was 30 years younger than me.

That let me know. Yeah. The three-date rule's a [00:04:00] thing. It is, so the three-date rule says, after doing all the one-and-dones and realizing that was getting me nowhere, I got to give this a chance. The three-date rule says it either confirms that there's nothing there because you've been with them three times now. Or there is something there. At this point I had started on OK Cupid and on OK Cupid. They do a percentage of compatibility, and they ask a lot more detailed questions, and one category is about sex. One of the questions they ask, and I'm reading all these women's responses, how many dates do you have to go on before you consider having sex? And 95% said three dates. So that's just sort of reinforcing this sort of three-date rule. It kind of takes three dates before most women feel comfortable or want to have sex with a guy they're dating. So that's where the three-date rule came in. But it wasn't literally, as I mentioned, [00:05:00] until after I'd written the manuscript and my third editor, who was 31, I was still in my late fifties, she confirmed that the three-date rule was a thing and everybody knows it and you're just now figuring it out.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, there is something about the three-date rule that I've discovered also. And for me, what I try to tell a lot of the listeners is you want to get out there on a few dates to kind of ascertain if there's something there, and it can take three dates to really figure it out, sometimes more.

But there always seemed to be this hard-set rule in a lot of women that I was meeting that on the third date, it's really going to go to this next level. And that was the mindset that I got from them. And if they weren't ready, they would run. And not that I was ready to do anything, it just, when it came up to the third date, they would act all squirrelly and all weird a lot of times.

yes. 

Turner: That, that's unusual. I, I [00:06:00] don't think I experienced that because I didn't let a lot of dates get to the third date, but that's Wow. So they knew what was happening, and they get all squirrely and

Paul: Yeah. They were like, well, we, it's the third date. This is whatever's going to happen. And I wasn't pushing for anything like that. I just, let's just, let's go out and do this and this and see where things life leads us. Yeah, that was one of the weird ones, so, and, and as we speak about this, I've been on over 180, you know, first meetup dates, which have led to subsequent dates after that, subsequent dates after that, but.

I noticed that three date pattern, when you get to the third one a lot of them won't even get to the third one because they think that they're, it's like there's this mentality where they feel like it's the third date they're obligated. Something's going to happen.

And maybe that's the way it was in the twenties, you know, in our twenties and [00:07:00] thirties. But in our age group, it's not like that. 

Turner: I will confess that my first, third date, and I convey this in the book To Venus and Back, and she arranged this date, she had some tickets to an art show, and we had dinner. And so, likes art checks the box for me because I love art and design. The date was over really in five minutes, and it's almost like what you just described. All of a sudden, she was quieter. It seemed different. There was reticence. So even though the date went on for about two and a half, three hours, in reality it was over in five

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: Because of what you just said.

Paul: Mm, mm-hmm. Yes. And then it, it's like the more dates you go on it, baseball is a terrible analogy for a lot of this, but I, I call it inside baseball. And you can start to read, read the room, read, read the mannerisms, and you can tell, yeah, this is done. Or the [00:08:00] date's not going to go any further. 

Turner: It's interesting. I ended up, after my book was written and published, and I did a few other podcasts, or you know, marketing of the book. I was introduced to a woman in California, you're in LA, she was in San Francisco. She had lost her husband. She had passed away. She wrote a memoir. And we did a joint podcast together.

And so we compared, you know, guy-girl notes, right? She insisted on doing the quickie first coffee date and no more. I took the opposite, which I didn't think you could get to know someone with, sitting on the other side of the prison visitation table in an hour or an hour and a half. And I wanted to do dinner.

I wanted to take them out to dinner and have time to sort of come down and relax. That was my perspective and my point of view. But hers was, no, she could tell pretty quick. So [00:09:00] drinks, coffee, that was it. And then, you either get the ring or you're out. 

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: Which, what was your, did you have a First Date preference?

Paul: For me, initially being naive and learning. I went on a lot of longer first dates. I remember meeting up, I would buy dinner on a lot of them. The conversations would go sometimes, two or three hours on some of them, where I really thought there was, we were connecting, and there was lots of potential, then I wouldn't hear from him again after that. 

And so what I eventually settled on after a, a few years was I moved into the coffee or, you know, meet over a glass of wine, have a conversation for about 45 minutes to an hour because I, I knew under most circumstances, the gals that I'm meeting are also meeting a whole bunch of other guys, it seems like.

And you can invest a lot of time into the situation and, uh. not get a return out of it in the [00:10:00] aspect of getting onto a second date or getting to meet them or getting to know them better. I eventually moved to keeping it shorter over, over coffee or a glass of wine.

Turner: In that vein, did you ever have a two-date day where you had a late afternoon or early afternoon date and then an evening date? I did. I eventually did.

Paul: I'm thinking about that. I don't think I ever tried two in one day. I had one week where I had five scheduled. 

Turner: Wow. Wow. Okay.

Paul: And there was a lot of learning that went on during that week about what is humanly possible from being able to mentally absorb four or five conversations like that and keep them all straight.

 Which, 

Turner: And, not only keep them straight, but have the sort of persona. For [00:11:00] yourself, you're special, you're different,

Paul: Yes.

Turner: You know, instead of it just sort of becoming an assembly line, you know, which it eventually started to feel like, to me, which is one reason I left Venus. It, it started to feel like an assembly.

Paul: So you're going through year one. You're still in the rookie here year, and you're walking through online dating, getting in through one of the "One and Dones", and I think at this point, you're starting to meet. What we would call the crazies out there?

Turner: Oh yeah. There was one date, and it was actually the day that I had two dates on one day.

 First time, and it happened shockingly fast. I had a date with a woman who was younger, actually the youngest woman I met, she was 42. Lovely woman in her photo. Beautiful smile. Really looking forward to seeing her smile in person. And we made a date to [00:12:00] meet up in what became one of my go-to places, which is the, uh, Ritz-Carlton Hotel lobby in Georgetown.

It's just really elegant, comfortable fire in the wintertime, she walked in the door. I, I always get there early. I'm pro, I'm always early. I want to get there. I get a good seat.

That's just my nature. So I'm looking toward the front door, and she walks in, and I'm waiting for the big smile to come when she recognizes me, and it doesn't come. Lips are horizontal and tight, and she comes, and I get up, and I'm smiling, and she comes over. It's like no expression. Shakes my hand, and I'm in a little seating arrangement where there's two sofas facing each other, and then a chair and one end sort of a U-shaped. So we can sit side by side on one sofa, loveseat-sized, or one can sit on the sofa, and one can sit in a chair. I sit at one end of the love seat, and then she sits in the chair. That doesn't go [00:13:00] well. And then I mention, you know, how cozy it is, and I've got a cup of tea or something. And she goes, I'll have water. Okay, then she launches into questioning me about, I mean, all the niceties aren't there.

Turner: She just says I'm in a bit of a hurry because I've got a babysitter with my 4-year-old. Okay, let's go. What it turned out to be was a daddy interview, and she finally got to the point and said, " Okay, I have to let you know, I'm not looking for a romantic partner. But I am looking, looking for someone to be a father figure in my adopted son's life. And you went on a dating site without saying a word about this? What did you expect was going to happen at this moment when you said that? 

So from the first shake of the hand, usually it's [00:14:00] a hug, right? You know, it's a warm hug.

It's a polite hug to the shake of the hand. Goodbye was 45 minutes, and she's zoomed out the door. That night was, this is the first two-date day was at my club. It's a private club. It's very nice here in Washington. And she's a doctor. She's just a dark-haired beauty. She's just a lovely-looking woman.

And a Dr. to boot, like, wow, I'd like to meet this person. She is probably the vice president of the Man Haters Club. She proceeded throughout the evening to ask me, well, what do you do for this, and what do you eat? And this, and she basically went through the list of all the things that I was doing that was unhealthy. And I'm a really healthy guy. I'm a very fit guy. She made me feel like an unhealthy doofus. And then in one of her [00:15:00] photos on her dating profile, she had 2 dogs, maybe two corgis or something. I don't remember what, and struggling to find something to talk about. I mentioned I saw the picture of your two dogs. They look terrific. And she blurts out. Yeah, they are wonderful. They are better than any man could ever be. I am going, what the hell? Why are you here? So that was in one day. I had the daddy interview, and my two dogs are better than any man could ever be. Well, ain't that fine. Thank you very much, ladies.

Paul: Yeah. 

Reflecting on the Journey: Lessons and Future Plans

Paul: So as you go on through these, and this is one of the things that went through my mind through the first year or two of this was, am I crazy or am I normal, or what's going on here? I, I [00:16:00] considered myself to be normal in my background. I had a good upbringing. I am; I'm not. My divorce was amicable. I get along with my ex today just fine. I'm not angry, 

Turner: Mm-hmm. 

Paul: Any of these things. And I run into a lot of angry women on the websites.

Turner: You, you think I, I wondered the same thing. I, and I don't know if you had the same benefit that I did. So my cousin and Abby and a few other women, I'm blessed to have a good number of women friends who I care about, and they care about me, and we're friends. And I question, is my dating compass working?

Right? I mean, they all assured me that it's not me that my date is dating. Compass is true. When it's in the weird zone, it's telling you it's in the weird zone, and don't give up. So I had some great [00:17:00] encouragement from women who were telling me these things, and I needed to hear that. I really did. 

Paul: Yeah. because it's, it's the online version of the Wild West of the 1850s. In many aspects, because of all the zaniness. I discovered that there were so many different types that were on there, that were on there for different reasons. 

Turner: Yes. Yes, yes. Oh 

Paul: And you, and you have to sort them out. That's part of, the trick, is sorting out those that are on there for personal validation just to match up with other people. Those looking at, just in your experience, the gal looking for a dad, father figure, there's a lot of them that are out there for a variety of reasons. Other than just searching. I think you and I are in the same group. We're looking for a relationship. 

Turner: Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the struggle, the struggle [00:18:00] I had as a rookie. I was the loving husband to my wife. She loved me, her family loved me. I had the good guy seal of approval, and here I’m meeting these women that are angry at men. Have agendas that I never imagined that any same person could bring to the table in meeting a guy. I was like, I don't think this is going to work. And I slowly. I think in that first year, I met 24 women, and it became pretty clear if something seems off or strange or suspicious in the dating profile, when you meet them, that's the way it's going to be. So I started dissecting little things in the dating profile, whether even certain pictures that were included especially the ones where [00:19:00] the woman is putting, you know, is showing a group photo. Okay, so which one are you, and why are you showing me these other women? Are you showing me that you have friends? What, what's the message here? So I started dissecting all these little things, trying to sort of suss out what the deal was here. I was flabbergasted. I really was.

Paul: So basically, we left off at the end of your rookie year, if you will, and you're now starting to go into year two. And one of the first things I wanted to ask about, your adventure into year two, is you'd been online dating for a while, and what adjustments have you made? to how you approach dating at this point, because I'm assuming most of it was online at this point.

Turner: Most of it was, I was still a reluctant online dater, but in that first year, I finally began to throw myself into it. But [00:20:00] right at the end of the first year, just before the beginning of year two, I made a, I made an adjustment. The adjustment I made was, and it came from a comment from someone, uh, or a question someone asked, " Do you think you're looking for someone who's like your late wife? And I said, no, absolutely not. And then the voices in my head are going, well, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait a minute. Maybe you are back up. Don't be so fast. 

So it made me think, and so, you know, with the dating apps, you have filters, you can set distance and religion, all kinds of stuff. I decided maybe I was not doing this the right way or the best for me. So I opened up all the filters. I mean, I opened up a distance religiously, everything that could be opened up. I opened them up, and that was right before the end of the first year. And I met someone that I otherwise would not have met at the end of that first year, who ended up not going [00:21:00] well because we had cultural differences.

She was a Christian Arab, from the Middle East, and clearly we had some, there are some differences about dating and relationships and stuff. So that's how I was emerging into year two. 

The Game of Online Dating

Turner: The other thing I realized after the first year was, this is kind of a game. I mean, the dating apps have sort of gamified this whole thing and not in a good way, but everybody else was playing the game and I wasn't, you know, I was sticking to my, sort of morals or I, not really morals, but just sort of, you know, I was just sort of being very honest about this. And I think I realized that the dating apps opened it up for people, maybe not to be so honest, and that also coincided with my, a sort of shotgun approach to this. You know, you have to come up with a time management system for doing this, right? I just sort of start, I call it a shotgun approach, where you just put out a [00:22:00] lot of, you know, seeds or potentials or touching base with people.

See what comes back. And I was looking at my book at the beginning of chapter two, or part two of my book, how I described it. I'm just going to read a couple sentences. I lined up the first and second dates, like boxcars on a train. Becoming a semi-professional. Scheduling juggler, weaving women and dates together at different levels of progression was clearly a skillset acquisition for online dating as well as mastering the art of being able to put on a fresh new face when meeting someone, only hours after meeting someone new, only hours after having met someone else.

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: I realized it was a bit of a game, so I had to up what I was doing, and I thought, okay, I'm going to, I'll play the game if that's what it is, but it was still really hard, and I didn't like it. I did not like what I found out there. I don't know what your experience was, but I didn't like it.

Paul: It, it [00:23:00] parallels pretty much what you were seeing. It's, I, I thought it was going to be this, this great panacea of people looking for the same things, and they were going to be honest and open with each other, with what they were looking for. And it, it was nothing even close to that.

It took me a while to come to that conclusion, too. And, at the same time, I wanted to reflect on one of the things that you'd also mentioned was that about you're into this, you're going through this, it's a game, but this also started to become like a routine. Is, is that a good way to put it? 

Turner: Uh, Routine that you've began to come to dread actually. But it did, there's this sort of wash, rinse cycle, repeat. It became that kind of routine, and it became you did have some control over how rapid fire you wanted this routine to go, [00:24:00] but. It was definitely a routine, and there was a pattern, and you could see it over and over and over and over. Yeah, you're right. Absolutely. It was a routine.

Paul: Yeah. And it, and then it becomes about how quickly can I get through the pattern to get, to actually get to meet this person? And that becomes a pattern, too, when you actually get into the conversations.

Turner: It does. I was blessed, and at the beginning, again, the beginning of the second year, my wife's, my late wife's cousin, who was guiding me and terribly interested in everything about what was going to happen with Turner. And she was determined it was her mission to find a woman for Turner. She came over once I sort of got the feel that she had. She had spent part-time in the US and part-time in another country in South America, where she had married and had children. But whenever she came up. We talked, and she came over just right at this time. And I remember she came over, she, she brought over a bottle of wine. I opened up my [00:25:00] iPad, and I explained how the whole thing worked. It was all eHarmony still at the time, and she was fascinated. And, the way all the dating apps work, or at least at the time, you can discard people easily, but you can sort of put people in a holding pattern.

And there were several that I had was sort of slow walking them through. And a few that I had sort of, you know, liked hadn't gone through. And then I got to see her go through. So here's a woman going through the women, and she was cutthroat. It was hilarious. She was going like, Nope, nope, nope. Oh my God.

No. Nope. Oh my God. It was just. It is absolutely hilarious to see her go through these. And what was comforting to me was that we were generally on the same page. And again, you just have the photos to look at. She's judging on photos

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: And then reading a little bit it, lingers on the iPad screen for a few seconds. But we were remarkably on the same [00:26:00] page. So that was some comfort. Okay. I'm on this game. I'm, I'm on it. Okay. And I'm in the game, and I seem to be reading it, and she's reading it the same way. It was an absolutely hilarious evening, however,

Paul: Yes, I've had similar situations with coworkers and friends where we would look through some of those, and it is comforting when you see other people seeing the same things that you are. Yeah. So you, you know, you're not crazy in some of these aspects. I wanted to mention, so you, you're in year two here, and year two is where uh, you basically got into your first relationship with Emily, I think is what her name was.

Okay. So one of the things that I find interesting about the Emily story is that you were dating for a while, and as you were dating, you began to learn more about yourself and what you were looking for in a partner. And uh, I think at [00:27:00] the, the end of the year, you had grown to realize more about what you're looking for.

So why don't you tell us about the Emily experience in meeting her and um, what process you went through, what she was like as a person, and then kind of how you grew individually to learning more about what it was you were looking for in a relationship.

Turner: Sure. Well, at the end of that first year, as we talked about earlier, I was emerging back into life as a widow. What is there for in life for me now? So there's that bigger aspect, and then there's the aspect of having maybe someone in my life. So that first year, the first chapter in the book is called Crossing the Threshold.

After that first year I was back, I felt like I was back in life. I was back on good ground, trying to find love. And then, as I mentioned, my late wife's cousin came over. And there was one woman [00:28:00] that in her profile that I looked at previously, and it was odd. Every photo, she had like four or five photos.

And every photo, or in every photo, she looked a little different than the other photos. It was sort of odd, and I hadn't seen this before, before all the photos showed clearly the same person. And this one was like, okay, well, this woman doesn't quite look like picture two, something's odd here, but we connected.

And I was sort of slow walking that one through. But Wendy, my wife's cousin, Wendy, when she was flipping through all these and saying, no, no, no, no. She stopped cold on in Emily and goes, I like her and I'm going, why? I just like her. I just do. And so she's going through all the statistics and stuff, and I, I shared that, you know, I thought the pictures were a little different.

She goes, I don't see [00:29:00] it. She said, you need to connect with her. I said, well, we have, I'm kind of slow walking it. She goes fast, walk it. Come on. And she smacked the iPad shut. She bottoms up her glass of wine and goes, don't blow it. So with this strong push from Wendy, I ramped it up, and Emily and I started doing a series of phone calls. 

Challenges and Realizations

Turner: And we ran into the very first problem that would dog us for the entire year we were together. And that was scheduling. I don't know if you ran into scheduling issues with

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: because at this, at this stage of life, if you're juggling a lot of things, you have kids, you have work, careers, whatever is going on. So for the first month, we were only able to talk on the phone. She was very involved in a community organization where she lived. I can't get too specific because it might identify her, but they did what they did mostly on Friday and [00:30:00] Saturday nights, oddly enough. And then she had her kids; she had two children, and she had them every other weekend. So we began a series of typically late-night phone calls when her kids were in bed, and my son was in bed; they were actually amazing. I look forward to talking to her. She seemed to look forward to talking to me. And then she's the one that broke the sort of the ice on like the fourth phone call.

It was, we were getting near the end of the phone call, and I didn't feel like I wanted to hang up. And she's the one who said it, Turner. I don't want to hang up. I want to keep talking to you. And she paid some wonderful compliments to me, and that's when my heart went sort of pitter-patter for the first time. So we made the connection on the phone, but we still couldn't meet. It was literally a month. And then, she found some time on a Sunday afternoon to come over my way. We lived 45 minutes apart that, and that would become another problem [00:31:00] as in that, in that year she came over and or where she, in planning her coming over, I offered this idea. What if when you come over, and I open the door, we don't say a word to each other. We just kiss. We've been doing a lot of talking. Let's just see if the next level of this connection is there. She sent back just sort of heart emojis in her text, and she was all in. And that's what we did. And it was just fireworks that day when she came over, and that's how it began. She was funny, sexy, accomplished, and appeared to be a great mom to her kids. And that's how it began. There were some red flags that, in hindsight, I should not have disregarded. And I shared those with Wendy as well.

Paul: And tell us about some of those red flags.

Turner: Here's the story [00:32:00] as she told it, and this. All true. I've not changed the story in any way. So, and this is where I had to take a little bit of responsibility for the, the male species being a little bit, okay. So we're not all; some of us are scumbags, okay? I have to admit. So her ex-husband, when they were married, was, we'd go on frequent business trips, and she discovered he was very much into porn, online porn really bothered her, but they, for whatever reason, she just let it go. And then she discovered he was having an affair. And to get back at him, she started having an affair. Now, remember, she, they have two kids together. She started having an affair. They ended up separating and got divorced, but the guy she had an affair with to get back at her husband for having [00:33:00] affair wasn't someone that she was really committed to. He was just the mechanism for getting back at her ex. I can do it too, but now she, for various reasons, was kind of stuck with him or committed to him in some ways, but he turned out to be a bit of a freeloader on her financially. Her kids were very young at the time, and this, I think, they were together for six years. He was a great parent, and the kids came to love him. She had a daughter and her son, so they were in there, you know, four and five when this began. All this happened, and she realized he was just mooching off her and kind of a bum, but her kids loved her. So what do you do? She eventually got rid of him, but her kids were really upset, and this all began with her wanting to get back at her ex. [00:34:00] She found the guy who was available and willing, and tag you're it, so that she shared that story with me on the phone, and I'm going, whoa, okay, wait a minute. There's a lot of bad decisions here, being made. Do I want to get involved with this? And I shared this story with Wendy, and she, she, I, I put this story in the book. She goes, well, okay. Yeah, that's complicated. That's, yeah. Yeah. But Wendy said, I still like her a lot. So with Wendy's encouragement, she said, just go into it with an open mind. You know, you're, you're, you're aware. She shared this with you? No, she wasn't trying to hide it. She shared it with you.

So give her credit for that. So that in hindsight, I should have just. Walked away from it based on things that happened with us over the course of the year. So that's that story.

Paul: Was Emily the one who had some security issues? Did she, was she the one who mentioned that she [00:35:00] had, like, some other guys in line?

Turner: Well, she did, so we, so she started dropping that line when we weren't able to meet those first four weeks. We can only talk on the phone, but we weren't able to meet because it was her schedule, not my schedule yet. She threw it back at me. So that's kind of, that was another red flag. I should have just caught on to it at the beginning, but I ignored it. I let it go. That was a mistake, too. But yeah, she was, and it was always my fault. As we got into the relationship and met and tried to proceed along, she did a good job of saying, it was always my. But we had, we were 45 minutes apart every other weekend. As I said, she was typically unavailable. And with these community commitments she had, I remember on my calendar four or five, six months into our relationship, there was a month where I wrote on my calendar on Fridays and Saturdays.

No, [00:36:00] Emily, no Emily, no, it wasn't me. It wasn't me. And we would get together during the week for dinner. But I really didn't like that. But she did do that. She threw that at me.

Paul: Would you say you were putting more effort into the relationship at this point, or is it more of a 50 50? 

Turner: I would say it was 50 50. I was still wary, I was still unsure of myself, quite

frankly. What do I want? What am I looking for? But unlike the others, and she was number 24, by the way, and I let her know she was number 24. I think I was a higher number on her, her end. I also, as I finished year one of the dating and began year two, which became Emily, I realized I wasn't sure what I was looking for, needed, wanted at this part of my life. Being a parent, having, you know, lived the life I live. And so [00:37:00] I just put it out there for myself. You don't know what you don't know, so don't say no to things you don't know about a lot of no’s, but that's quadruple negatives. I felt like I just sort of needed to go with it, you know, when the opportunities arise, go. 

So that was kind of my attitude with Emily. But let's be clear, she was wonderful to be with. She was very funny. She was a wonderful person, but these things that popped up that I called double standards on her part only became more of a problem later on. But given my sense of myself, look, you just need to, you need to put yourself out there and take some chances. So this was a chance I took, but I was conscious of that I was taking a chance on her, and I was willing to see where it would go. And I also knew from being married that any relationship requires work, and I was willing to put in the work. So in that [00:38:00] regard, let's put in the work. Let's put in the work. She seems like a good person.

Paul: You're halfway through year two, and you're going out and doing stuff on a semi-regular basis. Are you at the point now where you're, you're meeting the kids and getting more involved with the family yet?

Turner: I had met her kids. She was from the West Coast, so her parents lived out west, so I didn't get to meet them till Christmas time that year. So about three-quarters of the way through, the daughter was sort of excited to see who her mom's boyfriend was, and her son was like, I don't care. I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to meet him. I don't have anything to do with this. And that was my first experience with that. Now I had the same thing on my end with my two boys meeting her, and that's a new thing in life, gosh, that, that's got to be weird for the kids on both ends. So I had met her, and I mentioned earlier, I think I was very close to my in-law family.

They're the old Washington family, [00:39:00] very close to them all. And one of the strangest events. I mentioned my mother-in-law a lot in the book, Mary. I took my new girlfriend over to my mother-in-law's house to have dinner with her. So just saying that it sounds odd, but if you know both of them, they're wonderful.

And Emily came to know how important and wonderful my in-law family was, and they were my family. There was one hilarious episode. There was the family matriarch in Georgetown. Anything you can imagine about a Georgetown matriarch in Washington applied to her: the money, the wealth, the influence, the power. She was 96 years old and a little forgetful, in having a lot of those issues. But she was keen as well to follow my because her daughter was Wendy, so she was the matriarch was keen to see Turner happy so she said, I'd like to meet Emily [00:40:00], come over for lunch. So we went over to her house in Georgetown.

We were in the sunroom, and I relayed this story also in my memoir, To Venus and Back. The matriarch is going on. You seem so sweet. You see, it seems so wonderful, and you two seem so good together, and you're okay. She begins to stumble. You're all right with helping Turner with his problems. And I'm going like, what are my inner voices, which are a big part of my memoir. They're like, you just got thrown under the bus by a 96-year-old woman. And Emily's on the other side of the matriarch. We were on either side of her. And she's looking at me, looking at me like, gotcha, now I gotcha now. And we were leaving the lunch and walking down the sidewalk in Georgetown. And Emily goes in a little cartoon voice, Can I help Widow Turner [00:41:00] with his widow problems? So that was not very helpful, but it was amusing. So yes, we were introducing each other to our family members and getting the, getting the big picture.

Paul: Mm-hmm. You've been dating for the better part of a year at this point, and in reading the book, it's like the end of this, you came to kind of a realization on what your path was and kind of what you were looking for in a dating relationship.

Turner: Yeah 

Paul: Can you elaborate on that a little bit, because I know others, I've thought about the same things myself, and I know some of the listeners are 

Turner: Sure. And a lot of people were related to this. 

The Breakup and Self-Discovery

Turner: So we're not far away from a year, but at this point. It's been four years since my wife passed away. And my son, who's at home, as you recall, I have a son with disabilities who's in a school in Massachusetts. But my other son had gone through high school. He was getting ready to graduate high school. [00:42:00] he'd applied to colleges, he'd been accepted, and it was becoming real that we had made it somehow in my mind at the time. My wife passed away, I was looking ahead toward the next four years of high school. That was, you know, the, trying to finish the childhoods of my children, and we made it. And so here's that moment sort of hanging in the air. And then with Emily, the distance was a problem. Our different schedules were getting in the way and sources of conflict. So that's in the air. And I'm thinking, how can I make that relationship work? And the only thing that came to mind was, well, we need to be together. We need to get these difficulties off the table, distance, and schedules. So I started thinking about having her and her children move into my home, and there were so many mixed feelings; there were still some photos in the hallway. We have a, I have a big family photo wall in my hallway here in my home. [00:43:00] 

There were still a couple of pictures of my wife and me with our kids. And I was thinking about this. I thought, well, those will probably have to go. I changed those pictures out, but I just kept coming back as I was looking at, okay, which kid of hers we get, which bedroom, and which might be her home office, and this and that. And I'm always in the hallway with the photos, looking at the photos as I think about this. And at some point. It just hit me. And I describe it in the, in the memoir. It's like a two-by-four just smacking me across the head. 

My son's going off to college. I'm not going to be a parent anymore. My life is not going to be driven by school schedules, school events, the whole thing. And I realized, yes, I did make it, and I don't want it anymore. And as my friend Abby, who, uh, is a prominent person in my memoir, when I shared it with her the next day, she said, well, where does [00:44:00] that leave you? And Emily with her two kids? And I said, probably not together.

Paul: How, how old were Emily's kids?

Turner: They were five and six when I met them. So they were coming upon six and seven, seven and a half. I didn't want that.

Paul: It makes sense. because you're, you're reliving grade school and, and high school all over again. 

Turner: That was a first hard realization that I don't want to be in the parenting business anymore.

Paul: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Turner: And so Abby's telling me, you got to tell her, you got to tell her this is big. You can't keep leading her on. And then I said to Abby, I don't know if this is just in the moment or if this is like the real deal.

I've just put a, you know, a stake in the ground. This is a hard and fast line. So I gave it a month, and it was a hard and fast line. So I had to figure out how to break up with her, how to break this off. And it did not go [00:45:00] well, and they never do. She threw everything back at me. She possibly could. The problems that the matriarch had talked about. She was just mean. She was just mean about it. You know, I shared honestly, heartfelt, and getting hurt is getting hurt. I understand that, but she and I even shared in the memoir some of her emails and texts; they were vicious. So that's what happened there.

Paul: I went through something similar, so I completely understand. You're growing as an individual, and then the realization that you don't want to take those same steps back over again because you've already went through that. So it's recognition of the growth process, if you will, and I think anybody that's in the Gen X or baby boomer age group, when they get back into dating, could easily experience this. I went through it to some degree myself. 

Turner: You don't know it's a thing [00:46:00] until it arrives.

Paul: Exactly, yes. You have to, you actually have to go through that valley, walk through it and experience it to really, truly understand what it is you want to do as an individual, where you want to go as a relationship, cause I I'm the same way. I, I would not be able to do that myself. I've already went through that.

Turner: When that hit you, what age were your children or your child on, how many do you have?

Paul: So my son was in junior college at this point in time, when this, and so.

Turner: You're an empty nester. You're an empty nester.

Paul: Yes, He was still living with me at that point. There was still a little bit longer before he moved out. I was actually, I'd been dating one gal for a while that had, I believe, one in early high school and another one in junior high school. And I had realized, I could do part of that, maybe on the tail end of high school, maybe, but not many years of it, because there, it's [00:47:00] just, I've moved into that different phase of life. It's like, it's like retirement, 

Turner: Yeah. It is in many ways.

Paul: It's like you've moved out of the regular working life. And when you go into retirement, you're in this completely different phase where it's hard to explain that train of thought to somebody that's actually still working

Turner: Yeah. 

Paul: Many aspects. But yeah, so that's, that's, I, I went through basically the, the same thing, and it was about 18 months in being single and out dating that I realized I did not want to get back into a super heavy relationship immediately. I was still dating, if you will, to have fun and see what was out there 

Turner: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. 

Paul: And I didn't want to dive back in. So

Turner: Getting back out there. After that, it really was.

Paul: Yes, I hear you. Believe me. 

Year Three: New Beginnings and Assertiveness

Paul: Let's move into year three. So, you moved on basically with Emily, and you started getting back into online [00:48:00] dating. And one of the things that I found interesting, also, I saw another part of personal growth. I think as you were messaging and you were talking about who you were meeting next, your messaging process seemed to be much more assertive in your approach to meeting some of these new gals. You want to…

Turner: It, it, sure it did change. It changed because of my experiences with Emily and things I thought were one-sided, that double standard, as it were. I also realized. No, my, not just my dating compass, my life compass was back, and it was working now, and I had a much better idea of what I wanted, or what I didn't want. But I still have a little bit of, there's still a lot you don't know, so be open. The biggest sea change was previously. So as I emerged back into life and dating and maybe looking for someone to, to [00:49:00] be a life partner, I always felt like I had to prove myself to them first. And then they proved themselves to me. That now flipped. They had to prove themselves to me before I was going to put myself out there. I had just felt like I'd been burned too many times. I was getting tired of the game, and I'm not doing that anymore. So. Okay. I will contact you. We'll talk, we'll meet, but you've got to show me you're a serious person. You're a good person. You're an honest person. That you are a kind person. And that's something that I began to focus on a lot in that third year. And it's really something I focused on in life. Just basic kindness. I just found a lot of these women weren't kind, you know, go back to the first year and all those wacky things that they said and did, and they thought that was okay to do.

I mean, where are you coming from? 

Meeting Ava: An Enigmatic Encounter

Turner: And then lo and [00:50:00] behold, Ava comes along. So I had added to my online dating app repertoire, OkCupid. So I jumped into that. And that works very different from eHarmony. If eHarmony was a matchmaking service, OkCupid was, I won't say a meat market, but it was sort of, it qualified by answering questions.

They would sort of throw people at you, and they put a percentage of compatibility. So here's the percentage of, yes, this could work, or there's no way in the world this is going to work. Maybe it might work. So this percentage number became a big deal, and that's how I met Ava. Her online profile had this incredible sort of artsy black and white photo of her, that being an architect and someone who loves art and design, I was immediately attracted to.

So, she put a little bit in her profile, not much, but that photo was just like, wow. I mean, her hair was sort of wind-long, hair, wind-blown across part of her [00:51:00] face. It was like anyone who had the sort of aesthetic chops to have that photo taken and then put that on their profile. That's someone I'd like to meet. I contacted her, I messaged her through the app. She responded within just a couple of hours. And that evening we spoke on the phone, and we talked on the phone for an hour. It turned out she lived in Baltimore, which is about a 50-minute drive from Washington,

DC. So it's a, it's not a hard drive at all. And she was the one who said, let's meet. So we arranged to meet. If you want me to sort of go into that story, I'm happy

Paul: Sure. Yeah.

Turner: arranged to meet at a, she picked a place that was an old flour mill in outside Baltimore that had been sort of redone with some new development. She thought being an architect who loved design would be good.

And it turned out it was. It's a fabulous place. And as I often do, I get there a little bit early. So I'm sitting at the bar waiting for her to arrive. And I remember looking at my phone [00:52:00] and all of a sudden, in my peripheral vision. Someone arrives, but as I describe it in the book, these two large breasts arrived right beside me. And then there was a person behind her. I'm like, whoa. And she goes, you're here. And these little voices in my head who I give names to, they go, and so are yours. So we proceed to sit down. She knew the owner; she knew everybody. She, in a short ordering conversation, I learned this woman is an heiress. Her father was very accomplished. She runs around in elite circles, not just nationally, but internationally. And we're sitting there, and she's sharing all these stories about so and so, and how they made all their money and this and that. And I'm just going, I have no business being with this woman.

She's fascinating. She really is. But this is a classic one-and-done date. Then she [00:53:00] a, after talking about herself forever. And it was fascinating. I have no doubt. It was fascinating to hear about this side of people's lives. She asked me, tell me, why did you run for Congress? That took me back to that time.

And it wasn't hard to summarize, and this is actually something that came to be one of my answers, that when I was running, and it goes like this, I said, look, I'm a special needs parent. And I've learned over the years that sometimes you have to fight for what is right and sometimes you have to fight against what's wrong. And I've learned that if you care and you can, you have to fight for your child and for others. And if you care and if you can, but you don't. Then what's right will never be done. And what's wrong will never change. And across the table from me, her jaw just dropped, and she just sat there in [00:54:00] silence, and I said, what is it? She said, that's exactly something my father would've said. And her father had passed away just a few years before her. Very accomplished father who had made her an heiress. And she grabbed her phone, and she was fumbling for pictures. So she said, I want to show you a photo. And it was another very artsy black and white photo. And it was her hand overlaid on a very wrinkled elderly individual's hand. She goes, this is my father's hand when he was in the hospital. So something about my answer about why I ran for Congress, very heartfelt, why I devoted myself to this, touched her. I still thought we were done. I thought this date was over. The dinner ended. We, she gave me a tour of the restaurant, really nicely done by the architect, and I'm walking her out to the car and she jerks around and goes, You want to go for a walk? And I go, sure. It was that time of the [00:55:00] evening. It was June, you know, the sun is set, but there's that wonderful blue aura of light in the sky.

It's, it's very nice. And we're just sort of walking along the development amongst these old buildings and some new buildings, and we're just doing regular talking now, I'm not hearing about her rich friends and how they made all their millions and all this. And all of a sudden, she's, she's sort of come back down. So we walk for about half an hour, and we come back to where the parking lot is, and I'm ready to give her a hug, goodbye. And we give a hug, and I decide just to give her a kiss on her cheek. And then she slides her lips over to mine and lays a big one. And her tongue immediately goes in. And I'm going like, okay. And then she grabs me with her arms. She hikes one leg up around me, and then she pulls the other leg up. I'm in a full crotch clutch with this woman in this vertical make-out session. And I'm just like, where's this going? Although it's not [00:56:00] bad. It's pretty good. So it goes on, she says, this isn't working.

Let's go find a place. And there's no place to go in or dark or whatever. And we are literally sitting on these almost public steps. And she pushes me down to the ground on my back. She takes her stiletto-heeled foot, stomps it, or drops it right between my legs, and she drops down, and she begins humping my leg furiously like crazy. And I'm just like, you know, I'm gasping for air. I would relay this story later to Abby, and she goes, well, now you know what it's like for me dating men who jump on me all the time. And this goes on forever. And I finally say through, no breaths that I can hardly keep up with. I don't think this is safe doing this out here. Either take me home or send me home. And she says, through all this humping and pulling up her shirt and everything, taking her bra off [00:57:00] and everything, I don't feel safe with you yet. I'm going like, what? You don't feel safe with me yet? And you're, and finally it ends, and she puts herself back together, and we're walking back across the street, to her car, where the, 30 minutes ago I thought we were done. And she says. You surprised me tonight. I said that, that, that makes two of us. And then she goes, let's go over here. So she ends up taking me to the back of the restaurant. It's dark behind the parking lot, sort of where the dumpsters are. it doesn't happen on the ground, but she shimmies up a wall, and it's straddling my leg.

And this all happens all over again. And it's just like, okay, an hour ago this was, this is a one-and-done date, and I have no business being with this woman, and this happens. And then I'm on my drive back to Washington from Baltimore. As I mentioned, it's about a 50-minute drive, and I'm on the road no more than 50 minutes.

And she calls, and it's after midnight now. [00:58:00] And she goes, how are you doing? I said, well, I'm thinking about you. And she giggles. She goes, good. I was hoping you'd say that. And then we're off to the races. But the title of the chapter is Enigma

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: And she was, I never could figure her out, but there's, there's a lot more to tell about it because she gets, there's Enigma part one and then Enigma part two. But that's how my time after Emily launched was meeting Ava.

Paul: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Turner: It was mind-blowing.

Paul: One quick aspect I was, that I was thinking about, as you were telling that is, it's amazing if you just show up. If you go out on dates, you make the effort, you show up, you never know what's going to happen, and you're going to 

Turner: Exactly. And that's part of the game that I decided, okay, I will play the game. because you don't know what you don't know. But that was [00:59:00] totally, that was totally out of the blue. 

Paul: Yes. I've had similar experiences, and all it entails is you make the date, and you show up if you just show up. You're going to end up with some great stories in life and memories that you'll be able to take with you, so the Ava experience that turned out to be an intense one for a while 

Turner: It did, it did. This scene was played out again. She began to introduce me to some of her friends. I didn't meet her mother, but some friends, and this cavorting that she enjoyed doing in public or semi-public places continued. So clearly she liked this. It happened outside. She came and visited some friends in Washington.

I took her to my club for dinner. This happened outside her friend's house, where she was spending the night, and we were trying to find someplace private to. to. You know, to make out. And as we walked around the house, all these lights on motion sensors were flashing on. [01:00:00] And I immediately have this sense that, okay, the cops are going to show up at any minute, you know, they're going to shine the spotlight and go, Hey, you two, what are you doing? And each of our dates kind of felt like that. I always felt like the cops are going to show up, like that first date on the steps. The second date was on a park bench in Baltimore on a street, but there was no park. It was just a main avenue in Baltimore at like 1130, midnight at night. This is going on. So this was her deal, but it ended in a very strange way. That August, I was on the cusp of becoming an empty nester. I had to, and as I was telling her this, at dinner, I had to take my son off to college. Which is a big deal, emotional, and I mean that's just, there's so much as a part of that.

And then as soon as I got him, and that was in the Southeast, so that was a lot of driving and, you know, minivan full of [01:01:00] stuff. As soon as I got back, I had to go to Massachusetts to get my other son, bring him back for his end-of -summer break. Because his, the program he was in for kids like him was a year-round program. But this was his break. So I had him coming back, and we would be doing things, and then I would take him back up, drive him back up. And a couple of friends who had a house up in Booth Bay Harbor Main invited me up after all that was done. They said, Come up for three days of R-n-R and we'll just take care of you. But altogether, that was about three and a half, almost four weeks. And as I was sharing this with Ava at dinner in early August, she just went dead silent. And I said, what is it? What's going on? And she said, no, nothing. And so these games started being played. I had actually shared this with her at our previous date, and she said, I didn't realize you were going to be away. I reminded her that I'd shared most of this with her previously, and she said she [01:02:00] didn't remember, but something about this just shut her down. I took her home. That day was the first time I, she had actually shared where she lived. I went and picked her up because she was finally feeling safe with me. And I took her back, and there was this distance I couldn't figure it out. And it parted. She just sort of said goodbye. And I'm like, what the hell just happened? And then another dating episode would occur where I was flying off to Paris to meet someone. And then. Ava popped back up. She said she had followed me on Facebook, because we had connected on Facebook, she invited me to this gala, this museum gala in Baltimore that she was on the board for.

All her rich friends were there. She said, you know, without this being awkward, would you just like to be my escort? And I should share that. During this time, my mother-in-law passed away, and I'd shared that on Facebook. So she'd seen all this, and I was kind of not dating at that point. I, I was mourning the loss of a [01:03:00] wonderful woman, my mother-in-law. But she gave this invitation, happy to be a shoulder to, you know, lean on and someone to talk to about all you've been through. We go to the event, and then all of a sudden she starts making moves on me. And I we're off to the side on her own. I said, What the hell is this? And by the way, what happened at the end of the summer? And she went into this story that said that basically, she had been hurt so many times by men. She thought I was using my kids going off to their schools and breaks and stuff as an excuse to see other women. And I remember yelling so loud that she looked left and right to see if anyone had heard me yelling at her, going like, what? But that was what she thought when I was telling her about it. Now, here's a life milestone for me as a parent, taking my son off to college. I'm going to be here; it's going to be 5,000 miles of driving in about three and a half weeks. And all she could [01:04:00] think of was, well, he's off to see other women. Once all this was laid out on the table, all the cavorting just started right back up again, uh, till the end of the year when another incident happened.

So that was Ava. 

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: Enigma never could figure her out, never could figure out here's a woman with wealth that few people will ever experience and have at their disposal, goes to parties around the world. She invited me to a wedding after we got back together in Zurich at Christmas. I go, well, I'm going to kind of be with my kids.

But she goes, Oh, that's okay. I just wanted to dance with you at a wedding in Zurich, Switzerland. Okay? So this, her life, was very different from mine. So what did she see in me? What, what was I, that question came up over and over. Why is she interested in Turner? If she's got all this, why is she wanting to see you cavort around half the time in [01:05:00] public? What's the deal? And I could never figure that out. It ultimately ended on New Year's Day. I had to fly my son with disabilities back up to his school in Massachusetts. And this was just a routine I did every couple of months, flying up and back. I took him up there. He was picked up by staff from his school, and my flight was two hours later, had dinner, get back on the plane, and it started snowing in Boston. So we sat on the tarmac, and you and I both shared, we were both six feet tall. All seats are our preferred seats, but this time it didn't work. I was on a window seat, I was stuck there looking out the window with the snow and sleet falling in Boston for about an hour and a half. And it so happened the first, and it was, this was a Saturday, it was a Saturday night. Five years before. No. 25. No. Well, um, losing track of time. It was on a Saturday night, on a snowy night in Boston, that I first met my wife. The first Saturday in January, and here I [01:06:00] was at the first Saturday in January. So I'm thinking about her I just got very emotional for whatever reason. I went to my iPhone.

I found photos from our wedding. I did a post on Facebook in Remembrance, because it was two years later that we got married on the first Saturday in January in Washington at the National Cathedral on a snowy night. So all these emotions were just coming together, and it was an odd thing. I put this post up in remembrance of my wife, and all these emotions just sort of melted away. I needed to share this, and I needed to feel the embrace of my true friends. Well, Ava saw this. I remember the next day writing an email saying how are you doing? I had a bit of an emotional bump yesterday, but feeling better. Got through it. Look forward to seeing you. I never heard from her again. She was gone. After about 2, 3, 4 weeks, I sent an email to her just letting her know that one, [01:07:00] she's a fascinating woman, a deserving woman, glad that I met you, but you keep men in the dark. That's probably not going to work very well for you going forward. You need to share, be open, and talk. because there were a lot of other episodes where she wouldn't share a lot of information. It turned out she was widowed, and she never shared that with me to the, until the very end. I was like, what? So she said she kept everything very close because she'd been hurt. And if that's the case, if that's the reason, she's going to have a very difficult time if she's not willing to share and be open and be vulnerable. It's this going to be more of the same. Rinse, repeat, rinse,

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Turner: repeat. So that was Ava.

Outro

Paul Nelson: This second episode really gets to the heart of what makes midlife dating different. By this stage, it's no longer just about chemistry or getting a second date. It becomes about patterns, life [01:08:00] stage values, baggage, and whether two people are actually compatible in the real world.

Turner's stories in this episode also show us why detail matters. A lot of what seems confusing at first starts to make sense once you step back and see repeated themes. Who's ready, who's not. Who's dating with realism, and who's still dating like they're 27 with no history behind them.

In part three, we get into some of Turner's most memorable later experiences, including long-distance dating to Paris, fantasy versus reality, mystery women, burnout, and what finally led him to leave Venus behind.

Again, if you're getting value out of this conversation, be sure to check out Turner Grant's book To Venus and Back. One Man's Quest to Rediscover Love.

Links will be in the show notes. 

Okay, guys and gals, stay positive. Be present, be intentional. And remember, you may just be one evening away from a date that changes everything.

Thanks for listening, and [01:09:00] I'll see you in part three.