Dating is hell, but for some inexplicable reasons, people keep doing it. And, thank goodness, they keep writing about it, because daters—if they didn’t have friends and fellow bloggers to commiserate and joke with might sometimes have to go shut themselves in the bathroom or the car and just scream—really, really loud.

Yep, while you’re on the hunt for someone you like, dating sucks. And then, when you’ve met someone interesting, its all nuanced and hopeful. And the, if you starting seeing that person—well, it can be anything from butterflies and kittens (okay, not really) to civil warfare and domestic skirmishes (hopefully not, save that till you’re living together).

One of the things that keeps me going as a (middle-aged) dater is reading the blogs of my single friends and dating strangers. Like Jack Russell terriers, red rubber balls, and anything else that evokes the metaphor of being smashed against an unyielding surface and then bouncing back, daters’ blogs prove nothing if not how tenacious the quest for love and meaning is.

With that, some of the recent reads I’ve been enjoying:

Blue Lover Girl, from Hicksville, NY (aka Podunk) is single, thirty-something, and has a mom who’s dating on eHarmony but it ain’t going so good. BLG has a 50-something married guy friend who offers to teach her how to be multi-orgasmic, a couple of bad past relationships, and enough verve and wit to be an It Girl just about anywhere. A keeper.

Boredom alone is not enough reason to make out with someone, says Beauty School Dropout, and one gets the feeling not being bored drives a lot of the writing in this olbservant, sometimes acerbic blog, which is almost a sister site to the marvelous charming but single, a blog I keep coming back to with real delight because of posts like the one that reads: The Five Things I Should Not Know by the End of Our First Date, which includes gems like “How many beers you can drink in two hours” and “that you’ll do anything to get laid.”

Another sister under the skin to these two is the far more graphic but always discerning (and recently engaged)not safe for work Chelsea Girl, whose chronicles of dating Donny at pretty dumb things are the ultimate post-modern dating/romance saga.

It’s harder to find the blogs of mid-life women who are dating, but a few I’ve come across that caught my eye were Calamity Annie’s myspace blog, which is basically a public, personal journal about a 60 year old being single, and Meg Kelso’s Divorcing Rick, another journal, which chronicles her life as a Boomer single.

And then of course there are the single sex bloggers, the ones who taking on dating—and relationships—has a far earthier flavor. Among the women writing sex blogs who focus on navigating singledom, I’d point to the njot safe for work The Erotic Journey of Juno Henry, and the polyamorous (and charming) Cunning Minx's My licit affairs, two who catch my attention, as do the single guys Flint and Cajun boy in the big city, two healthy libidos who don’t hold back in the honesty department either.

Who are some bloggers that focus on writing about dating and their singles experience that you enjoy? Any GLBT bloggers you’d add to this list ?
Fill up these comments, folks?

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