Last week, a conversation with Sabina Ptacin, genius PR maven at Collective-e, and her own company Red Branch Public Relations, turned to the subject, as it so often does, of finding men in New York. She was telling me about someone she knew who was convinced that it was impossible to find love in New York once you’re “over the hill”. “I met my husband when I was in my 40′s” I said, “on the Internet”. After a dead silence on the other end of the phone, Sabina said it would be a great blog, so here goes.

About a dozen years ago, I was home recovering from some surgery, bored to death with daytime TV, and I decided to surf the net for personals. On a site, possibly webpersonals, was a picture of a man that really appealed to me. His

Does this look like an Internet serial killer to you?

profile had the top ten things he was looking for in a woman (something he got a lot of grief about), and a bonus question…you had to like France and the French. Well, I won a scholarship to the Chamber Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and lived in Paris for a year after college, so that one was easy. The rest were along the lines of  you have to be smart, politically aware, like sex, and be tall. According to Frank, my husband, my best answer was to the tall question. “I’m 5’4″ but I have an extensive collection of 3″ heels, and I love tall men.

We e-mailed for about a month, and one day he sent me an e-mail that said “My friends say I’m working too hard, and turning into a dull guy. Do you have any advice?”. I screwed up all my courage, and typed back “why don’t you take a good looking blond out and buy her a drink?”. We met later that week, and hit it off completely. I would have invited him back to my place, but my brother was convinced he was an Internet serial killer (something he completely denies now), so that waited until the next date. We got married a year later, in a surprise wedding, and have lived happily ever after for 11 years now. Let me know if you’d like to know how to throw a surprise wedding, and I’ll put it in another blog.

Oh, and the weird part, although he says his picture was on the site for a long time, as one of their success stories, I could never find it again…ever.