Updating the Love Circuit: 1 Marriage Has Taken Place So Far

About this time last year, Bob Nelson placed a singles ad in the classified section of Orange Coast Magazine with a beckoning headline: “Let’s Fly to Hawaii or Europe.”

The Los Alamitos sales representative, then newly divorced, said in an interview with Single Life that he had been feeling lonely and hoped the tactic would link him up with a compatible mate.

Guess what? It worked.

Single Life caught up with Nelson, 45, for a progress report, and he announced that he recently married a woman he met via the classifieds. Norwalk resident Stella Cabrera, 38, responded to his ad, the two rendezvoused for coffee, and the rest is a his-and-her-story.

“We hit it off right away; she’s a very special lady,” Nelson said. His new wife, who practiced gynecology in her native Philippines, is studying for a medical license in the United States.

After spending “every spare moment together for six months solid,” the pair suddenly decided, in Bob Nelson’s words, “why not?”

“We went to the courthouse and got married one morning, and then I went back to work,” he laughed. “Our commitment to each other is the important thing, not the wedding.”

Have they yet taken that promised trip to Hawaii or Europe? “Well, no,” Nelson said. “But we did go up to Portland to see my parents.”

As for other stars of Single Life columns gone by who were contacted for an update--their news was not so earthshaking as Nelson’s.

“Nothing’s changed,” said F1048 (the identification code used in her anonymous singles ad). “It’s so hard to meet someone, especially when you get into your 40s. Everybody has so many battle scars, and at the same time you’re more fussy.”

A university administrator who lives in Irvine, she certainly made a go of her advertisement last summer.

“One Saturday I actually arranged five dates with men who’d written me letters--8:30, breakfast; 11 a.m., coffee; 1 p.m., lunch . . . ,” she said. “It was like a marathon. I figured the odds of hitting it off with someone were so slim that I might as well make the most of my day.”

F1040, a 43-year-old teacher in Huntington Beach, did not pursue her ad correspondents with F1048’s energy. “I didn’t get my money’s worth out of it,” she said. “I only followed up on one. It turned out that I just didn’t feel comfortable making dates with strangers.”

And remember Elliot, the (then) 33-year-old radiologist who had transplanted to Newport Beach from the East Coast and complained that Orange County women just weren’t as intellectually stimulating as the women he knew back home? (His assessment of O.C. women, as you might imagine, elicited some angry mail.)

Nonetheless, Elliot claimed that he desperately wanted to marry and raise a family, and he had joined multitudes of singles clubs in that pursuit.

“The only thing that’s changed since that article is that you can add two years to my age,” Elliot conceded. “Maybe I’m one of the people who are too picky. I’m definitely alone in this house, except for my dog.”

How might he refocus his approach if in another three years he is still alone in his house?

“I would change some of the prerequisites,” he reckoned. “For example, right now I don’t date women with children, but I might change that because I would be older and not as marketable myself.

“Thirty-eight and never married connotes that either you’re a fusspot or you’ve got some problem you haven’t worked out. You’re not bringing the same strength to the market, so consequently you shouldn’t have the same relatively fixed criteria.”

Elliot laughed over the observation that his wife hunt sounded rather clinical. “That’s because I’m fairly coherent,” he defended himself. “If I paused with a few ‘uhs,’ I probably wouldn’t seem so mathematical.”

Yes, the Cornell graduate still finds that Orange County folks “aren’t as educated as are New Yorkers.”

“But I avoid making those comments because they get such negative reaction,” he said.

Elliot closed with the plea: “Don’t make me look like a bigger jerk than I’ve already made myself look like.”

Then there was the pretty Tustin woman whose shyness prevented her from interacting with men. She wrote Single Life last fall berating herself for clamming up when she would rather be flirting.

“I’m still not seeing anybody, though I dated someone for two months,” she said this week. “He’s shy too, so that was a burden at first; both of us would get tongue-tied. But on the other hand, we didn’t think each other odd because we understood shyness.”

She said she has been working on overcoming her timidity by de-pressurizing the moment--rather than viewing every encounter with an attractive guy as cause for nervousness. “It seems that as soon as I focus my attention on something else besides men, that’s when men flock around me,” she noted.

At the March of Dimes “Bid for Bachelors” fund-raiser last October, Army Lt. Col. Gary Hesselgesser of Irvine brought in the highest bid: $6,000.

“For $6,000,” Hesselgesser said, “I figured I better make my date package a good one.”

He succeeded. Hesselgesser took his “buyer”--Linda Leigh Long of Pasadena--to President Bush’s inaugural ball, then followed up with a cruise to the Bahamas.

Going on a two-week-long blind date was, Hesselgesser said, “real different.” However, a good time was had by all. “There was never an awkward moment. Linda Leigh is easygoing; I was really fortunate to get her as my date.”

Let’s see: a cute 27-year-old woman and a handsome 42-year-old man off together on a seven-day cruise. . . . Did the formula add up to romance?

“It certainly occurred to me,” Long said. “Unfortunately, I got disappointed on that aspect. We discussed it briefly when we got back; Gary is 15 years older than I, and he thought that was too much. But we’ve remained good friends.”

At least, we thought, we could count on April Ford and Joe Savage to give us some exciting news on the marriage front. After all, the couple have cohabited now for 14 years, and have dated for 18. And after all, as of last summer they boasted plans for an autumn wedding.

“Nope, we haven’t gotten around to it,” said Ford, 32, who, with her boyfriend, owns Shear Progress hair salon in Anaheim.

In an interview, the high school sweethearts said they don’t much believe in the institution of marriage, and see it only as a means to parent children in the socially acceptable manner.

That attitude still holds. “I never even think about the actual wedding,” Ford said.

But, she added, “We have set a date: 1989.”

They just don’t want to rush into anything.