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I was born in Vancouver, Washington, in the very most northwest part of the US. I have lived in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and I have been living in California for about 35 years. My birthday is 18 January and I am 77. My education was at Harvard and Cornell Universities. I have a Ph.D. in computer science. my book was used widely in Russian speaking and other European colleges. I retired (finally) in August 2021. In the past, I was also a professor. Nowadays I spend a lot of time writing a series of technical books.
Personally, I am very healthy and active. Compared to most men of my age, I am more like 60 than 77. I have no bad habits, have never smoked, and drink only a little wine sometimes. I go to the gym regularly although I am not a big fan of exercise just for exercise’s sake.
I have visited widely in Europe — notably France, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, and (further away) Uzbekistan and Japan.
I own my home in Palo Alto, California, about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose and right in the heart of Silicon Valley. It is about 230 sq. meters and there are 6 rooms and 3 bathrooms. My home is part of a condominium — a sort of housing cooperative. I have been the association president for most of the last 20 years. Not a paid job — just a way to help our small group of 35 homeowners get all the typical housing maintenance and other work done.
I have been in five serious relationships and have two boys. Later on in the letter, I will tell you something about the relationships. My older boy Charles is 37, married, and lives in Amsterdam. My younger boy Matthew is nearly 21 and he splits time with me and his mother. Right now, Matthew is trying to figure out what to do with his life. There are some reasons why this is a hard problem for him. But we will work it out. My father died about 9 years ago at 93 and my mother died a year ago after her 100th birthday. I have one brother 3 years younger than me.
My intellectual interests are eclectic and I read a book or two a week. My music collection is enormous. So you won't be mislead, you will have to work hard to convince that any pop since about 1975 is actually music. I like all the normal restaurants, foods, shows, movies, TV, sports, ... I'm sure we can find common ground somewhere.
A word about my personal philosophy. Although I am not in any sense religious, I like this passage from I Corinthians 13 in the King James version of the New Testament that ends like this [the word "charity" real means "love for others"]:
📖 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
I have faith in people, I hope for the best in myself and them, and I strive to show charity in every way.
Let me tell you something about my previous life. Because of my age, I have had a lot of social experience. I recently read that previous romantic experience is a "green light" when you meet a new partner because you know that they have learned from what happened. I hope you think this is a true statement.
To explain some of the references, remember these points:
- I went to college at Harvard in Boston.
- I went to graduate school at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, about 500 km west of Boston.
- During my graduate school, the Vietnam War was going on and I had to leave school for 3 years. During that time I lived and worked in California.
- I went back to Cornell for two more years and got my Ph.D.
- I went back to California and was a professor and researcher for about 5 years.
- I went to New Jersey and was a researcher for about 7 years. During this time, I lived very close to New York City.
- I moved back to California in 1986 and have stayed here ever since.
- I retired in 2021 after 53+ years of work as a computer scientist.
To get the suspense out of the way, I have been married four times. Let me say that I always wanted to find a woman for my whole life. I never wanted to have many relationships. But it seems to have worked out that way. If I have not been able to have just one relationship, that may be my fault rather than that of the women I have known. After you read the rest of this, you can decide for yourself.
When I was young, I did what most young people do. I had many girlfriends, some serious and some not so much. When I went to college, I did not have so many girlfriends, but I dated women whom I met in college and whom I met in Boston. It was a way to learn about what I wanted to find in a partner.
In the summer before my last year in college, I lived in Boston while I worked on a summer job. There was a woman I dated sometimes and one night she brought along a friend of hers named Joan to have a double date with a friend of mine. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Then a few weeks later, the woman I was dating took me to a school party. The same girl (Joan) was there. This time I talked to her a lot. She gave me her phone number.
A few weeks later, my school started and I called Joan and invited her over for a nice Sunday lunch at school. She came and we connected. There is actually a long story about this, but it is better told in person. From then on, we never dated anybody else. We became lovers that first Sunday and spent all our free time together. Whenever we could, we found ways to have free afternoons and evenings with each other.
Joan and I were really in love.
At the end of my last year in college, I decided to go to Cornell — about 500 km from Boston — for graduate school. We did not know what to do about this because she would have to stay in college in Boston and live with her parents. We did not plan to get married and decided we would find a way to visit one another. But we could spend the summer together. However, her parents found out we were lovers and, in a very old-fashioned way, threw her out of their house. We decided to get married and did so in the summer of 1967.
Off we went to Cornell. I was a poor graduate student and Joan worked to help support us. During this time, the Vietnam War was going on and I was drafted into the US Army. But I managed to get a job in California and stayed out of the army. She came with me and finished her college. In 1972, we went back to Cornell so that I could finish my Ph.D. She worked again, but we were not quite as poor this time.
In 1974, we moved back to California so that I could teach at the University of California, Davis, and work in the same laboratory as before. Joan went to law school and became a lawyer. We had a lot of friends and were a nice young couple.
However, by 1979, we had both grown up a lot. Unfortunately, we had not grown in the same direction, but rather we had grown apart. We still liked one another, but we were no longer in the passionate love that we had first had. We separated and I moved to New Jersey in the fall of 1979 while Joan stayed in California. We were calmly divorced by 1981.
This may be a hard part for you to understand. Joan and I have stayed friends. After we divorced, she met a somewhat older man whom she loved a lot. He died suddenly about 25 years ago. My parents really liked Joan; my mother said that she was the daughter they never had. As the years have gone on, Joan has became closer and closer to my parents. After my father died, she has spent lots of time with my mother. But I never saw Joan except when we both visited my mother. Joan moved to New Jersey in about 2015 (4,500 km away). It is like having a sister who is half a world away but who will help you when you need it.
After I moved to New Jersey in 1979, I dated many women, none very seriously. I was always trying to find somebody permanent, but the right woman didn’t seem to be there. I bought a house and for a while, a woman I dated moved in with me. But she correctly decided that I would not be a good husband for her and moved out within a year. We stayed friends, but I lost track of her soon after. That is the fifth relationship I mentioned back at the beginning.
In 1984, I met my second wife in New York City (not far from where I lived). She had married young and had been widowed young and left with a boy (7) and a girl (6). All of a sudden, I fell in love with a family. We were married in December 1984 and lived in New Jersey for about a year and a half. Then I got a good job offer in California and we moved out here. Right after we came in 1986, my older son Charles was born in 1987. For another year or so, we had a good enough marriage. But then the problems began. We separated in 1990 and were divorced by 1992 (divorce when there are children can take a long time in California).
What were the problems? It is fairly simple. I saw her and her family and realized I wanted to be a father and have children. What I didn’t see was that she had never grown up beyond a teenager. Although she had gone to a good college and was a lawyer, she couldn’t understand why everything couldn’t be exactly the way she wanted it to be. This meant that she was not a reliable mother or wife. I was very sad about this because it meant our family was broken. We were divorced by the time Charles was about 6. Fortunately, Charles was able to live with me half the time until he went off to college and he spent all his college vacations with me.
Right after Charles left high school, she moved to North Carolina. I have only seen her a few times since: at Charles’s college graduation and again around Charles’ wedding. She gave me a hard lesson about what kind of woman to avoid.
Now I was alone again here in California. I dated without much interest for a while. Then I met a woman right here in Palo Alto. Not long after we started dating, we realized that we really liked each other. Also, she had a daughter who was exactly one day older than Charles. So we had a kind of instant family with instant almost-twins. In 1993, she moved into my house with her daughter. We were married in June, 1994. For a while, everything seemed OK.
But a year or two later, her ex-husband moved back to California and started to take her daughter away. Unfortunately, her daughter decided that she wanted to live with her father more than with her mother (that was, I think, a bad decision, particularly for a girl who was not yet a teenager). But there was no arguing with the feelings.
This was such a big problem for my wife that she no longer had any love for me; her worry for her child was too great. I made a mistake and could not see this soon enough. I also could not find any way to help her or help us stay together. Suddenly she asked for a divorce and it was over by 1997. Soon she moved to Washington DC and I have not heard from her since. I do regret this failure a lot because it seemed to me that she was an intelligent, attractive, and warm woman. I still think that there must have been something I could have done, but I do not know what it could have been.
Now to my last marriage. Once again I was single in Palo Alto. This was in 1997 when the internet agencies were just beginning. I looked at some of them and I ran across a woman on a tiny website. She seemed attractive and I sent her an email. But nothing happened.
In the meantime, I visited Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Tashkent and still found nobody. But then in 1999, that woman wrote an email back out of the blue. We began corresponding and I went to visit her in Kiev (she comes from a small town near Sumy). When we met, she seemed quite nice and she was pretty. She was quite a bit younger than me, but that didn’t seem to concern her. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I came back to the US. But she was sure and asked me if we could be together. I thought about it and decided it was OK. Soon she had her visa. We were married in 2000.
She wanted to have a child. In 2002, Matthew was born. He seemed like a completely normal baby and was never really sick or otherwise a problem. As he began to grow, Matthew showed some very difficult emotional problems although his intelligence is just fine. He was only diagnosed in 2013 with a neurological problem that he now can control with medication. [I will tell you more about this later.]
By 2004, things were starting to go bad. By the fall of 2006, she was arrested for spousal abuse (she scratched me during a fight and the police in Palo Alto automatically arrest somebody when there is an injury with visible blood). I arranged with the courts to drop the charges when she agreed to go to marital counseling. Even after a year or two of counseling, she could never find a way to work harder on the marriage. By about 2008, we had stopped being lovers.
I was still very worried about Matthew. It was very hard taking care of him because we did not know what was wrong. I tried to keep our family together and cooperate enough with her to make a good home for Matthew. As time went on, I realized that the trouble between the two of us was making life harder for Matthew. Also, her problems caused her to impede care for Matthew; she had gotten him thrown out of one school, for example, that would have been good for him and had antagonized every school official we have had to deal with.
In 2013, I decided that we had to divorce and live separately. I got all the paperwork in order before I filed. We went to court in November 2013 and were separated (although she did not move out of the house for a few months — that was a very hard time). Fortunately, just before I filed for divorce, we got Matthew’s diagnosis with new medications. That made it much easier for him to live with the situation.
When I filed for divorce, I asked for Matthew to be with me full time. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often in California. There are also complicated rules for dividing property. After 3 years of legal wrangling, the details were settled. Matthew lived with each of us 50% of the time — one week with me and one week with her. Unfortunately, we had to make joint decisions about things like his education, but that ended (mostly) in June 2020 when he became 18. I never see Matthew’s mother now and do not talk to her. If we have to communicate, it is only through brief emails.
Why was she such a bad wife even though she seemed (on first sight) like a nice woman. It is because of three things. First, she is very paranoid about other people. Second, she has no self-confidence. And third and most important, she has no empathy for other people. Because she cannot understand how other people feel, she cannot keep from hurting them. And because she gets angry at almost everything (that is the paranoia), she is always angry at somebody. I have literally had to restrain her from hitting a clerk who made a mistake, for example.
She had these problems when I first met her. But I didn’t recognize them. I always think the best of people, so I thought it was just her nervousness about moving far away from her home. As the years have gone on, she has gotten worse and worse. For the last several years of our marriage, she would often come to me and yell at me for an hour or more at a time. I could not leave her nor stop her because that would mean I was leaving Matthew alone with her. Sometimes she yelled like this at Matthew when he was unable to control his own behavior. This was even worse because he was still a child. I did not even like to come home after work because it was like coming home to a nest of poisonous snakes.
For example, when my father died, I did not invite her to the funeral because she is so mean; I did not want her to be around my family even if they thought it was a little odd. She wrote me emails in which she cursed him even after he died.
I cannot describe how awful this has been. If there had been no Matthew, our marriage would have been over within 2 or 3 years of when it started. But I had to protect him. Even now, when he is with her, I worry about him.
She also taught me a very hard lesson. And I do not want relive any of that trouble.
I have always been serious in my marriages. I have not been unfaithful and I have tried to make each marriage work. My choices may not have been perfect, but I never tried to hurt anyone. Probably this is not the nicest history possible. But it is a human history. Bitter for me, but real. And I do have two terrific sons. Perhaps that is better than I could have expected.
After you read this, you may well wonder why I am even looking for another woman. It is simple — I am alone and lonely. I miss the companionship, the love, and — not surprisingly — the physical affection and the sexual pleasure of a relationship. Even though I have had these 5 relationships, I am a one-woman man and I definitely want to find just one woman for my life. I have been looking for almost seven years and, if the search is not successful soon, I will probably live the rest of my life alone.
You may want to know what I value in a woman. These are not requirements or part of a dating profile.
1. Good will and good nature.
2. Empathy and sympathy. Kind and forgiving.
3. Calmness, thoughtfulness, reflects on the world and on herself.
4. Honesty and trustworthiness.
5. Reliability
6. Affection and ability to love both as a friend and erotically.
7. Good humor and laughter.
8. Intelligence.
9. Reasonable interest in matters intellectual and cultural.
10. Substantial femininity.
11. Significant sexuality and erotic enjoyment.
12. Some enjoyment of glamour and overt sexuality in herself.
13. Aroma (which carries biological markers of all sorts).
14. Youth or the characteristics of it.
15. Face.
16. Curves, good body, nice skin, nice hair. All the common elements of beauty.
The list emphasizes character, personality, intelligence, and culture or education over beauty. On the other hand, I expect that my partner and I will have a complete and absolutely fulfilling romantic and sexual life together. Bluntly, that requires that we each find the other attractive and more desirable than any other partner. Sex is definitely part of the equation. Besides, in spite of the envy of those who are neither, there is no reason why you cannot not be both beautiful and brainy.
Now imagine that there are three ways we can interact: erotically, with emotional intimacy, and with trust in each other. When we are at the center of these circles so that we are happy together as lovers, so that we are emotionally open with each other, and so that we trust one another, then we can fall in love and stay in love forever.
One word about age. I am not specifically looking for a woman who is younger than I am. But it is my experience that most of the women I can find are somewhat to quite a lot younger than me. As I expect that, in the first place, we will treat each other with respect and honor as friends and human beings, that difference may not be as important as it seems on the surface.
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