I have a protocol for checking out potential online dates. Sometimes before the first date. Definitely before a second date. At the bare minimum I check civil court records for divorce and spousal abuse incidents (you don’t want to know how many of the latter I’ve discovered.) I check criminal records. I see if Google has any news stories mentioning them. Yesterday I came across a scary red flag I had not considered.

I told you my POF account was hacked on Valentine’s Day. There went one of my most prolific sources of possible dates. It also had been my best source of stories for this blog. By far. So, I’m taking a break from POF and I am now on a mission to find some of the lesser known sites to use in my online dating quest. There are some real unique ones out there. More about that later. Yesterday, I found Positive Singles. It’s a dating site for people who are infected with herpes, Hep-C and other similar STDs. What a great service for singles who might be considered “undateable.” So I signed up to take a look. The same assortment of men were on the site. There was a bit of a higher quality on PS — fewer face tattoos, more gainfully employed. And then I saw THE ONE. Good looking, great sense of humor, likes similar to mine. And he was THE ONE I had talked to on POF a few weeks ago.

So, maybe he’s doing the same research that I am, (I tried to think positive thoughts about this.) Poor guy, maybe he contracted herpes, as his profile said, in the 3 weeks since we last talked. Or there’s that other possibility…

I couldn’t help but wonder how many other men I had gone out with that were on Positive Singles? If so, would they have told me they had a communicable disease before anything intimate happened between us? Had anything worse happened? No not going to think about that. But I have to. Two words: safe sex. Two more words: be careful. And two more words: find out.