Owing to pressing reasons best left undiscussed, I have been industriously and somewhat aggressively been attempting to date; the key word here being “attempting.” In particular, I’ve been, despite past disappointments, trying my hand at online dating, which has been going smashingly in the same way that a wino successfully drops an empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose on the sidewalk outside your bedroom window at oh-dark-thirty in the morning. Nonetheless, I have at least received a small and in fact nearly fractional number of responses, and of those which contain something that has a grammatical structure that can be parsed into recognizable English there is one that seems, or rather seemed, like a possible and perhaps even probable potential for pursuit. However, after nearly three weeks, six exchanges of e-mail messages, and there explicit suggestions to meet for coffee, drinks, or a light meal, I have yet to receive a positive response to said offers. (Twice she has claimed to be “too busy” for even a short meetup, and once she just flat out ignored the suggestion.) I understand being busy–right now at work I’m busier than a one-armed man in a wrongful murder plot–but the entire point of having a profile on a dating site and responding to messages is, at least in my skewed view of the societal macrocosm, is to actually meet someone; if I wanted someone to exchange e-mail with I’d just start another bizarre and tangential e-mail chain that my friends and co-workers enjoy so much.
Mind you, I’m not even all that enthralled with the woman in question; she’s basically at the bottom tier of women I sent messages to, and I doubt we have enough in common to fill an entire evening of conversation. I basically view this as a practice date, or the off-chance that she’ll turn out to be a far more interesting person than she appears in her profile. If she just wasn’t that interested in meeting me, or just blew me off, I wouldn’t be heartbroken enough to waste a sip of cheap whiskey on her. But she keeps responding and at surprising (some would say excessive) length, albeit without any apparent intention of actually meeting. I know I can be a bit abrupt when it comes to social interaction, but it still seems to me that this amount of correspondence is excessive for the intended purpose, and this comes from the guy who writes three page monologues on why Lloyd Dobler is a vastly superior character to that toad-licking punk Ferris Bueller.
So how long is this sort of thing supposed to go on? Is this typical? Am I just monumentally impatient? Can or should I just cut my losses at this point, or is there some merit in continuing this electronic conversation with someone who in whom I’m only marginally interested?
Stranger