This weekend, apparently. After several months of no luck at all with women, and a subsequent shattershot approach to online dating (four or five e-mail, phone, texting “relationships” active at all times, plus four or five women whom I’ve already gone out with recently on first- and second-dates with), I’ve hit the dating jackpot in the past day or so:
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Thursday night, I meet a woman (from one of the sites) for a drink. We’d been flirting online, and she seemed unusually enthusiastic about the pics I’d posted. Me not so much, since she had posted a single pic that barely showed her face. Turned out she was pretty good-looking, and when we went up to the bar to fetch our second round of drinks, she says to me, “I think I’m going to have to kiss you.” I go, “Maybe it’s a little soon?” and she looks hurt so when we get back to our table, I plant one on her before she sits down, and then later when we leave the restaurant, there is another hour or so of further kissing in her car, the space limitations of which prevent much more from happening, but she wants to see me again “very soon” in more spacious and private surroundings. Next morning she texts me a dozen times, trying to arrange a rendezvous, but I persuade her that her job, my job, the thirty miles between her location and mine, traffic jams, etc. stand in the way. So we’re on to get together this weekend.
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Friday night (last night) I get a call from another of my dating-site correspondents, a rather strange one in that we had actually dated ten years or so ago, and I’d contacted her because I didn’t recognize her from her pics (she’d gone from a long-haired blonde to a close-cropped brunette). She was under the (partly correct) assumption that we had broken up because she’d pissed me off, and I assured her that bygones were bygones. She said “Let’s meet sometime,” and Friday night was “sometime.” She asked if she could drop by for a drink, so I thought “What harm could be in one drink?”–when she got here she started telling me how damned attractive I had gotten (I’ve lost 50 pounds in the last year or so) and starting in again telling me how sorry she was for pissing me off and how she’d like to try again, so we indulged ourselves, and parted at 2 AM.
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This was all happening in the context of another woman whom I’d gone out with on two dates (dinner date and theater date) before, whom I liked a lot, telling me that she was interested in me but needed a little time to decide how serious she wanted to be. Usually, this kind of talk bodes ill, prefacing a decision not to get more serious with me, but no, on friday afternoon, she phoned, and started pressing me to see her again soon, after a week of “thinking it over.” She sounded like she had decided to get serious with me, the difference being that now I had this woman from Thursday night (and would very soon have this other woman from Friday night) expressing fairly urgent and explicit desires to start some heavy-duty romantic stuff with me.
But wait, it gets worse–earlier this week, I heard from
- the woman I had yearned for and dated the last few months of 2009 who kept breaking up with me and then starting up with me and breaking up again. (I’ve written some previous posts about how heartwretching it was for me to endure this, as I was really crazy about her.) We’d kept in touch since the last breakup (in January) and I 'd been having little luck dating on-line since January, but a few days ago she said she “was reconsidering our breakup,” and she missed me and was thinking she’d made a terrible mistake. I told her I didn’t want to go through another breakup with her and her commitment issues, and she agreed–she said she would give it some more thought, and decide whether she could or couldn’t make a real commitment this time. We’ve agreed that certain tangible signs of real commitment needed to be there this time–her being willing to spend whole weekends with me, her introducing me to her family and friends as her new boyfriend, and most of all her willingness to turn down invitations from other guys to go out on dates while dating me–she’d kept that option open (didn’t act on it, tho) while we were dating, and I foolishly put up with it. I thought I was being cool and open-minded, but it made me into a gibbering ball of jealousy and insecurity. So I told her, “Sure, think it over, and if you’re ready to commit, you know where to find me.”
So within the past few days, I’ve gone from a guy who has having a very hard time getting women to express any interest all (my best case being woman #3, who needed time to decide if she wanted to get serious) to a guy who now has four women expressing some advanced level of interest–my last two night’s dates, who are plainly available right now, and these two (somewhat hotter) women who have stepped up their thinking about getting romantically involved with me.
The problem, if this IS a problem, is that I don’t really enjoy being a player, and juggling women, or even in deceiving women, however mildly. I’m looking to get into a nice, stable monogamous relationship, and any of these fine, attractive, intelligent women would do perfectly. I would be jazzed if only one of these women had earlier taken the position that she’s taking now, but now I’m frazzled with the array of options before me.
My approach was a kind of “market” approach up until this point: to date as many women as I could keep straight, and hope that one of them turned out to be attractive and interested in me, and I’d been fairly self-critical about my failure recently to get one woman interested (which self-criticism has motivated my recent weight-loss, so it’s not a bad thing in itself.) But now the “market” is behaving irrationally and I find myself with a bewildering set of options. I’d gotten so accustomed to the “Market” telling me “Sorry, I don’t think we make a good couple,” “Sorry, no chemistry,” “Sorry, no spark. Good luck searching,” “Sorry, I’ve decided to go back to my ex-,” etc. that I’m really puzzled by my sudden good fortune. At least I knew what I needed to do when I was a coldie: keep trying. But now that I’ve suddenly burst into flame, I’ve no idea what I need to do.
