OK, my dear fellow Dopers, please help me, as I’m falling back into my original neuroses. Bad Hat, as much as you say we should enjoy the journey as well as the destination (and as you also mentioned, I’m not entirely sure where the journey will lead; if you have that kind of self-confidence, then you’re definitely a step ahead of me!), I’m having a hard time with it. Maybe it’s because my last serious journey was so darn compressed that there was no time to obsess over it…but those darn insecurities are popping up again.
So Dude #2 mentioned a play for later this week, but I haven’t heard from him yet, although he mentioned he’d e-mail me yesterday. Since he starts and ends work later than me by several hours, and since I was at class rather than at home last night (drooling over my guitar teacher, of course, not that that’s relevant for these purposes), I was hoping there would be a note in my inbox this morning, but alas, there wasn’t. Maybe this means something, and maybe I shouldn’t read too much into it. That, coupled with the heretofore complete lack of smoochage, are making me feel once again like my old insecure, neurotic, high-school-social-reject self, which I hate and was hoping to have left far behind by this point in my life (and which I didn’t felt like at all while I was with him).
Maybe I just need to come up with more stuff to do that a) takes place at night, and b) unlike biking, or even eating dinner across a large wooden restaurant table, involves scootching into close physical proximity. Maybe Ravinia or Grant Park…plus, keep in mind we’ve never gone out on a night where we both didn’t have to work the next day. Maybe that’s it. Other ideas are welcome. Am I going to have to a) call him on it, or b) beat him over the head with a baseball bat?
Plus, I don’t want to seem overly frantic about wanting to set up the plans, but I do have a couple of commitments for later in the week and the weekend, and would like some reassurance that he does actually still want to get together again…I forwarded all the relevant info to another guy friend, and this was his take on it. So who concurs, who doesn’t, and why or why not? I was thinking of the breezy e-mail approach toward the end of the workday today if I haven’t heard anything by then…
“Hm. Tricky question. Well, here’s my initial take:
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Day dates tend to fall into the category of “date lite.” So they don’t tend to be great opportunities for stoking the flames.
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School night dates also tend to be date lite, but not as much as category 1. So I think your thought re: dates on a night when neither of you has obligations the next morning
has merit. -
Some guys take a while to make the move, even if they really want to. It’s all a matter of reading body language, which is not an exact science. So, while it is easy to say “oh I would have made a move by now”, it’s harder to say if there was something in your body language that may have been sending the wrong signal. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times my arm has gone dead from resting it on the back of my date’s seat in a movie theater about one molecule away from actually touching her.
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There is nothing wrong with making the first move. Go in for a smooch. If he’s interested, he won’t pull away.
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A date that has cuddling opportunities would provide a better forum for a reasoned analysis if you’re not going to go all out and invite him to come over some night to help you cook dinner. Perhaps a movie in the park? Grant Park runs theirs on Tuesday. Tonight is the Marx Brothers’ “Horse Feathers”, and the next two weeks (rounding out the series for the summer) are “Vertigo” and “West Side Story.” Again, see point 4. If you do something basic like hold his hand or snuggle in, he should take the bait.
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As far as the play is concerned, you should be concerned a little bit at this point if he hasn’t emailed you about the play yet because the amount of “later this week” is shrinking. A brief, breezy email asking about it is enough. Something like “so what’s this play you were so hyped up about?”
Hope that helps.”
Your well-reasoned feedback will be highly appreciated. I feel like I’m back in seventh grade.
Sincerely,
Eva Luna
P.S. Bad Hat, I hear the Wilco film is really cool…I recently fixed up the aforementioned guy friend, and he took her to see it a couple of weeks ago on a second date, and they are currently planning to go away together over Labor Day weekend (which is not at all his usual M.O., BTW; he’s generally much more conservative). Hope your evening works out just as swimmingly.
