nm
Or said: "Great, where are you taking me? "
Possibly, but it wasn’t going to happen as she had a 14 year old daughter at home alone.
This seems to really be bothering me since I am up at 3 AM, eating cereal, and re-reading this thread.
Only four more days of work and then I am off for two weeks. I have never needed a vacation more than now.
I just decided that I am going to write the girl who kissed me and went silent a week or so later and ask her what the heck happened. I may change my mind after a few hours of sleep, but right now it seems like the right thing to do.
People are weird. Life’s not like you exect, or even what you have experienced already. Nothing makes any sense. We all make arbitrary decisions for arbitrary reasons at arbitrary times. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason. Sure, 80% of the time you can figure out the logic, but that other 20% of the time is a lot of situations, moments, events that are going to bring about weird stuff with no obvious motivations.
So what I’m saying is, don’t worry too much but trust your instincts. Take some risks but don’t be reckless. Have as much fun as you can, but be considerate. And, above all, don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about.
So, how you doing?
Lamar, I don’t think you started this thread to open one of our regular debates about online dating, so I’ll only make two observations FWIW, about online dating and you:
- You’ve been getting terrible ROI
- Your feelings are hurt. Relationships, not just in full bloom but when planting their seeds, are supposed to feel good.
Get away from online dating, or at least buy an egg time and when the sand runs out log off. Join an Illuminated Manuscript meetup, or a hiking group, or a volunteer group.
You’ll see a lot of really attractive women there. Don’t get distracted by that, because a significant potion of the well-put-together, non-overweight middle class women who go to these things are shopping for their male model CEO. They’ll instantly run a rough Dun and Bradstreet on all the guys and determine which of them has a cute ass at the same time you’re scoping out who are the pretty women in the room, and write you off as a corpse before you ever screw up the courage to start talking to them.
Leave them to the PUAs and just enjoy the hike or food bank shelf-stocking or whatever, offer goodwill to everyone present, and a nice woman will most likely screw up the courage and start talking to you.
Don’t play any strategies (and I’m sure not offering you one) but do this: offer to be Facebook friends as soon as possible. These women don’t know you and middle-age people are just as wary as they are lonely, maybe even more. If they look at your FB page, they can get a better idea of you from a safe distance, see that you have other woman friends and known ties to the community and are not a flight risk, and they’ll be more likely to hit the message button.
This happens sometimes, particularly with online dating. As someone upthread mentioned, though it’s not a term I’d known before, this is ghosting. Maybe she was interested in taking it further, indicated by the kiss, but felt she got mixed signals. Maybe she wanted to go farther than just a passionate kiss that night, then felt that since you didn’t initiate the next step then you weren’t interested. Or maybe she was interested in going on another date but didn’t feel like you were interested enough, which can happen if you’re making plans but maybe it’s not until the weekend. Or maybe she was really interested and the more she got in her head about it, she lost interest. Or maybe she met someone else that she was more interested in.
The thing is, you’ll never know, and it’s frustrating as hell when you interpret all the signals that things went well and you’re really looking forward to seeing her again, and she just disappears. Ultimately, all you can take from it is that it didn’t work out. I would suggest not putting to much effort into trying to figure out what went wrong between the kiss and her disappearing because there just isn’t a way to know and anything beyond taking it as rejection is just going to be speculation.
I had something similar happen to me earlier this year. There was someone I’d met online and was really interested in and she just disappeared. She hit me up again a few months later, apologized, we set up a date, she canceled last minute and then vanished again. No big deal, it seemed a little odd, but no real investment. Fast-forward a couple years, and she hits me up out of the blue. Odd, but I didn’t have a grudge and figured there was nothing to lose, so why not. We have a fun conversation, and she claims she’d been in a bad spot and had also been talking to me and another guy, and ended up choosing him, and it didn’t go well and then regretted it but had didn’t actually have the courage to hit me up again until then. So, what the heck, nothing to lose, we have a date, it actually went quite well, but ultimately there was a deal-breaker in there for me, and I think we chatted a couple times after that, but that was pretty much that.
Anyway, I’d be inclined to think that’s probably likely the case whenever something like this happens. She’d rejected you before and either realized that reasoning was silly or regretted it, especially if it was in favor of some other guy and it didn’t work out. In my case, I accepted it as much out of curiosity as anything, but honestly, chances are, if you were rejected before, there’s not much chance of it being too much better on a second round. Either way, take it however you see it.
And as dating seems to go in general, I feel like in some ways it’s easier, but in many ways it’s harder today too, particularly with online dating. And if you’ve been married and divorced and dated more before online dating became as popular as it is, it could be difficult. Consider, in the past, you’d meet a handful of people, they may or may not be great matches, but unless you’re a casanova, and with limited options, you’re going to pick a decent match and work with it. With online dating, it seems like there’s SO many more options. Literally, with a given app I can browse through dozens of women I’ve never seen before a day, many of them aren’t interested or ultimately not someone I’d be interested either or they’re dormant or fake or scammers or whatever, but the point is everyone seems to feel like they have so many more options and they end up being so much pickier. I imagine this can particularly be true for moderately or more attractive women, as I understand they can get inundated with messages from men. I think it creates a skewed perspective of the dating pool and leads to some unusual behavior.
Up until 3am eating cereal and going over it is not conducive to good decisionmaking in my experience, some sleep should help.
Maybe you should first write down your thoughts and illuminate them 
(holy crap really? damn I should have bought lottery tickets)
For the record, I wasn’t up until 3 AM. I went to sleep at a normal hour, but woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.
What I did after I last posted (here) around 3 I am not proud of. This should be an interesting next 24-48 hours. Did I say I needed a vacation?
Jesus, I can be a passive-aggressive asshole when I feel pushed into a corner.
Did I say I needed a vacation?
Lamar,
I’ve been in a very similar boat as you. 11 years married (not sneak-bragging, I promise! LOL!), and I’ve been divorced for past four years. I’ve dated extensively over this time, and I met almost all of those women online. I really think it’s the best way to meet people, but it obviously has its downfalls.
Its biggest downfall is ironically its biggest appeal: the sheer number of people you can interact with in a short amount of time. Obviously it’s a great advantage: you can learn about, chat with, and even have conversations with many women and choose which ones interest you. Of course, they can do the same thing.
In some cases these women may just be total flakes and there’s no real justification for seemingly being so into you one night, and then totally “ghosting” you. But I believe that in the majority of the cases they are probably hedging their bets. Rather than tell you that they (may) like someone else better, they think it’s better to say nothing, and then if the other option(s) do (es) not materialize, they come back to you (e.g., the six month example discussed above).
This is just the nature of the “game,” and I know it’s easier said than done, but you just can’t let it get you down. You have to keep “playing” and try to enjoy it as much as you can.
In my case, I went through it several times over the past four years. Now I’ve been with someone for 5.5 months–we hit it off instantly and so far no flaking by either of us. Again, I promise, no sneak-bragging. I feel really good about where it might go. But who really knows?
F
When a telemarketer calls I look at the caller id and don’t take the call. It would be nicer of me to pick up and explain that I am not interested in sending money but that would be awkward for me. So I just pretend to not be home.
These women are not interested in dating you, probably because they met someone else and are not picking up the phone to save themselves an awkward conversation. It is rude but the conversation would be awkward for you as well.
Take a vacation and head to Thailand. You can date amazingly looking women with little to no effort.
I did take the vacation. As of noon, I am off until the 28th. Jesus, I was headed toward a mental heath breakdown.
I didn’t call the woman who “ghosted” me back. Great term BTW, I never knew such a thing existed.
I don’t think I will go to Thailand, although the idea is intriguing. I have family out that way. Not in Thailand, but out that way.
P.S. You guys have been helpful, and nice. I thought after I posted that I was going to get pummeled.
Thank you.
Happy Holidays.
LM
Gosh. Three posts in a row. I think that may be a record for me.
I just wanted to let people know that I am OK. At 12:00 on the nose I unplugged my work phone (I have a home office) and by 12:02 I was walking to the gym. I worked out for an hour and a half and feel great.
There is a chance though that I may get completely shitty-faced tonight. I haven’t done that in a really long time. I have two weeks to work it off.
Dating - online or IRL - in the modern world really sucks. I did the rounds for 4 years, diligently working at it as though I were looking for a new job (which was probably my first mistake). It’s nothing like the dating I did as a teenager and I felt totally awkward and unprepared. I had no idea how to work the system, I didn’t even realize it was a system to be worked. I suffered through blind dates, online dates, etc. and while I had some pleasant evenings and some nice conversations, there was never a real spark. I wasn’t getting anywhere and it was takig a huge toll on my self-esteem, so I gave myself permission to give up. I pulled all my profiles, closed the email I was using, even changed my phone number.
Wow - huge relief.
I still hope that I will meet someone compatible somewhere along the line, but the structured world of dating just wasn’t for me.
Not saying that this is the right advice for you, too, but don’t get down on yourself because it hasn’t been working so well for you. It is a whole lot harder than it looks.
Serious question since I’m married and ignorant of the modern dating scene. Why use dating sites and not try finding someone from a shared activity? And is there an age difference between you and the folks you meet from the sites?
I travel a lot for work which makes it hard for me to participate in structured activities.
Almost all of the women I have dated are within 5 years of my age. I’m not looking for 26 year old yoga instructors (though I wouldn’t turn them down.) :o
I did have a good friend tell me once, though, that “Have you ever noticed that all your female friends on Facebook are obscenely hot?” I have to admit that it is true, but most are married and many to some of my best friends.