Online Dating at 36 - The Good, the Bad, & WTH?

It has now been a full week since I reached out to the ex, the text message conversation where I learned he no longer had my number. Until I'd texted him, that is. The week that followed was full of texting and a few brief Google chats, and with one main theme running throughout: sex. Oh sure, there'd be other, much more innocuous texts and messages, but sex always came up at some point. Now that I'm being more and more open with selected friends about the situation, there has been more discussion about what may be going on. Men are sexual creatures, and some have an even bigger sex drive than others. This is not news. Even a year or more ago on this blog, I wrote about how men need sex to feel emotionally intimate, while women need emotional intimacy to feel comfortable enough to have sex, all based on some very interesting reading I had done. It's all part of our yin-yang pairing, the "women are from venus, men are from mars" stuff. The discussions with

It has been quite the week. It is a lovely, perhaps slightly cool, Friday evening. I am sitting out on my balcony enjoying a screwdriver and doing what I do best in situations like this: blogging. Processing. Thinking. And if I hadn't used up what little vodka I had in the house, probably getting buzzed, too. This week has been about the ex. Which one? The most recent one, the one from a year ago, the one who, out of the blue, shattered my heart much more than I thought he could. Ever since that fateful text message, we've remained friends. Slightly ostracized at times, perhaps, but still friends. About once every 6 weeks or so, there'd be a brief text message exchange or a short Google chat conversation. (Which, incidentally, reminded me of yeeeeears ago and using AIM for similar purposes. What goes around, comes around, I suppose.) Over the past couple of weeks, I'd been thinking about him much more than normal. Ever since one of my many revelations about us post-

After me spending about 48 hours analyzing and reviewing the date and wondering why he hadn't yet called, he called. Sure, there were plenty of reasons for the delay in calling.  We chatted for 35 minutes. Turns out, the reason he called was the reason I was dreading. He really enjoyed talking and meeting me. He had a great time. But, the spark wasn't there for him. I understood. I was thankful he actually called to say that to me, rather than texting, or worse yet, just disappearing.  He even said that; after he himself going through Match and numerous women who just disappeared, he swore to never do that to another person. Doesn't make it any easier. Right now, my self-esteem, which is often low, is non-existent. I'm not saying that, fishing for an outpouring of love and warm fuzzies. It's just where my brain is right now, not to mention my heart. If there's a silver lining, situations like this usually cause my appetite to pull a Houdini. Maybe anot