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...

Well, tonight was my first date in almost a year. For some reason, that seems shocking to me even though I've spent extensive stretches of my life not dating. As the minutes ticked closer today, I felt the nerves getting worse. I felt "out of practice" on this whole first-date thing. I went on them at least once a month when I was on Match, and that kind of frequency can be beneficial. Or jading. Your choice. It was just coffee. No pressure, we agreed. We carved out about an hour out of our busy schedules to just sit and chat. Become friends. See if the chemistry that seemed to be there in the text messages and phone conversations actually carried over to real life. So of course that explains why I was so numbingly nervous. *eye roll* This afternoon while getting ready, I probably changed my clothes close to a dozen times. I knew what jeans I was going to wear, but jeans are such a blank canvas. It was just coffee. But he was coming from work, from Corporate America...

We're nearing the final countdown. In less than 2 days, I'll be having coffee with Mr. E. I'll be honest, I'm getting increasingly excited for this date. It will only be about an hour long; he can't get there until 5:30 (unless he slips out of work early) and I have to leave for my own work at 6:30. So far, the connection has been good. First, the texting. Then last night, a 45 minute phone call - not bad for a first conversation, even if it didn't end until 11:30, which both of us agreed tonight was a bit too late. Yes, tonight. I walked in the door at 7:35, a little later than usual for a Tuesday, clutching my McDonald's take-out because I was too tired to cook. I was ready to change from workout leggings into sweats and settle down at my home office desk to work further on a freelance project. Then my phone rang. An hour and a half later - you read that correctly, 90 whole minutes later - we hung up. We were both that much more relaxed and "our...

Things are moving along just nicely with the newest gentleman. At the conclusion of my last post, he had texted - as promised - and said he'd text later. He did, and we once again texted the evening away. We also set up a coffee date, after much schedule wrangling. We found an hour or so on Thursday to meet at a Starbucks. Not as much time as either of us said we wanted, but a little time was better than no time, we agreed. As we said goodnight, he said he would be in touch "very soon." So far, I've left initializing contact completely up to him. But if you're a regular reader, you know just how humorously hard that is for me. Last night, dealing with a round of laryngitis, I was "sitting out" in rehearsal - listening, marking my score, etc. while not singing. And oftentimes, bored out of my mind. So of course I texted him. It's the first time I've reached out, and I was rewarded by a response. It wasn't long into the conversation, though...

This first went up as a "quick post" to satisfy the curiosity of my recent Facebook status that let drop I was "texting with a potential date," which brought on questions of, "Does this mean the blog is back up?" Now that I have a little more time, I've come back to expand upon it. First, a brief review of the status of the last round of twitterpated drama. There were three guys. Gentleman #1 got married over Thanksgiving weekend. Most of our mutual friends said, "I didn't even know he was dating anyone!" Gentleman #2 and I are still comfortably friendzoned, and in spite of the firm beliefs of my ex who thinks this guy & I have some sort of sordid sexual history that I refuse to admit, we probably always will be just friends. And Gentleman #3... just, no. Now for our newest entry, Mr. E. This is another set-up by a friend, although this time around the friend knows at least one of us pretty well. (If you remember from the disastro...