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

Ever since we connected, Bachelor #4, D, and I have had amazing communication. We've had phone calls that have lasted for hours. Our first date went 6 hours - a very, very easy and comfortable 6 hours. Our second "official" date was last night, another easy 6 hours, but in between, on Monday, we also got together and just hung out and enjoyed each other's company for about 4 hours. When not around each other, we're texting, thinking of each other. Poems and terms of endearment and sweet messages are flying back and forth. But last night, things changed. We had a serious adult conversation. Now, it isn't that our other conversations have been flippant or fluffy, but this was a deep one. One that was not easy, because it was us stepping back from the rose-colored glasses and trying to determine what our future should really look like. Was it a future together, or not? Some of you may be thinking it's much too early for that conversation. We've only k...

Once again, I've been handed a situation I really don't quite know how to handle. Yesterday afternoon, I went to hear several of my friends in a concert. After the concert, I was invited and encouraged to join them for drinks and dinner, and of course I accepted. The table I was at had friends from Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire -- how often are all of us in the same room? I had been texting with D and told him that when I got home I would call. He suggested he should come over to my place. Currently, my place looks like a platoon of 3 year olds tried to cook in the kitchen, and then continued their revelry by strewing laundry up and down the hall before harassing the cats into shedding everywhere and in general making a huge mess. Yeah, no. He's not coming over until I've cleaned. So I ended up at his place instead, quality time together neither of us had planned for. "The kids" were home, so D and I were sitting in the sun room area ta...

I love literature. I love crafting words into written images, and reading how wordsmiths better than me create such vivid scenes using only printed words that you can feel like you are there. Characters are crafted, locales described, weather explained, even the smallest of details you can glean from their words and your imagination. Poetry is particularly rich for that. I think it is in part because poetry often uses just little snippets, phrases, ideas that are magically woven into something so complex you can dissect it forever and still come to a different interpretation every time. And while I am an above-average writer (or so my friends who read this blog say), poetry is not a form that I think I've ever used to express myself. Maybe I'm not enough of a hopeless romantic, or maybe my experiences have left me so scarred and jaded I'm too cynical to write poetry. It takes a romantic heart to capture and put into words the essence and feelings behind the beauty of na...

Yesterday with Bachelor #4 was normal, typical even, if there is such a thing at this point in getting to know someone. Texts messages went back and forth during the day, nothing terribly exciting or crazy, certainly not like Bachelor #3 who was pretty much sitting around waiting for me to text him. I knew he was busy in the evening, but as I was leaving work after rehearsal I sent a "hope the rest of your day was great" kind of message. Nothing that demanded a reply, feeling pretty sure I'd get one. I didn't. This morning, still nothing on my phone. I went in to play for school Mass; nothing. This wasn't like him, and odd scenarios started running through my head. You all know how I am! Then at 11:15, just as I was about to walk out the door to work, I got a text from him. A long text. It was a sweet, chatty message that he had typed up late last night and, in his exhaustion, forgot to send. He said he was just picking up his phone to see how my day was goi...

At the risk of dating myself horribly, I remember the days when we would be excited for phone calls, especially if they were coming from our crushes. We both had to be home, of course, and when the phone rang our hearts would jump as we either waited for our parents to answer the phone or as we ourselves picked up the receiver. Was it our crush? Was it someone else? Then if we were fortunate, we would spend a chunk of time talking to our crushes, chatting about anything and everything, while our parents or whoever complained we were tying up the phone. Of course, there was also the flip side: being the one to make the call. Would he be home? What would his parents think if they answered? Your hands sweat and your heart beats crazily as you push the button to "dial" the touch-tone phone. You listen to the ringing on the other end, wondering if his dad would answer, if he would answer, or if you'd get the answering machine. Should you leave a message? I mean, anyone can h...

Yesterday I posted a blase little post that was basically random musings and in it dropped the news that there appeared to be a Bachelor #4. Well, indeed there is. This latest candidate, Bachelor #4, is a 42 year old divorcee. He has partial custody of his son, and lives in the next suburb over from me. (Hey, in a sprawling metro area like this, that's kind of a big deal!) 5'11", blonde and blue, and labels himself "slender." He works as a business analyst for an online shipping facilitation company, which leads me to a tangent. What is it with guys in the shipping industry coming to me? Bachelor #4 works for a website that supplies shipping quotes to companies that, well, need to ship stuff. Bachelor #2 owns a shipping company. Seriously, what is up with this? Back to Bachelor #4. He has a degree from a local Baptist college. Uh oh. I was raised Baptist. My dad is a (mostly) retired Baptist minister. I left the Baptist church with some intentionality wel...

Things are quiet on Match right now, at least for me. It is Mother's Day, graduation season, and overall a generally busy time for many people. I'm not taking it personally, and besides, I haven't exactly been reaching out, either. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about random things related to Match. First Musing:  a "new" feature on Match. I say "new" because they didn't have it the last time I was on Match. You're given 10 or so pairs of thumbnail pictures and ask to choose who, between the two, you prefer. All you have is a picture, their screen name, age, location. No, that's not shallow at all.  Choosing preferences based upon profile pictures. *eye roll* Sometimes choosing between the two is almost impossible. Sometimes, you hit "skip" because I wouldn't choose either one if they were the last two guys available. Sometimes, guys you have interacted with - or in my case, dated in a previous round o...

To steal from a meme I posted on Facebook, friendship is weird. I mean, think about it. You meet someone and something just clicks and you decide you like that person and you want to do stuff with them, so you do. Rare is it that you can pinpoint an exact moment where you said, "we are friends now." Stalkers are something else. Remember the kid who was coming after me and coming after me? The one I was pretty certain was married or in a relationship? The one I had to tell more than once to "find someone else?" I thought that was done. I thought he had gotten the message loud and clear. I thought he was gone. I thought wrong. Last night, about 24 hours after the final text exchange, I had a missed call. From him. No voicemail, just a missed call. I legitimately missed it; I was in rehearsal. Coming out of rehearsal and seeing that unnerved me. I texted a couple of trusted friends in my frustration, panic, and unease. Then I did something that, for whatever re...

Late last night I first put this post up. It was a knee-jerk reaction, in many ways. I have frequently said this blog is therapeutic for me and posting was my reactionary way to process. But, I did it from my phone, which limits my editing and clarity and so on and so forth. Besides, I have also now had a night to sleep on it. It had been a lovely evening. I had consumed my teacher appreciation 2-for-1 Chipotle burrito and posted on here about dumping the kid and the facepalm worthy Match email. I was ready to catch up on my phone games like Words With Friends and call it a fairly early night. After all, I had gotten into my classroom an hour and a half early just so I could do all the stuff I needed to over the weekend but couldn't because I'd left some important elements on my desk. In other words, it had been an early morning and a very long day. No sooner had I hit "publish" when my text tone sounded. Literally, it happened less than a minute after I had poste...

This is a tale of two facepalms. Times like this make me wonder if it is really worth it when it comes to dating. After all, there's only so much I can do with makeup to cover the evidence of multiple facepalms. Facepalm, Part 1 We continue the saga of the 28 year old wanting to help me renew my cougar card. Last night I thought I had made it clear that I didn't want to be a cougar again, that I didn't want a casual sex relationship, and that I wasn't going to be having him over. Thing is, and I should know better, men and women communicate differently. When women think they are being clear, men still don't understand. It usually takes language akin to a "Dick and Jane" book for successful communication. So why was I surprised to see him texting me at a little before 9:30 today? Inquiring if we were getting together tonight? I ignored the messages for an hour or so. It was a teaching day for me, and I don't have a lot of time for texting. Then I g...

Technology and the Internet has made me impatient. If I Google something and the answer I'm looking for isn't within the first page of links rarely will I dig further. And language being what it is, it is constantly evolving. We are always finding new words, new phrases, to describe things. Texting has brought into the vernacular all sorts of shortcuts, and recently the phrase "because ________" has been deemed acceptable. I wonder if there is an area of the English language with more slang and terminology, though, than dating and sex. We know what a gigolo is: a man who is supported by a sugar mama primarily in return for sex. We know what a silver fox is: a man who is silver or grey at a young age and looks great - think Anderson Cooper, George Clooney even 10 years ago. We know what a cougar is: a woman who goes after men who are younger than her by a certain number of years. (Most definitions say 7 years, although I've heard others.) We know what a kitten is...

It has certainly been quite the ride since I've returned to Match. In less than a month, I've garnered more attention than probably ever before. My inbox has almost 60 emails in it from probably 35-40 different guys, my "winks received" equally number that. So last night, as I was enjoying a glass of wine on my balcony, I realized it was the first night since returning to Match that I wasn't all agog over a boy, and it felt weird. I expressed that to my good friend, my yenta in MN, who said, "Weird good or weird bad?" My answer: both? See, for me it was weird good because it's been three weeks of drama. Three weeks of answering emails, responding to text messages, waiting for replies. Meeting someone new and wondering if the two of you will be any sort of match can be really stressful. A lovely evening on the balcony with a take-and-bake pizza and some wine without that stress was just what the doctor ordered. At the same time, it was weird bad...

Warning: this blog post gets into the sensitive subject of sexual compatibility versus violence. If you are not comfortable with that, I suggest you skip this post, or stop reading when I intro that subject. Well, I did it. I sent the email calling things off. After a lot of internal debate and discussing with friends and my ever-opinionated Thursday group exercise classes, I knew that downgrading Friday's date would not be good. I needed to end it NOW. I went on Match to email him because I don't have a personal email address for him. I took a little bit of comfort in seeing that he'd been active on Match within the last hour, and I doubt he was looking at my profile. I haven't heard from him at all  today, which is odd. I think he already knows I just don't feel a connection. So here is the letter I sent: "You probably aren't surprised to be getting this email, and for that I feel awful. You know I'm a written communication kind of gal, and th...

After further ruminations about last night's debacle, one thing is clear: I need to end this, whatever it is, and soon. Bachelor #3 is just a puppy. He's all a-twitter over me because of my looks, primarily, but also over this "amazing connection" he feels that I just don't. I thought I might. I thought something was developing. He had the right things to say at the right time, and it catered to my biggest dating flaw. My biggest dating flaw is this: I let things go too far with guys I'm not really interested in simply because they are interested in me.  It's the intoxication of being pursued, of another person finding you desirable. I do believe that certain situations attraction can develop, but there has to be some sort of good foundation. Unfortunately, he's fallen for me, and I only fell for the idea of someone wanting me. It is not often I regret my dating decisions. I usually take them in stride as an important learning experience, reali...