2008: the dating pipeline

Okay; enough sob stories. It will be fun for me to sneak in nasty comments about Performer here & there, but it will be more fun for you if I get you up-to-date on the men in my pipeline….

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DATES SO FAR

I had two dates with REG (real estate guy). He was courteous, pleasant, and decent-looking, but ultimately there was no electricity. He took me to two nice restaurants and a very good movie, refusing all my offers to contribute my share of cash. (‘Look old,’ he whispered to me as he handed in our tickets; ‘I bought you a senior ticket.’ ‘No! you didn’t!’ I objected, but too late.) But the poor man had a tragedy in his life, the death of his only child, which he never mentioned, but which I discovered during my usual serious googling. I even found out how the poor child died. REG’s main interests appeared to be restaurants, movies, clothes,and his dog. I could go far with any of those subjects, but conversation flagged a bit over dinner on the second date. And also, it has to be mentioned, I just wasn’t attracted to him. He was a bit too skinny for me, and there was no energy in his body. He was a decent man trying to distract himself, I think. He didn’t phone after the second date, having (I guess) read me accurately.

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I had one date with AM (Arts Man). He had discovered and liked my match.com profile (as had REG — it’s sort of better if the man-the-hunter role can be preserved), and I liked his. We emailed a bit. I was a bit concerned that he was too short for me,but I wanted to continue my practice from last June of ‘casting a wide net’ and dating the ambiguous cases. As it turned out, it wasn’t his height but his skinny little legs that left me distinctly unattracted. His art (I mean, the stuff he created) was excellent, and he was smart, had pleasant-sounding children and grandchildren and, clearly, good relationships with all of them. But there was something besides the skinny little legs….in a few stories he told about himself, he seemed a bit of a complainer, a mild pain in the ass. Not a big one, but just enough of a pain to make me wonder; and he seemed ever so slightly ungenerous in some ways. And I should have remembered from a date last june never to have a first-date with the two of us sitting on bar stools (that issue is discussed near the end of the linked post). It’s awkward and uncomfortable and I don’t like it. Never again.

AM sent me a thoughtful, honest post-date email message, something that has never happened to me before. I won’t quote his exact words in case he’s a googler, but he said, more or less, that although he wasn’t sure that we hit it off, he felt we were “like friends,” but “it was nice” and he felt he had barely gotten to know me, using the word “bright” (shining, not smart) about me. I wrote back thanking for his message, agreeing with it, and saying I hoped he’d let me know when there was an exhibit of his work.

DATES IN THE FUTURE

And there are three I haven’t met: AM2 (another arts guy) responded to my email about his profile. I was doubtful when I wrote him but I was in casting-a-wide-net mode. Too wide in his case, I’m afraid, but he called and I guess we’ll have to meet. He thinks of himself as a ‘funny’ guy, but remarked that I hadn’t laughed at his jokes. (Uh oh….I hadn’t noticed them.) He hazarded the guess that maybe I wasn’t a loud laugher….Then when I mentioned I was looking at the website with his art, he asked directly if I liked his work. “Oh yes,” I lied; “it’s wonderful.” He talked politely and wisely about two recent relationships he’d had, but there is no future there: our sensibilities are too different. No rendezvous was planned, but one was spoken of, at some not-too-distant date.

* * *
The next one I haven’t met is L (lawyer). I had an email correspondence with L in the middle of January 2007, all of it preserved in my dating email files. He was at that point under some stress at work and also mourning a recent death in his family, and our correspondence just trailed off. I had liked the sound of him then but put him on a mental back burner; and anyway, he took his profile down soon after we stopped writing. When I was looking at the slim pickins among the jdate men last week, I noticed that he was back, so I wrote him and reminded him of our correspondence of a year ago. He had no memory of it, but once he checked out my profile, he was very interested in writing. He lives in Another Borough; is a widower; has two children and a few grandchildren; is tall and nice-looking though not killer-handsome. He has a pleasant though somewhat conventional sense of humor, but I like the sound of him (as I did last year). However, he’s recovering from surgery and homebound for a month. Probably we’ll talk on the phone sooner or later and then see where things go.

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And finally, there’s RB (retired businessman).

Like L, he’s a widower. Last year, I dated two widowers, but I preferred divorced men because (this was my thinking — then) I thought it would be better to be compared to an awful ex-wife than to an idealized dead one.

However! I now think otherwise. My experiences with Rolly, with x, and with Performer, have made me value honesty and generosity even more than I already did. In all those cases, I was honest and generous and (in different ways for the different people involved) the men were not. I was also (toot toot: own horn being blown) kinder and more tolerant than the men.

So now I think I’d like to try out a relationship with a man who has experienced a good, successful marriage. Yes, of course, even the best marriage has difficult moments, but my serious googling of L and of RB, as well as their own profiles and the things they’ve written and said to me, suggest that theirs were good marriages. I now think I could hold my own in a relationship with a man who has had a good marriage, who knows when to be unselfish and who can recognize and appreciate my unselfishness.

So hey, guys, I’m ready!

* * *
Here’s how I met RB:

Two days after I had met Performer, as you may remember, I turned down a date with Man1 and with S, the short guy. The men were (as Marlene Dietrich sings in Blaue Engel, though in looks I must acknowledge I’m no Marlene Dietrich, alas) swarming around me like moths around a light. I turned down those two dates, on the grounds — fool that I was!! — that I wanted to be the person that (so I then thought) Performer thought I was, i.e. loyal, honest, blah blah blah. And exactly a week after I met Performer, I received an email message from RB (who had discovered me on match.com) that was charming and funny. I told him that he sounded perfect for me, but that his timing was bad, because I had just met someone….

RB wrote back another charming message, asking me if I had a sister or a friend like myself, and including his real email address in cryptic form so that match.com wouldn’t delete it.

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Although at the time I thought RB was perhaps not quite so perfect for me as Performer (RB used emoticons and phrases like “the incredibly lucky guy” for Performer), I saved his message. And right after Christmas, I began trying to figure out what his real email address was from the clues he had given. Two of my attempts bounced back to me, but my friend Marion (the one who came for Christmas at a moment’s notice) works in the high tech business, and she figured out his correct email address.

This was fortunate, because he was no longer on match.com, and I hadn’t saved his profile.

* * *
I heard back from him at once. He appeared to be delighted to hear from me. I did some serious googling and found out lots of wonderful things about his late wife, his children, his grandchildren, and his own collegiate and business careers.

Now it’s true, the photo he sent must be ten or fifteen years old, but that’s all right: he directed me to a business website that actually has a recent photo of him, so I can see how the extremely good-looking man in the photo has aged! (I don’t think he was aware of the second photo.) And yes, his match.com profile (an abbreviated version of it had come with his original message, the one I saved) had shaved three years off his age….but hey, Rolly had shaved off four years, and Performer had said he was divorced, and you know what? I really don’t care. I’ll just have to see what he’s like.

I don’t know his height, but (in web photos I’ve found) his son looks tall…

And just as all the things about Performer’s profile that made me pass over him twice before I finally wrote him last June turned out to be true indications of his personality, and valid signs of why we would not get along, so the emoticons and the photo and the wrong-age and the “charm” of RB’s messages may be signs of possible problems; as may the fact that L was too busy or too depressed or both to sustain flirting and courtship last year.

So I’m wary.

HEALING AND HIBERNATION

RB and I spoke briefly about two hours ago. He wants to take me out to dinner, but I can’t go right away.

L can’t meet me till he has healed from his surgery, and I can’t meet RB till I’ve healed from an accident I had yesterday. I slipped in the shower; that has never, ever happened to me before in my entire life. I have no idea why all of a sudden it did, but it did, and my face is purple and red and blue. I explained this to RB and told him I’d be back in touch when I looked like my profile picture, probably early next week.

* * *
So my dates with these two very eligible, tempting men — and with the other, not-very-tempting one I mentioned in the unmet category — are on hold.

That’s all right. It’s fine. I can continue to get P off my brain and maybe even get some work done.

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And the moral is:
Keep every email message from every good prospect. You never know when you might want it.

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