Plan C; and a breakthrough

I think I’ve just had a breakthrough of some kind.

This is a ‘framed’ post: first I’m going to print the long (sorry) post I wrote yesterday early evening. Then I’m going to add a few comments after it. So as you read, keep it in mind that I’ve already moved on — a bit.

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PLAN C

What does this mean? you ask.

* * *

It means the following:

if Rolly was Plan A, and Performer was Plan B, then the new man is Plan C.

And C is also a letter I associate with him for a number of reasons.

* * *

Shocking, perhaps, to some, that I would think of these men as ‘plans.’

But really, it’s just another way of saying LTR.

And yes, there’s another man waiting in the wings, one you haven’t yet heard of, and he’s Plan C.

* * *

This winter is amazingly unlike last winter. In 2007, between 30 January and the first week of March, I had absolutely No Dates. And very little interest coming in from men on the web or going out from me to them.

This was the period of ‘Southern Fried Date,’ the Texan who was stuck in the suburbs because of the snow on every single one of the three dates we planned. He finally gave up, his last words to me the classic I’ll call you.

In stark contrast, this January and February are like last May and June: it’s raining men. I don’t understand it, but I’m not complaining. I could have had dates with four different men this weekend: I cancelled Owlman, and I asked SDF out for the next weekend. I’ve rescheduled or cancelled phone dates with four other men and have been in correspondence with a couple of others. Friday I have a date with HTG (High Tech Guy, a decent man but no sparks).

* * *

And Sunday evening I have a date with Plan C. Our First.

* * *
Okay, so now you’re wondering, rightly, why I’m ranking him already with Rolly and Performer, when I haven’t even met him yet.

Well, yes, to some extent – no, to a large extent – I’m making the same mistake I made before my 8 January date with RB. I’m saying to myself:

I have a feeling this man is going to be The One. No, Mimi; don’t say that. Don’t you remember what’s happened in the past when you’ve said that? The very reason you’re still dating is that none of them has been The One. Being stupid again?? Yeah. I am. But this time, I’m not making the mistakes I’ve made in the past. This one is different. I was wrong all the other times, but I have a feeling this time I’m right. Yeah, sure. I’ve heard that one before also. I know you have….but this time I’m really pretty sure I’m right. Ho hum. Like before. No, really! But I’m trying to keep it under control, only fantasizing 70 % of my waking hours, not 85%. Oh great: you’ve really improved. I know, I know; it’s dumb, it’s a bad habit, it so patently stupid; but this time I really really think he may be The One. I have so heard that before!
* * *

Okay, let’s work this out rationally and statistically.

Who are the ones I’ve thought, before, were going to be The One?

Before meeting them
Kevin (July 2006)
Andrew (September 2006)
RB (January 2008)

After meeting them
Rolly (October 2006)
Performer (June 2007)

There were some other possibilities, especially in the ‘before’ category, but I had strong doubts about them.

So in the ‘after’ cases (which this is not, because I haven’t met Plan C), why didn’t things work out? Why wasn’t each of them The One?

Rolly: too mixed up; ambivalent about intimacy; not interested in commitment; always late to our dates, later and later; always, always, scanning the lasses on jdate; always ‘on-line now’.

Performer: a shit, of course; and I was way too nice and understanding; and I had a rotten lousy psychiatrist who identified with Performer, liked to think of us ‘together,’ and for him Performer could do no wrong, so I never got (except from my blog-readers, for which thank you) a serious appraisal of all the many ways he was awful and unethical.

* * *

Okay, but those two cases don’t really bear on this one, because I haven’t met Plan C yet. In the three cases where before I was meeting the man, I was 97% certain he was The One, what disabused me of that idea?

Kevin: skinny old-man body, uneven shoulders narrower than mine, completely unattractive, I knew it the split second I saw him, after I realized that that little old guy standing at the bar was my date.

Andrew: although I thought at the time that it was my mistake, that I hadn’t known how to flirt, how to make eye contact, how to smile a lot, how to banter and so forth, really, I might have done some of the above if I’d been at all attracted to him. I remember being a bit surprised that he was smaller than I had expected. Although it’s true I didn’t really know how to do a first-date then, it’s also the case that the sexual response-systems were not activated.

RB: I remember during dinner (this was one of the two dates I ‘live-blogged’) asking myself, Am I attracted to this man? could I be? will I be? If you have to ask the question, then….. And why not attracted? He wasn’t small; he was tall and large and had ‘mass’ and ‘bulk,’ which I infer that I like, given the men I’ve slept with or made out with in the past 20 months. But in spite of RB’s size, there was, I think, something old-manish about him. He was 74, Rolly’s age, but he didn’t have Rolly’s amazing build. He moved like an old man. His body was not flirtatious.

* * *

In short, if I have to generalize, and I do, it was the physique every time. It was also the case that Kevin had some intellectual failings (he wasn’t as smart and sharp and quick as many of the men I’ve dated and didn’t have a wide-ranging intellect), but the body did it, long before I knew the mind.

* * *

Yeah, I know: I haven’t seen Plan C in the flesh yet, and his stats are the same as RB’s: he’s 5′10″ and 190 lbs (he weighs a little less than RB). But he’s 65, a veritable baby compared to many of the men I’ve dated. I don’t think he’s going to move like an old man.

* * *

So here’s the story:

Tuesday evening, as the primary returns were coming in, one state right after another, a very exciting time for anyone who cares about politics, I got a JDate email that there was a message in my Inbox. It was quite a long one, longer than all the messages I’d received this week (from about six different men, more than one from some of them) put together.

It was an unusual message: he (now named Plan C) took up almost everything I said in my profile and commented on it, item by item. He had an amused but not reverential tone; and he countered each taste or characteristic I mentioned with one of his own, relating it to mine (‘I think I like some of your likes and then I have my own…’). His writing was literate, witty, and articulate, his voice confident but not the slightest bit brash. Actually, he was somewhat self-deprecating: ‘Well it has been fun and if you don’t write back I’ll understand that. It happens here. But if you do, I will be pleased that you did and pleased to say more’).

Heartthrob!

* * *
I of course went at once to his profile, and I really liked his photo. I was drawn to it immediately, a largish man (with the hint, so far as I could tell from a top-half photo, of a stomach, which I always like in a man) with glasses and a calm, benign smile.

When I read his ‘About Me’, one phrase rang a bell. I know this man! I said to myself. I looked at his pictures and saw there was another one, besides the one with glasses, and I remembered the other one perfectly.

Yes, we had a history: I had written Plan C in August 2006. I had loved that earlier photo (he didn’t have the glasses one then) and had written him, initiating a correspondence. And he had written back a grumpy message, saying New York was too far away for him to date. (Unfortunately Plan C lives in suburbs so remote they aren’t really NY suburbs….)

So I wrote back informing him of the existence of trains, and he wrote back another grumpy note explaining why he preferred to drive. Then, finally convinced that this was not to be, I sent him the sonnet I’d already written about him, having been ‘taken’ not only by his photo but by some of the wording in his ‘I am looking for a – ’ paragraph. He wrote back a few cursory and not very significant comments about the sonnet, which he appeared barely to have read.

* * *

And now, eighteen months later, he was writing me.

He had forgotten me.

Of course, I now had my expensive glamorous professional photo and an entirely new profile, so it was no wonder he didn’t remember.

* * *
Boy did I have fun writing him back!!

After reminding him – informing him – that he had already ‘nixed’ and ‘rejected’ me, I wrote out my thinking process about him, not making clear what I was going to do until I said he had obviously ‘seen the error of his ways’ and was ‘eager to make my acquaintance.’ I also said that I couldn’t wait to hear what he thought about ‘our history.’

* * *

I’ll just quote one of the many paragraphs in the perhaps fifteen or sixteen messages he has sent since then. This was in one of the first, as he was taking in the fact that he had rejected me in the past:

I can’t believe I did that. I mean said no because of whatever. Thank you then, if I did, and I must have, for being forbearing, understanding, and giving me this extra chance. Oh, I am, well, I don’t know, did I really do that? Don’t, do not, please do not, under any circumstances, answer that. This is, entirely, a rhetorical conversation with myself.

* * *
Is he a doll or what?!

* * *

To make an already long story not unnecessarily longer:

– we had an 85-minute phone call Wednesday night;
– we have a dinner date Sunday evening;
– he is a widower; when he wrote me in August ‘06, his wife had only been dead one year, and, he said, he wasn’t ready to date yet. (I had already figured that out by the time he said it himself.)

In our phone conversation, he mentioned that since he started dating, he has had two ‘hot and heavy’ (not his phrase, but it was something like that) affairs, and that he realized both relationships were wrong for him. I thought, Yes! Good! I didn’t want to date a man whose last sex was with his now-dead wife. I like it that he has had other sexual experiences since then, and also that sex is obviously important to him.

Many times, he made it clear that he is tired of dating. A sample from one of his messages: I do get impulsive when I want something and I want us to meet because somewhere in this internet dating thing there might be, no, must be a happy ending.

* * *

I found myself speaking more openly to him than I usually do in a first conversation. I actually told him what I had not told the men involved, that when I dated widowers, I was a bit awed by the ghost of the wife and the memories of a happy marriage, something I’ve never had. I told him that when I went to one widower’s apartment for dinner, there were pictures of the dead wife everywhere, looking beautiful and staring at me from every corner of every wall. And when I went to another’s, there were absolutely no pictures of the wife, though she and my date had been together (in high school and after) for over half a century. Clearly he had taken them all down for my visit.

Plan C talked about that issue a while, saying that after her death his children had put pictures of her up everywhere, but he thought that now it was time to take some of them down.

* * *

Well, you get the idea: Plan C and I can talk.

And as in the case of RB, though I hope with a different ending, the man is stirring up my romantic fantasies with his own even more romantic fantasies, expressed or implied in almost every message.

But there’s a lot that isn’t just romantic, much exchanging of information about our professional lives, our children, and their interests (which in fact are quite similar).

* * *

What will happen when we make the next leap, from voice to face-to-face, I can only hope.

But you see, I bet, why I already feel so good about this man, although we haven’t met.

* * *

There’s little I can do to still or quell or minimize my hopes, so I’ll just live with them for the next 2.5 or so days.

And I have so to speak laid myself bare before you…..so if it doesn’t work out, I’ll have to eat crow once more. And that is quite a mixed metaphor.

* * *

Over the phone, he confessed that he had rejoined JDate just so he could write me.

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Okay, so that was as far as I’d written while I was on a train yesterday. Plan C left a romantic ‘good night’ message on my cell phone (I was asleep on the train and didn’t hear it), and when I got home there were two email messages from him. One of them described his career (I had been asking him about it), which has been lively and significant, without the colorful appeal of Rolly’s (writer) or Performer’s (violinist), but without question more socially useful.

Somehow all that dose of reality did something to me. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it sort of lifted some of the veil of illusion surrounding Plan C. He became — and not in a bad way — an ordinary person. I still liked him. I was still planning what to wear when I meet him Sunday (a first-date outfit that, on both occasions when I’ve worn it, has led to second dates!). But I became somehow less confident that he was The One. I was still entirely open to that possibility and hoped that he would be.

Or might be. Or something. But I was less sure.

* * *
And (you’re wondering) what about SDF? what’s happening with him? is he no longer in the picture?

Tuesday night, as I was logging on and off JDate many times to read Plan C’s messages and to return them, I of course checked SDF’s profile each time, to see what he was up to. All experienced JDaters reading this post know we do that; we want to see how busy our guys are and if they’re checking other women out. They usually are.

And every time I was on, SDF had logged on also. He was having a busy night.

Oh good! I thought. He’s finding someone else too. Now I won’t need to worry about that.

‘That’ = our date on Saturday the 16th, one that I had asked him for, because I wanted to, and because I was taking my blog-commenters’ advice! (See the comments to this post.)

By Wednesday afternoon I was sure that Plan C was going to displace SDF. I was wondering how to get out of the date, and SDF was emailing me about our choice of film. I didn’t know what to do.

But then when I got home and — for reasons that I still don’t entirely understand — suddenly felt less silly and romantic about Plan C, I began to wonder if I should still go out with SDF.

* * *
But then: I had a great session with RS (Rolly’s shrink, now mine also) this morning. After I had gotten him up-to-date on my dating life, and as you can imagine that took a while, he gave me excellent advice. He told me the main thing he noticed was the great Switch, how I had suddenly and almost absolutely switched all my attentions from SDF, with whom I had a good time on our last date, to Plan C. That abrupt change caught his attention, and he wanted to think about it and understand it.

I had asked his advice, and he gave it, that I should indeed go out with SDF. I was already thinking that myself.

In giving RS my final thoughts on my romantic status quo, I used the phrase ‘controlled illusions’ about my attitude to Plan C. He thought that was very good and quoted it back to me.

* * *

In the past hour, while revising this overly-long post (apologies), I have had emails from

1) SDF, about the film we’ll see on the 16th: ‘The film looks very interesting and so are you.’ So romance has returned or perhaps entered that relationship; we’re past the ‘you’re so sexy!’ stage and past the ‘please don’t grope me’ stage to — who knows what.

2) Plan C, who writes more about his own career (in response to my comments), more about mine, and then finishes, ‘Would you like a goodnight call tonight?’

3) HTG, High Tech Guy, firming up the logistics for our plans for tonight. Hence I can’t really plan a goodnight-call from Plan C.

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If someone had told me, in my non-dating high school days (I went to a girls’ school) or during one of the bleak celibate periods of college, that as a sexagenarian I would have the social life I was missing out on in my youth, I would have been astonished. (And of course I also would have wondered why I wouldn’t be married at age 60…).

All three men are from the usually uninspiring JDate; they’re all uneccentric; and two of them are of great interest to me.

Please, let’s hope something permanent comes out of one of these…

But in the meantime, it was a real breakthrough, to realize that I could still be very interested in Plan C without being silly about him, and that I could — maybe for a while, at any rate — date both SDF and Plan C. Have no idea how or even if that might work.

We’ll C.

* * *

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