Watch your words as you may be forced to eat them!
Trying to remember that phrase exactly, but I’m sitting in Cannes, France right now, getting ready for the start of the film festival. Between the jet lag, all the wine I had last night, and the fact that I’m in a lovely apartment in the South of France sitting on a terrace in the sun as I write this… well, the brain isn’t firing on all cylinders. Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!
Being forced to eat one’s words – that’s me right now. I read over my previous blog entry and I had to laugh. Me… the wanna be “serial dater.” No sooner did I submit that entry and I met someone! Seriously. I submitted that last entry on Easter Sunday morning. After I put that entry on the site I decided to check my match.com account. And there he was… Doglover592.
Now as I mentioned in the previous entry, I’d had a date with eHarmony guy the night before and I was trying really hard to feel excited about dating him. We’d been seeing each other for about a month and had been communicating for a couple of weeks before that. He was a nice guy. Kind, considerate, had all his teeth…. But in my heart, I just knew it wasn’t something that was going to last. We just didn’t share enough in common, and to be honest, he was a bit of a yawn. Sorry, but for me he was pretty boring. Not interested in food, music, movies, or what was going on in the world. A pretty narrow view of things. True story, until he met me he had never eaten asparagus! THAT freaked me out a bit. If that makes me shallow, too damn bad. How could you be 48 years old and never eat asparagus? It’s not like it’s some exotic food that is difficult to come by in the Midwest! I guess we were destined to meet so that he could experience asparagus.
So, I justified it all by saying I wanted to “serial date.” And in theory, that was a good plan. I just figured I’d serial date until the right one came along. Who knew it would happen the next day?
Believe me, I’d had my share of lunches and phone conversations with all types of guys. Some were interesting and fun, others not so much. For anyone getting back in the swing of dating, I highly recommend the internet – and match.com in particular. It really helped me define what I truly wanted in a serious relationship. And the only way you can do that is by communicating with a lot of different guys.
So, when Doglover592 (DL for short, from here on out) showed up in my e-mail box I just had a feeling. From that Easter Sunday morning on there was an easiness in our communications. We were on the phone that evening for 3 hours. I’d never had that sense of familiarity and honesty with anyone I’d met up to that point. It was amazing what we had in common. And our differences were good too… nothing insurmountable, just enough to make things interesting. From our phone conversations I knew that DL was articulate, educated, spiritual, kind (hey, he has a dog, a cat, AND a fish!), interested in food, wine and music (the trifecta in my book!), and he was damned funny too!
Another thing that was surprising with DL was that he wanted to meet me soon after our initial conversations. Every other guy I had met up to that point seemed to drag their feet when it came to meeting face to face. The phone communication would drag on for weeks before they would want to set up a date. It was weird to me, since I figured that if there was genuine interest, why would you want to hold back from meeting someone? So, it was refreshing to me that DL was of the same mind as I was – basically, let’s meet and see if this is as good as I think it’s going to be! We decided to meet that next Saturday.
It wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. It was better. And, he likes asparagus!
More to come, but the Mediterranean is calling me and I’m only human!
Tags: dating, over 40, romance
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May 10, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Eileen is too generous in her comments. While there is a fair amount of truth to what she writes, the fact of the matter is she elicits those good qualities in me that she describes. I’m just an ordinary guy who had the extremely good fortune to meet an extra-ordinary woman.
There’s an intriguing irony we first “met” on Easter Sunday that isn’t lost on either of us. We both recognize the resurrection of our abilities to really care about a special someone and willingness to commit to one person.
In my case, I was pretty much resigned to going through life on my own. I had shut down all my profiles on all the dating sites on which I had posted. The day before I met Eileen I had had a date with an old friend I had been corresponding with off and on for almost three years (no, I’m not the type that Eileen described who possessed the inability to get to the meeting part of the process – the lady and I just never had the oppotunity to get together for one reason or another). I decided to keep the date because she is a nice person and I really wanted to meet her after all the time we had been corresponding. I figured this would be my dating swan song (unless we really connected). We met for lunch the Saturday before Easter and really had a nice time. But, there just wasn’t the “spark” you hope for when you meet someone and we both recognized this.
What DID come out of the meeting, though, was a willingness on my part to give it one more try. I realized isolating myself wasn’t the answer. On the way home from the lunch date I remembered a profile on Match.com of this really interesting and VERY attractive woman. We matched on 23 out of 25 matching criteria – pretty good in my book! She even lived in the town in which I grew up. So, about 8:30 on Easter Sunday morning I shelled out the 30 bucks for a full fledged membership on Match (you can post a profile for free but if you want to correspond with someone you have to ante up) and wrote a brief note to her.
To my surprise, I received a response from her in less than an hour. This made me a bit nervous; usually a rapid response like that meant “thanks, but no thanks.” Much to my relief it was a very nice and engaging note. Two more exchanges on Match and by that evening we were chatting on the phone. We haven’t looked back since.
I know that there is no “perfect woman” or “perfect man” – we all have our baggage. But I do believe there can be that person out there that is perfect for us. Eileen is as close to that as I’ll ever come.
If only she liked the Three Stooges…