By the time I got to number 38, I had been on a number of dates in a relatively short amount of time. Since almost all of my dates involve initially speaking on the phone, I sometimes have trouble keeping the numbers straight when they are not set as a contact–but I have this thing where I feel that someone has to ‘earn’ their way into my address book. Since you have heard what most of my dates are like, you know how few of them ever ended up as permanent contacts….luckily, I can usually tell who is who by the texting associated with each number and this system works–well, most of the time anyway!
Number 38 first contacted me from the site for ‘mature’ daters. I have to admit that after reading his profile, I really couldn’t see where we matched at all–which is exactly what I wrote to him in response to initial e-mail. He said that even though our likes weren’t too similar (sci-fi? not my cup of tea), he really wanted to meet me because I seemed to have more of a brain in my head than most of the women on this particular site. We ended up speaking on the phone one Saturday night and impulsively decided to meet that night at 9:30 at a sports bar very close to my home.
I had never been to that particular bar because it is very close to a nearby university and I felt it was a college hangout–well, I was right! When I tell you that we looked like the chaperones, I’m really not joking. It was more than a bit uncomfortable for me, but we made light of it and tried to get to know each other. I found out that he is just separated, not divorced–this is territory I really don’t like to go into so I wanted to find out when he was expecting to be divorced. Much to my surprise, I discovered that due to the cost of covering his wife’s insurance, he had no plans to get divorced cause he would save quite a bit staying married. He assured me they lived completely separate lives and had for a couple of years, but in my head he was still a married man and I didn’t feel comfortable with that at all. Honestly, the date was over for me at that point and when we said our goodbyes, I was fully expecting that was it.
Well….remember how I said I was dating a lot in a short amount of time? And how I didn’t put contact info in my phone? To make a long story short–he texted me a week later and asked me to the movies–and I thought it was someone else and I said yes–I didn’t realize it was him! So what did I do–since I couldn’t figure out how to tell him how I mixed him up with another date and just blowing him off wasn’t my style–I went through with it. So now I have a movie date with this (in my mind) still married man!
We started this date at a bar for happy hour–much better choice than the first place! We walked over to the movie theater from the bar and I felt like he wanted to hold my hand but I just didn’t want to go there. Then we get to the movies–and before he sits down, he lifts the seat arm from between our chairs to make it more ‘cozy’ but I am just not into it. As we watched the movie (which was terrible, by the way), he kept on putting his hand on my leg and I kept on pulling it away (at least as far away as I could in the seat!). At the end of the movie, he walks me back to my car and stands there, expecting a kiss. There was not even a tiny part of me that wanted to kiss him, so I gave him a peck and got in my car to leave, cursing myself for mixing up people and having to go through that date at all!
The next day he texts me that he expects a physical relationship to be part of the deal and I appeared to have trouble with physical contact (um, not really, just ask number 29 ugh) I replied that I was fine with physical contact, but you have to give me a bit of time to get there–and since this was pretty much a first date, I just wasn’t there yet (not to mention he was still married in my eyes–but I kept that part to myself!) He said he saw what I meant and would call me again–which, thankfully, he did not–cause I wasn’t going to mix him up and make the same mistake again! Ugh-again!
Lessons learned:
1. Try to keep people straight–it really is problematic when you don’t!
2. I should have just told him that without any kind of divorce plans, he was still married in my eyes and I wasn’t interested. That was my bad.
3. Don’t engage in physical touching if you are not feeling it–I felt even giving him a good night kiss would be leading him on since I knew I had no interest.