Dating Confusion: Part Two

With the response that I got from the last post, I thought I might post an update.

By the time I posted “part one” I had already gone out with him and decided it was a “no go.”  I also knew that he hadn’t cyber stalked me and found my blog, so I felt safe to go ahead and post what I had written the previous week, knowing that I was talking about him behind his back..  I’ll go ahead and post the rest of the story now.

Looking back, I should have given up at the point where I asked him to call instead of texting and he basically said, “no thanks.”

I didn’t.  Lesson learned.  I shouldn’t have to beg someone to want to get to know me.

On Sunday, after a week of light communication, he asked me if I wanted to grab lunch.  I said yes even though I read The Rules and know that they say you should always act busy/push the date out a few days/play games and manipulate (not the woman I want to be).  I wanted to get it over with, to find out sooner than later, since I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t going to like this guy after I actually met him.  Actually, I didn’t say, “yes” to lunch, but to coffee (that is my hard and fast first on-line date rule.  No meals for a first date, just coffee or cocktails so you can bail pretty quickly if you want to.).

I walked up and he looked nothing like his photos.  Here’s a little tip for any men who might be reading this that are on-line dating:  Be honest about how tall you say you are.  I know how tall I am.  So I know that 5’6” should be taller than me.  When you claim to be taller than you are you change my first impression of you from being, “Hmm.  He’s kinda short,” to, “Hmm, this guy is a liar.”  That’s not a good way to start out.

He had spent all morning making me a mixed CD.  How sweet.  (Side note:  It’s actually really good.  And he didn’t drive a Trans Am, after all, it was a Pontiac Vibe.)  He’s recovering.

Then he let me buy my own coffee.  Oooh.  Yikes.

He was nice.  There was absolutely no spark.  After the texting debacle, he actually didn’t even know what kind of a hole he had to climb out of.  So, he probably would have had to be Ryan Gosling to recover. 

He wasn’t.  Ryan Gosling, that is.

All of that, though, is a set up for this:

I’m really bad at letting a guy down in person.  I wait until I can do it the cowardly way, over the phone.  Since that hadn’t been the m.o. with this guy, I had no idea what to do.  Should I text him?  That seemed too low to stoop.  I opted for email.

Sunday night I sent him an email saying, as sweetly as I could, but also very clearly, that I wasn’t interested.

Remember how I have the world’s dumbest smart phone?  Tuesday night, I was at work.  I had to make a brief phone call to my sister to make sure I had the plan straight for our early morning flight the next day.  While I’m calling her, my phone does something that it’s never done before.  It makes a weird little vibrate and then powers itself down.  Hmmm.  It starts powering itself back up, but I don’t have time to wait for it, I only have two seconds while my client’s color is processing.  No problem, her number is one of the four that I have memorized.  I call her from the landline.  When I get off work two hours later, my phone has powered itself back up, and I have a text.  From Mr. Heavy Metal.  What?  Why is he texting me?  It says, “but good?”  Ok, that’s about the strangest text ever…oh, no.  No, no, no.   I look back at the text log and when my phone powered back up it had sent him a text saying, “but good.”

I have no idea why.  Maybe it was in there from previous texting, and I hadn’t sent it.  That happens sometimes, I’ll abandon a text when the person I’m texting with has moved on to the next thing and I can’t keep up.  But, usually my phone tells me that I have a “draft” still pending, and that hadn’t shown up.

Oh, man.  Of all people.  Of all of my contacts to randomly text, it chooses him?  Really?

Either way, I didn’t know what to do.  Ignore it?  Text back?  I finally decided that I had karmically earned this from talking trash about him on my blog, and that I should text him back a quick one.  I said, “My phone that I hate randomly texted you.  So sorry to bother you.” 

Unfortunately, he read that as an opening, and texted me a couple more times last night.  “oh, I was thinking that you still wanted to kick it.”  And “If not that’s cool, I’d still love to hang sometime.”

I didn’t text back.  I thought about it.  “Nope.”  Would have been sufficient.  But, I’m not that girl.  I felt that I had been clear in my email and there was no need to reject him twice.

So, that’s the whole story, folks.  I will say one thing about these on-line dates:  they’re definitely getting incrementally better.  I figure by date 50 I should be about there.