At long last, hope
I had one of those self-revelations last night as to why I hold people at arm’s length. Well, people of the dating variety. All it takes is one (or more) men to tell you they can date you but not marry you, and no wonder a girl learns that you can’t have much faith in someone just because you don’t share the same faith as them.
Anyway. It’s NFL season, and the ball isn’t the only thing getting kicked in the head. Then again, these a-ha moments, while they suck, at least serve to prove that I didn’t get this fucked-up of my own accord. 😉
Speaking of losing faith, I haven’t been overly compelled to check in on my dating-service e-mails in quite some time. I mean, I get notified when someone’s trying to get in touch with me, but I guess when you meet semi-normal people in person (it happens on occasion — nothing to count on, unfortunately!), you can be more selective.
But my faith sort of got a kick in the ass this morning because I did log in to read my 27 new e-mails (you people did see my photo, right? You did read the insane ramblings, no? And you still wrote to me?). And lo and behold, I think we’ve got a live one!
I’ll keep the deets to myself for now, but I will share something in the broader sense as I finally found someone with a clue who actually made me WANT to respond.
In keeping with my occasional list of do’s and don’ts to online dating, I’ve got to wonder about these services that allow you to send winks or woos or whatevers to people you’re trolling. If I’m interested — and I’m typically not — I can see who’s viewed my ad.
I guess what bugs me is how many winks I get. Not that it’s a BAD thing — hey, anyone who worships the Goddess is A-OK in my book! But fine, you wink at me. I know to go check out your ad.
But … it’s frustrating if you don’t fill out your profile. I mean, yay if you went far enough to upload a photo. At least that’s something to work with. But for those of you who have the big ol’ question mark placeholder where a photo should be, no winkies back at you.
Furthermore, if you don’t fill out your profile, WTF am I supposed to do with the wink you sent? I receive a message that Genius101 sends me a wink and I can’t think of one goddamned thing to say to strike up a conversation with him, so what do I do? Nothing. So I delete the message.
The bottom line here? If you can’t think of something to say in your profile OR in your correspondence to people whom you want to view your profile, pull your ad off the site. You’re not ready to use it yet.
But is it better than seeing these people looking at your profile and them not bothering to contact you at all? I just assume I’m not their type. I’ll go check them out — and some of them might even be up my alley (or that’s where they’ll get if they’re lucky. LOL) but I tend to assume they would have said hello had they actually been interested.
I have one other maybe not so much a rule, but more of a WTF moment to process. One dude sent me a wink. I checked out his profile and his username includes a city (and, oh, AGE) that I think is way too far out of my dating range. I wasn’t overly wowed by the person in the photo (not that I have a real mental picture of what I want anymore), and the profile was — surprise — empty. So I actually tried to be nice and said thank you for winking. No encouragement to continue this “discussion” as it were.
Hell if I didn’t open a can o’ worms with that. I’ve gotten instant messages from him (I don’t know how that function got enabled — I killed it quickly). He sent another message asking why I didn’t answer my IM. (Because I don’t answer anybody’s, even my colleagues if I can’t find time to talk to them. LIVE WITH IT.) I know another message came at some point a few weeks back.
And then, I haven’t logged in to the site in forever (haven’t needed to), and yet I see more messages popping up from him when my account is clearly inactive.
Am I missing a good thing, am I just such an unforgettably blinding beauty, and/or am I wrong to need to spell it out that he would have heard back from me if I’d felt compelled to respond? (Respond to what is the bigger question, but I digress.)
I did open the messages today. Nothing exotic. He’s up to a full sentence now, telling me how pretty he thinks I am. That’s it. No more, no less. I don’t know whether that’s flirting or stalking, truth be told. I mean, it’s nice to be worshipped but judging from the other guy who totally wowed me today, it was abundantly clear that he took the time to read my profile. And he commented on it. And told me how he relates to various things I said. It was, for all intents and purposes, a conversation.
So when you get really good responses, it tends to make you delete the other ones faster. And my response to this guy was very simply to thank him for giving me hope for this online odyssey after all. Astrologically, I don’t see compatibility, but it might just be everywhere else. And I tell you, I haven’t had much luck with my favored Gemini/Aries/Aquarius/Libra/Leo set of late, so I’m willing to put down the charts and see if the Big Dipper exists in someone else’s constellation. 😉
When it comes to previous hits and misses in my dating cycle, I realized that I have spent a lot of time wondering what I said or did to offend or otherwise drive away various people who have crossed my path in my day. But then I had to ask myself whether some of these chuckleheads ever stopped to think about what they could have done to keep me around or what they said or did to make me steel my spine and never feel like I could relax around them?
For example, I can name two guys with whom I insisted on paying for myself at all times. In both instances, I would have been happy for them to do so, but I know with one in particular (see the very first graf of this epic tome), I figured if he could maintain that I wasn’t marriage material, I would look at our dates as just two friends who had no one better to spend the evening with. It’s not that I WANTED to look at things that way; I did it for myself, to delineate the “I don’t know what the fuck it is we are, whether it’s a couple or friends or what the hell ever” into a “We’re friends. Damn it. I can live with ‘friends.'”
I’m not going into these new things for friendship. I don’t need any more friends. I’ve got great ones. If I’m doing this, I’m going for the gold here. Not necessarily the wedding band gold (please, make it platinum. *cough*) but companionship gold. I’ve had too many arm’s-length relationships, whether it was of my own doing or because of theirs. I need the closeness. I need that hug that’s going to make everything all better.
I need to know that, if everyone’s in it to possibly win it, they’re not going to say they can’t marry me because of something I’m not. Instead, I want the ones who know they’d be fools to let someone as dynamic as me spend the rest of my life loving someone else — and who will do something about it.
August 15th, 2007 at 1:16 PM
Dear Goddess,
Well, you quoted me about “riding my own melt…” (inadvertently by quoting Reality Bites), so I must not hesitate to elaborate on some of your latest blog, with some Troy Dyer thoughts and theories.
First, relationships are about chemistry between man and woman, between man and man, or between woman and woman.
Age, ethnicity, and (arguably) social tolerance play very little role in what makes us bind our loins in mating or in matrimony.
Smell the sweet scent of the sex’s desires, and you will know why the stars pale in gravity’s pull for a planet or god the likes of Venus or Zeus.
Even a hateful lover’s kiss can taste of intoxication beyond all logic.
What is the reason for this mis-match of mates?
I have a theory. It starts back in pre-historic times, perhaps 80,000 or 100,000 years ago.
When Helen Childress (writer of Reality Bites), and I used to have long talks about men and women and their ships-passing-in-the-night fears, I would always espouse my veritable garden of gab by enlightening her about the Troy Dyer “Herd Theory”.
I formulated the “Herd Theory” back in 1989, when I was struck by “cupid’s stupid” (a moment of rationality and reason leaving one’s person for the sake of sexual satisfaction or gratification of such needs independent of real world needs or desires), and I believed for a short time that nothing would pull me away from dumb (read; pheromoneal induced insanity) desires.
It’s quite a bit different than Laura Zigman’s Animal Husbandry novel, in that my theory has its primary focus in the “rapist-bastard” realm. Perhaps you remember reading in the news that such characteristics of rape and illegitimate fatherhood were found to be genetic and ingrained in the male mind much like salmon spawning grounds for certain carnivorous fish…
Lets start with the typical, pre-historic father within a female tribe’s village.
Women need sperm (and security), while homo erectus man needed multiple, passive females along the varied and distant hunting trails of the wild beasts he killed, ate and made clothes from… Which, according to the Troy Dyer “Herd Theory”, meant the man would father different children, at different settlements, with different women who were best suited to raise, rear and remain responsible for his offspring while he was away spearing beasts and sustaining his genetic materials at differing outposts along the killing paths.
What does all this mean for you?
Pick a boy-toy who’s hot, smells and tastes yummy, and get ready to throw away the hope chest, wedding bell honeymoon bull, and be rocked-and-rolled into a nest of happy offspring. Just don’t count on having a storybook life, or a particularly pleasant one. That is just the will of the Fates.
T.D.