Match Schmatch (T-Minus 486 Days)

In an effort to distract myself from the relationship previously referred to as “neither defined nor satisfying,” I decided to take matters into my own hands and dive into some online dating. I have dabbled in the venue on and off over the last few years, never with much success, but the commercials somehow always draw me in and convince me to give it another go.

Maybe that sweet, tall, dark, handsome independently-wealthy cyclist with a random desire to move west and has an equally intense love for college basketball, good wine and his parents will somehow magically be searching at the same time for a work-a-holic, closet-commitment phobe with trust issues and a severe case of a third-life crisis (let’s face, we’re all past the quarter-life).

I mean, it happens all the time, right?

Anyway, about a month into this, I would love to report that such an event actually happened. Or that I met someone the complete opposite of all those things and I realized that’s who I really wanted.

Instead, I was reminded of all the reasons I cancelled my subscriptions on the previous attempts.

After filtering through the emails, “winks,” “nudges,” and other assorted means of cyber flirting from all of the guys that were either: atrocious spellers (I am intelijent), borderline midgets, “recently separated,” downright creepy, holy rollers, using a profile photo from circa 1995, outright mama’s boy and/or posing shirtless with a motorcycle, sports car or woman that’s been blacked out, I found a few possibilities.

The first two were crossed off the list after a few email exchanges and, in one case, a phone call. I judge you for your grammar and punctuation use; what can I say? The third one, however, not only garnered a first date, but a second and a third.

This is going to be mildly embarrassing because I definitely lied to at least one of you about where I met this guy, but really, as of now, it’s a moot point. So, without further ado, because of his status as a PhD student in geology, we’ll call him Rock Doc.

On paper, Rock Doc sounded entirely promising. He holds at least a handful of characteristics mentioned above as ideal and shared enough common interests that I figured he would at least be a cool guy to get to know. I had a pretty OK time on date one and was pleasantly surprised at the end of it when he said he would call the next day to set up round two.

What I thought would be a single phone call, opened up a string of incessant communication, all sandwiched between a daily good morning and goodnight text that were nowhere near the hours that a non-student/working professional such as myself finds herself going to bed or waking up.

I told myself it was cute.

And then I ignored the glaring red flags on date two and went for the third, thinking it might be the charm. Instead, I found myself deciding once and for all that this was not the person for me. No big deal, right? It had only been three dates and clearly if I felt like I had more chemistry making out with my pillow (hypothetical), then he would feel that way too.

Besides, I was leaving on a road trip for several days; the timing to extricate myself was perfect.

The barrage of text messages continued though. And daily email updates were added with declarations of “I miss you, hurry home,” suggestions of possible long-term plans and an embarrassing whole paragraph of Rock Doc devising a formula to turn the number of days I was gone into the number of kisses I owed when I got home. I think I ever read a sentence about weekends counting double before I deleted it all together.

Because, by this point, I had known him for six days, and for those of you that know me, that is not my style. I can wallow in a grey area for weeks. Months. Years.

Now I wish I could say I have handled this like a mature woman and gently explained to him that I didn’t feel like this was the right time to get in a relationship, that I didn’t see it going anywhere or that I hoped that we could still be friends.

In short, that it’s not him; it’s me.

Instead though, I have blatantly ignored. Texts, emails, calls – I have not answered or replied to a single one for a week now. I am certainly not proud of my behavior; I didn’t mean for everything to go unacknowledged for this long, but what’s done is done.

And for now, neither defined nor satisfying doesn’t seem so bad.