vinylgirl's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fantasy Man and Friday Man There it is. The first, "Sorry, I was tired and fell asleep" message. Why does it feel like such a personal affront? The thing is, I don't even know the man. That's the embarrassing part. We swiped right on a dating app and started chatting over text. That texting went from getting to know you and banter to flirting to almost sexting to a text-relationship, if that's a thing. I know it's not. Somehow it feels like we have a something even though it's objectively nothing. I know that, rationally, and yet I'm still hurt. And I feel so stupid for feeling hurt. I don't even know him. We haven't had any real conversations. I've seen more than a glimpse of his face. Yet we're saying that we miss each other and that we can't wait to meet. Surely, this is a recipe for disaster. It started a couple of weeks ago. I looked at his profile and thought he was cute. A ginger man with a big beard and great taste in music. I swiped right. He swiped right and we started to chat. I made the move I always make now and asked him out immediately. He said he'd love to, but there was one catch: he was currently living in the UK and wouldn't be moving back to Canada for a few weeks. Sigh. It should have ended here. I should have said, "Oh, okay. Why don't you get back in touch when you've moved and maybe we can grab a drink?" Instead, we decided to use the intervening weeks to get to know each other. So we've been chatting nearly every day. Mostly about music and TV and books and movies. About our hobbies and interests. And mainly about the attraction we share. We have a crush on each other. We like each other. We wish that we were together. We make plans for our first date. I'll show him my favourite places in my city and he will teach me about photography. It's all so romantic. It's all fantasy. The fantasy will always be the greener grass. He has no snags right now. There's no downsides. No other shoe has dropped. I can give him any voice I want in my head. I can imagine that our chemistry is galvanic. I can imagine our interactions as seamless. I can imagine our future is solid. It's a nice easy mental shortcut and break from the stream of disappointing reality. But there is a reality with him. I ask him when he's moving and he won't tell me a date. He says he wants it to be a surprise. I send the eyeroll emoji. He says that he thinks that he should come directly to me from the airport. The butterflies flutter. It's a fun fantasy, but it's a fantasy. Until he actually appears in this city, it's not real. It reminds me of when I had Internet boyfriends. Boys I met in chat rooms or on message boards with whom I spent whole evenings chatting and for whom many nights lying in bed pining. Now that I look back, I realize that when I was pining for these unreal boys, I missed out on all the real boys around me. That's what I worry I'm doing now. I'm focusing all this energy on the fantasy and not on the real men I could be dating or that I am trying to date. I want to grab myself by the shoulders and give myself a good shake and ask why. On Friday I went on a second date with a really lovely man. A man who's touch sends a jolt of electricity through my body. I remember on our first date we sat at the bar our thighs pressed up against each other. He kept touching my arm or my back or my knee and sending live current through my body. We had a great conversation about music and life and love. And we had a very romantic (and sexy) first kiss in the rain under my umbrella. For the first time in this new round of dating, I sent him a message the next day saying what a good time I had with him. I decided that even if I wasn't sure that he was the one, he was one for right now. Our second date was great, too. More great conversation. So much so that the restaurant staff started stacking all of the chairs on the tables around us. We shut the restaurant down. I remember he mentioned that he lived close by. He proposed that we go to his to drop off our leftover pizza and then we could go and get a night cap somewhere else. I knew that as soon as we walked through his door we weren't going anywhere but to his bedroom. I was petting one of his cats, sitting on the floor, when he came back from the bathroom and sat down beside me. We talked about his guitar and he strummed a few chords on it and then put it back on it's stand. He pulled me close and kissed me. He is such a good kisser. His lips are soft and he knows how to apply just the right pressure - firm, but not hard. So we sit there making out on his floor until his hands start to wander and then he pulls me up, saying we should move to his room. We kiss a bit more in his kitchen. I have to stand on my tip toes to reach him without heels and I like the way his arms feel around my waist. His roommate burst through the door and we quickly separate, a bit sheepish. He tells me not to worry as he leads me by the hand down the hall to his room. It's a classic single man's room with a cheap Ikea bedframe, a lonely dresser (with a bong on it) and a laptop sitting on a kitchen chair that's being used as a sidetable. It kind of makes me cringe, but it's too late now. My body has decided it wants this and there's no going back. He's a wonderful lover with a sensual touch and we spend the next two hours nude and intertwined. Talking and kissing and caressing and... you know. He gives me not one, but two intense orgasms. I'm a little scared of falling into that old trap where the oxytocin from my orgasm tells my heart that we love this man and makes me a bit crazy. I tell him I should go soon and that I can't stay over. He understands and we get dressed and walk to his car. He drives me home and we chat some more. Somehow this already feels homey - relationship homey. I think to myself that I could see us on road trips. He says he wants to go for a walk with my dog soon. We kiss some more when we reach my place and I pull away, saying we're playing with fire. He says he's going to miss me and my insecure brain forces me to say, "You miss me because you don't know me. Once you know me a bit better, you won't miss me so much." I don't know why I felt the need to say it. He was just trying to be sweet. I'm so suspicious of men who are too emotionally available and open with their feelings, especially if they are positive feelings about me. Though I can't blame him entirely. I attribute a lot of this recent feeling to my ex-husband. It was New Year's Eve and we were in New York City. He had whisked me away very romantically after a whirlwind month of dating. As we sipped our first cocktails, he told me he loved me. A huge leap. I said that I was falling in love with him. That word has always been troublesome for me. I've often said it after someone said it to me and hurt their feelings in the process. He was hurt. At the end of the night, when we decided to leave, he was in pure problem solving mode. It was NYE in NYC and everyone would be trying to get a cab. I was a bit upset as someone stole my flats from my coat, foiling my plan to be comfortable at the end of the night. So I shuffled in my leopard print pumps as snow fell. He tried to hail a cab close to the venue, but it was proving impossible. He said we should walk at least a couple blocks to try and hail one. Tired and a bit annoyed (see: heels and not flats), I was a bit of a brat and said I didn't want to walk miles in my heels. So we managed to hop into a private limo and paid a fortune to get back to our hotel. We had our first fight that night on the sidewalk. A fight I would hear about many more times over the course of our relationship. No doubt I behaved a bit badly, but most people would be a bit more generous than he was and chalk it up to walking in the cold and in heels. He looked at it as an indictment. He thought this was the "real me" coming out and he wasn't so sure he liked it. In some ways, it was the real me as in the whole me - a whole human who has good days and bad days and sometimes behaves badly. He didn't want the whole human. He wanted the good days only. He often talked about my attitude and my mood and how I needed to adjust them. This led me to the belief that the whole me was flawed and that I needed to be careful about how and when I show the whole me. I think it also led me to be suspicious of anyone who liked the whole me. Surely, there must be something wrong with them if they like the whole me, flaws and all. And that's kind of where I am with Mr. Friday. He's really sweet and seems to really like me and so I'm very suspicious of him. There must be something wrong with him. I mean, there are some things that are less than ideal. A brief list: -He was married and is now divorced; For some reason, when a man really likes me, it sets off an alarm in my head: "He must be a loser to like you. You better run now!" I start to focus in on all his negatives and lose sight of the positives. I get stuck in my own head instead of just relaxing into things and enjoying whatever happens now. I can't seem to just say, "You know what? I don't have to know right now whether this is going anywhere. I just have to enjoy the moment." Sometimes I do turn it off and it still goes poorly. I knew Jon's list of not-so-great qualities and I still gave him a shot. I tried my hardest to live in the moment with him and enjoy wherever we were headed. In the end, I still felt like I was being punished for being myself. Something was wrong for him. Something was missing from me. I wasn't right. Then I'll never be right. And I pull my kimono tighter and tighter around my body, hiding my inner life, because I'm scared to death of getting rejected again for who I am. 10:02 a.m. - 07/03/2018 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||