Approximate reading time: 18 min
It’s been a busy week.
(I have attempted to code 12 interviews, so far, I have only coded TWO correctly!
Apparently, practice makes perfect …..I have 18 more to go!)
But it’s been fun and I have learnt some more dating lessons.
I have been thinking a lot this week about last week’s post. I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but it seems like something has just cemented in my brain this week.
It’s like I finally get it.
After years and years and years of online dating…..
I finally get that none of this is personal.
I think my head has
(In some weird way)
always known that….
but finally, my heart seems to be catching up!
Believe it or not, I am actually having fun!
Yes, you heard me.
I am enjoying my online dating!
(Most of the time;-)
So, this week I only messaged 5 new guys.
Two of the chats lead to prospective dates being planned.
#1 Stuart was from Manchester and had to cancel at the last minute. He did ask if we could reschedule for a couple of weeks time when he is down in London again, which I said would be fine …
(However, I’m not going to be holding my breath)
#2 Garreth was South African and we chatted prettily easily ….
(Us South Africans are super chilled ya’ know;-)
He said he would be coming to London this week and that he’d message me a little later to confirm a date and time.
(Famous last words)
#3 Charles was a high school teacher who had a nice profile, was good looking and seemed pretty well-balanced.
(From what he had written)
I will admit when I saw his profile one part of it made me laugh my head off….
Either it was pure genius or utter stupidity.
But either way, I couldn’t help it….I was just dying to match with him so I could find out.
The dating app that I use has a feature that allows you to choose 3 questions that you can answer that will hopefully give your future matches a glimpse into your innermost psyche!
This was the question that Charles had chosen.
So, Charles had declared his love for ‘chickens’ and then uploaded a video of what looked like Egyptian geese….
(Ummm…..?)
When we matched, I could barely contain my excitement to message him.
Ok granted,
I confess,
he had me!
I clearly didn’t know the difference between a goose and a duck.
SHAME ON ME!
……but in my defence…. the dam things do look similar.
I felt it was my civic duty to help Charles.
I mean this wasn’t someone who came from a different country and simply got his words mixed up. This was a British HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER teaching our future generation.
Charles had also stated on his profile that he wanted:
“A woman who would get an ‘outstanding’ from Ofsted in both looks and intelligence!!!”
(For those of you that aren’t British….Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. They do the inspections in schools to ensure they are doing their jobs properly and that they hire teachers who know the difference between a chicken and a duck.)
Ofsted would definitely NOT be happy about this!!!
(I even gave the man an out people!!!)
Maybe it was a TEST!!!!!
And I had just passed it!!!!
(Surely?)
Well needless to say I never heard back from Charles.
But I was giggling to myself for a WHOLE ENTIRE day…
So, it was well worth the effort.
I mean I’m sorry if you don’t know the difference between a chicken and a DUCK!!!
I can’t help you.
#4 Then I ended up messaging a police detective from Philadelphia, Darren, who was coming down to London for a month.
I will be honest….my first message from Darren was a little bit of an overload.
It was this long rambling message about how his ancestors were originally from Ireland…..
(A descendent of William the Conqueror no less)
….and then right at the end of it all, he said
“Maybe you can figure out my surname from all of that information….if you do,
I’ll buy you dinner!”
I will admit my initial thought was
“Wow this is a little intense for a first message”
…..if this is how he messages most girls he is going to send them running for the hills.
But luckily, I am not MOST girls.
I am a researcher!
Plus, I Love a challenge!
Plus,x2 a free meal sounded AWESOME!!!!!
I managed to narrow it down to 10 surnames and one of them was the correct one.
(I felt so proud)
And so, Darren and I started chatting.
He admitted that he was new to dating and that he had just come out of a 25-year marriage
which gave me a lot of patience with his general emotional overload and his
overall frustration about dating apps.
(I mean hell…NO one knows these frustrations better than me!)
He was highly confused as to how out of the 10 women that had matched with him…
I was the only one that messaged him back?
“Why do people match and then not message?“
(I know, I know……. it’s the fundamental question we all want to be answered, Darren!)
So, we chatted for a couple of days… although I was very conscious that it seemed to be a lot of him oversharing way too much information with me, way too soon…..
(But then again, really …..who am I to judge all the ‘over sharers’ of the world?)
The last message he sent on Saturday night
was a rant about people who add pronouns to their profile.
That made me laugh….and I mentioned that I had written about that in a blog post.
The next morning, I got another message complaining about
how so many women put their younger pictures first and then right at the end they post their most recent picture.
(It’s a legitimate frustration…men do that too)
How most women in the UK seem to be nurses, doctors or teachers and
“Why do so many British women seem to have huge foreheads?”
(Ummmm…..ok….)
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that message…..
and while I was contemplating an answer another message came in about how it also bugs him that
So many women over 30 are posting pictures of themselves in bikinis.
“I don’t care how good their bodies are…..if you are over a certain age, it just looks tacky!“
Mmmmmmm DAM right!
The gall of these women NOT covering up.
If only we could go back to the good old days when women knew how to dress appropriately!
While quietly contemplating how awkward my first summer holiday with Darren was going to be. Me trying to swim in a kaftan to ensure that not too much of my tacky 48-year-old body showed through….
Ping!!!!!!
“And do you want to know what my biggest gripe is?”
(Good lord there is more?)
“That stupid ducklip thing (or whatever you brits call it) Where they stick their lips out. Just no!!! Please No”
Which was then followed by a whole long rant about how he didn’t care how young, gorgeous or rich they were….
I must admit by now I was genuinely confused as to how to respond to all of his ‘complaints’.
One of half me thought that he was beginning to sound just a wee little bit misogynistic…. another half of me got it…… it is frustrating looking at hundreds of photos and noticing all these things that do annoy you continuously ….and I tooooooooo have written about them.
The kind half of me wanted to cut him some slack… because let’s face it the poor man had just jumped into the dating cesspool!
So I did something I have NEVER done before.
I just didn’t answer him.
I figured he hadn’t actually asked me anything…..there was absolutely nothing in those messages that required a response back….he was just venting.
I decided to just wait and see….. maybe he might realise that his messages were a little bit too much and reach out with something a little ‘less intense.’
Two days later I got this….
Good enough…he reached out.
So I decided to be honest about what I was feeling.
We had, after all, just had a “mini online rupture” in our non-existent online relationship …..
let’s see how he dealt with it.
I wanted to see if he could be open to hearing what I was saying.
I wanted to see if he could understand why I felt a bit put off.
I wanted to see if he could respond kindly…
My response back was this
Mmmmmm interesting…..Daren didn’t hear me at all.
What Darren seemed to have missed completely was that I was not one of his blog followers.
(Not that he had a blog….his blog comment was a mini dig at me, I do believe)
I was a woman hoping to get to know him a bit better and what I was getting to know so far wasn’t looking that appealing.
So, I made the decision that this was not the type of person I wanted to have in my life.
(Cause frankly I like wearing bikinis)
#5 Then I matched with 48-year-old Thomas.
Mmmm what can I say about Thomas?
When I first showed my flatmate Richard Thomas’s picture he said:
“Why do I feel like I have seen him before?”
To which I then burst out laughing and said:
“Because you have!!!!
ALL MY MATCHES LOOK THE SAME!!!!”
Yep, it has dawned on me that I very much have ‘A TYPE’ that looks like some variation of the following….
What can I say…I love a man with a beard.
I have nooooooo idea where that obsession came from?
Mmmmmm well, that’s not TOTALLY true….
I have an inkling….
(It is quite possible that I might be fundamentally fucked up)
In fairness to myself…I am not blinded by this….I do match with loads of men that don’t look like
Ummmm Jesus Christ…..
but I probably get way more excited about the ones that do.
Anyway, back to Thomas.
He was good-looking and an executive life coach.
After chatting for a couple of days he asked if I would like to chat on FaceTime.
I was impressed he had initiated the call ….but to be honest, I was not overly enthusiastic.
Not because our chat hadn’t been lovely, mind you ….they had been great.
But I can’t tell you how many times I have had amazing watsap chat only to discover that in person the guy’s energy is just a bit ‘bleh’.
I can chat pretty confidently with most people….I don’t want someone who is going to fall apart in a phone call and be a blabbering, anxious wreck.
Like is there anything less attractive than that?
We made plans to chat on Wednesday afternoon.
OMG
Thomas was gorgeous.
Probably a zillion times better looking in person than his photos.
He had beautiful blue eyes; an easy smile and his energy was incredible.
Cool, calm and collected.
I on the other hand……
turned into an anxious, blabbering wreck!
You know when you have that like ‘out-of-body experience’ and you are watching yourself ….and it’s like you can hear this voice in your head screaming at you
“STOOOOOOOOOOOOP TALKING GAYLE!!!!!”
But you just can’t find the off button?
Well, it was like that!!!
He just kept coming at me with these soulful questions ……and I was powerless….
to stop myself from answering them.
By the time I got off the call, I was slightly mortified and convinced that I would probably never hear from him again.
About 20 minutes after the call ended, Thomas messaged.
Thomas thought I was AWESOME!!!!!
I can’t even begin to tell you how happy and excited I was.
Having a ‘Jesus-Christ Barometer’ that is subconsciously used to measure all men against makes
DATING VERY HARD ya know!!!
I so very seldom meet men that I genuinely like…..and I was actually excited about having a date with Thomas.
We chatted a bit and I headed off home to have my usual Wednesday night dinner with my Spanish friend Marisol.
I walked into the house only to find Marisol and Patrick, a friend of Richard’s who was staying with us for a couple of days, sitting on the kitchen floor staring at the roast chicken in the oven.
Patrick, who is from Toronto, asked in his Canadian lilt:
“Is your chicken supposed to be blue?”
I had been with the cats the whole day and I had asked Richard to just bag the chicken and put it in the oven for me so it would be ready by the time I got home. He had sent me a message asking me if the blue bags were the roasting bags…..and I had said yes…..without looking properly at the picture.
Needless to say, they were NOT roasting bags.
No harm done.
We all had a good laugh and Patrick reassured me that he could save the chicken for us.
I sat at my kitchen table watching him and Marisol cooking up a storm while he practised his rusty Spanish on her and realised that they both seemed to be smiling quite a bit.
They looked soooooo sweet!
A message came in from Thomas.
He sent me a picture of his youngest son cooking dinner.
We chatted a bit about his sons.
I sent him a picture of my blue chicken. and told him the story.
He didn’t make any comment on it.
(I thought it was a pretty funny story;-)
We chatted a bit more.
The last message I sent was one of me telling him how sweet it was watching Marisol and Patrick cook together. I don’t think there is anything nicer to watch than two people who very clearly are enjoying each other’s company.
The romantic in me was in my element
Thomas didn’t respond back.
By the time I went to bed that night, I will admit I felt a bit crushed.
Call it a sixth sense,
(or perhaps I’m just a pessimist…)
I kind of knew I wasn’t going to hear back from him again.
That night as I lay in bed unable to sleep, I went back to check his profile out
and I was slightly horrified to see something that I had missed.
Under the section where you can choose what you are looking for
(i.e. ‘Relationship’; ‘Marriage’ ‘Something Casual’)
Thomas had clicked:
‘I don’t know!’
I am pretty anal-retentive when it comes to NOT matching with guys who have posted
“I don’t know!”
I am a 48 years old woman who knows what she wants and frankly,
I am ready for a man who knows what he wants too.
I started to think about how Thomas had told me that he was still going through a divorce but they hadn’t signed the papers yet.
What was I thinking?
Did I really want to get entangled with a man who still hadn’t untangled himself from his last woman?
Divorce is stressful enough as it is…..
Could any man who was trying to deal with all of that really and truly be ready to commit to someone else, especially when he has two young boys to look after…..
Could I blame him for not knowing what he wants?
Nope, not really.
Thomas had, after all, stated it very clearly for all those women out there to see.
Then it got me thinking about a blog post by Evan Marc Katz that I read years ago called “Believe the negatives, ignore the positive.
(I followed Evan’s dating post for years)
Evan speaks about how we so often ignore the things that potential new partners might be telling us. Like if a man says: “I’m not ready for a relationship” and we then continue to pursue the relationship with the giddy hope of a teenager that we might be just the person who could CHANGE all that!!
OR like when a man says “I don’t want kids!” and we hope that one day, maybe he will change his mind.
Um no.
I decided on Thursday that I was not going down this road with any man ever again.
And I certainly wasnt going to lose any (more) sleep trying to figure out what it was about me that made Thomas suddenly decide that he didn’t want to continue getting to know me.
I couldn’t help but think how lovely it had been to meet a man that I really liked…..and how exciting it would be when I meet one like that again,
who likes me back.
Number of men messaged: 52
Number of first dates: 3 (+ 1 zoom date)
Number of second dates: 2
And finally…
(the end is nigh, I promise)
On Friday night I went to a meet-up with a lovely girl, Tanya, who I’d met at that awful ‘lock and key’ party that I went to a couple of weeks ago.
Mind you this wasn’t just ANY meet-up.
This was a TALL person meet-up!
Lol I know I know, is that not the most ‘TALL-IST’ thing you have ever heard of?
Who comes up with these types of things?
(A six-foot-six single woman perhaps;-)
It was an experience.
I mean at 5 foot 11, I have always considered myself to be pretty tall for a woman….but I honestly felt like one of the shortest women there.
(Except for the 5 foot 9 women that turned up.
I mean honestly….what was she thinking?
This was where the TALL people came!!
I was wondering if our 6.6 hostess was going to have her forcibly removed…..but alas she took pity on her and allowed her to stay;-)
I had a great night.
I drank alcohol.
(I know, I know I was weak.)
I spent most of the night talking to my new friend Tanya and a really lovely man named Kevin. Kevin had this great belly laugh and seemed to enjoy my endless chatter about…
…..ummmm me!
I am not usually that self-absorbed you know, but when I have an engaging audience
(Aaaaaaand I’m drinking)
Roxy comes out and I just can’t stop her.
Life is good😉
Ps So on Friday I was listening to my ‘song-of-the-month-on-repeat’ (on YouTube music) when this song (below) just randomly started playing on my phone….except my phone is still showing that my old song is playing and I can’t find where the music is coming from AT ALL.
(It was freaky as hell I tell you!!!)
But then I listened to the words and I kinda loved it.
(I think it was a sign from the universe!!!)
The Universe was saying…
“It’s time for a new song!”
(And they say miracles don’t happen anymore!!!!!;-)