Six: The End

How has it only been seven? How am I not on Forty-Seven? How am I this exhausted after a measly seven dates?

You’re going to get the brunt of my mood tonight. I hope you don’t mind. Six started showing flaws. Seven was a nightmare.

Ok, fine. Let’s get this out there: Six stopped communicating some time early yesterday. I brushed it off as not a huge loss, because my list of his accumulating flaws was growing by the encounter.

1. He took FOREVER to decide what to do on Saturday. I spent a good ten minutes rolling my eyes on my end of the phone as he hemmed and hawed over what to do in his own town. It was uncomfortable how long he took. In the end I suggested we meet in the middle and go to his favorite museum.
2. He didn’t know what states make up New England. If you think this is beyond offensive, you’re going to love,
3. He thought, because New England is, admittedly, made up of mostly white people, that they were all rich Republicans. Dude, have you seen the demographics of conservatives and liberals in this country? How can you, as a history major, not know that New England has ALWAYS been a pioneer on the liberal front, embracing Vermont’s legalization of gay marriage AGES ago, Massachusetts’s mandated health care, and Maine. Maine speaks for itself, doesn’t it? It’s Maine for crying out loud.
4. He was completely city-centric. He tended to make multiple comments per encounter about how I lived in the middle of nowhere, outside of civilization, outside the reach of electricity. Had he ever been to my town? No. Did he care to hear that my town was only an hour outside of the city? No. Did he listen when I said that it has a population of 70,000 people and, relative to where I grew up (where the population was a tenth of that and there were no grocery stores and the nearest HIGHWAY was an hour away, never mind a city [three and a half hours, in case you were wondering]) it was quite sizeable? No. I started to grow concerned over whether my future plan to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere would coincide with his plan to be a fancy pants international lawyer at the country’s epicenter.
5. He would send pointed text messages, asking me specific questions, and then, when I would reply, take HOURS to respond. Annoying. If you’re too busy to talk, then don’t text me.
6. There was no chemistry, really. After our second date, I found myself thinking, “Oh, I hope he doesn’t kiss me.” Never a good sign. Not that I was ducking and running like I have with other men (AH HEM, SEVEN!). I was never turned off by him, but I was never dying to get into his pants.
7. And, not to be a bitch, but he lives at home with his parents. And not because of unfortunate circumstances. No, he owns a townhouse that he shares with his friends, but it came out at the end of our second date that he hasn’t stayed there in five months. He’s been living at home, never fully moving into freedom. That’s a kind of momma’s boy I began wondering if I even wanted to touch.

But all of these flaws seemed like things that would come up in the future, and I am doing my best to not jump immediately into THE FUTURE and MARRIAGE and CHILDREN and IF I CAN’T SEE MYSELF WALKING DOWN THE AISLE WITH YOU THEN THIS IS OVER, you know? I’m working on hey that was a fun date and that was a nice conversation and I like how you just put your hand on my back.

Baby steps.

But when he didn’t even try to kiss me at the end of our second date, and I didn’t stress over the lack of intimacy, and when he didn’t respond to my text message that I hope he got home safely, I anticipated never hearing from him again.

This is not a post with any intention of bashing. In fact, can we all rise and give Six a resounding round of applause, because what happened next is worthy of nothing less.

He called me. He called me this morning and told me that he had a really fun time on Saturday and then listed off the reasons why he didn’t think the timing was right: he was applying to law schools far away, he would be busy with applications, and we lived awfully far away from each other, all of which was a roundabout way of saying that he just wasn’t that into me.

But MY GOD he CALLED ME and WAS A GROWN UP. It’s a (belated) Christmas miracle!

(It’s sick and twisted that I’m kind of more attracted to him after the phone call than I was before, right? Yes. Say yes.)

I don’t know what he expected from me, probably not what he got because he avoided my response for a while, rambling off excuse after excuse, all while I sat on my bed smiling like an asshole. And when he was done, I gushed, “Thank you SO much for calling to tell me that. I REALLY appreciate it.” What a refreshing change of pace!

He must have thought I was insane.

But, you know, he was fun. Not uninhibited and outgoing kind of fun like I prefer, but we had a nice time. There is no need to burn bridges. Maybe we’ll still hang out as friends. Maybe, one day, I’ll need a good lawyer. Lord knows, with the way things have been looking lately in the land of love, I will.

Six: Continued

For the sake of anonymity, let’s say that we met in Chicago. We met at the farthest Subway station and took the train into the city. We got off at the stop for The MoMA, circled the museum, and stopped in all of the gift shops. Apparently we’re both suckers for museum stores. Afterwards, in the freezing cold (or was it the stifling humidity?), we walked the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, the skin of our legs going numb through our pants.

You know my policy on writing about people that are still being worked out: it feels very wrong. But just know that Six is still continuing. In a very tall, friendly way. And when my text message noise sounds or the phone rings, I find myself hoping it’s him.

Six

Sixth time’s a charm? Who knows. I think it’s fair to say that, considering what’s already happened in this experiment, that anticipating the worst is to be expected. Getting ready frantically at the last minute, throwing on a shirt that doesn’t quite fit as it should, noticing the clump of eyeliner in the corner of my eye, and covering up a stain with a cardigan becomes all that I can muster.

I didn’t care about Six. I didn’t care about this stupid date at this stupid coffee shop. And I certainly didn’t care if I looked a steaming pile of shit when I walked in to meet him.

Let me elaborate: I had on a button down, camel-colored shirt that I bought at H&M ages ago and hadn’t worn in years. I threw on a J. Crew floral cardigan to cover a stain on the right side of my stomach and to hopefully hide the fact that when I sat down, the buttons down the front of the shirt gaped open, revealing the magenta of my bra, the pale white of my skin.

But really, who gives a fuck? Just another stupid date out of fifty-two. I was getting sloppy. I was also coming off of an afternoon of packing up my life and my dog into the back seat of my car and transferring it all to my mother’s apartment because my furnace stopped working, and I was left with a house slowly sinking into the low 50’s. With the idea of a multiple thousand-dollar home repair looming in the somewhat near future, I was in no mood for being fun and flirtatious.

I left late. My mother was not pleased with me depositing my skittish dog in her new apartment, on her new carpets that she had bought THAT MORNING. I don’t blame her. So I did my best to empty the dog’s bladder on every fire hydrant and sign post that we could walk by, and when I left twenty minutes before 4pm, knowing full well that it took me thirty minutes to get to where we were meeting, I didn’t care. I looked like shit. I felt frantic.

At ten minutes before four, I ran into a nasty stretch of holiday traffic and came to a standstill. Shit.

Luckily I had Six’s phone number, so I called him from my stopped position on the highway.

He picked up the phone and said, “This is Six.” Hm. His voice was kind of hot. How is it that I’m old enough to be dating men who sound like such MEN? I remember when I ran the risk of dating some boy who sounded like a chipmunk. Now they all sound SEXY. I faltered a bit. Shit, I thought. Maybe I should have put on a more flattering top. The truth was that my breasts were everywhere in this shirt, and there is nothing that I hate more than being self-conscious of my cleavage. It’s a more recent acquisition in my life, my small B’s turning resolutely into D’s during the year and a half I took birth control. Even though I have been off of it for a number of years now, the breasts have stayed, a constant reminder of my past promiscuity.

I don’t like them. I think they’re just another part of my body that is fat, is oversized, that struggles to fit into clothing. So when I say that my boobs were all over the place in this shirt, it’s not a good thing. It’s a situation that makes me highly uncomfortable, and when I feel physically uncomfortable (in too tight pants, too high heels, too short a shirt), I am miserable. I get a little obsessive. I have a hard time focusing on anything other than my boobs all over the place or the pain in my feet of the waistband digging into my stomach.

You see where I’m going here, right? I should have rethought my outfit entirely.

But I didn’t care. I was meeting him for a short hour, if that, and getting the hell out of dodge.

Except now his voice sounded sexy, and when we moved towards the end of the conversation he added quickly, “Thanks for calling to let me know.”

Hm. Polite. Sexy voice.

But no worries. I am bitter and jaded, remember? I still figured it would all go to shit when I got there. He would be awkward and uncomfortable and ugly and I could go home after an hour and spoon my pup.

I didn’t arrive as late as I anticipated. I was about ten minutes late, and when I walked in and saw him across the room, I REALLY regretted underestimating the outfit.

FUCK! He was ATTRACTIVE! I think a very safe generalization is that people put the best pictures of themselves up. Pictures that don’t capture the extra inch of fat around their stomach, the awkward way in which they walk or carry themselves, the way their eyes constantly blink when they’re talking. But somehow Six had missed that memo. His pictures didn’t do him justice at all because here he was standing up from his high stool and pulling one out for me and he was confident and tall and smiling and smart (like, intimidatingly so) and, damn it, he was attractive.

I’ve definitely learned from every date that I’ve been on so far, and if I have learned anything from this one it is to anticipate the worst, but dress for the best. Because, as much as I tried to fight it, what always happens when I feel uncomfortable happened: I wasn’t at my best. There were some moments of silence. There was loud jazz playing in the background. And all I could think about was how slouchy I was, how much my shirt must be gaping open, how my breasts were EVERYWHERE, taking up my ENTIRE BODY, covering my stomach and my legs and my feet and my face and how can he not be staring directly at them because they are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

I’d say the best part was when we got up to leave and I gratefully zipped up my jacket, covering the whole shirt debacle. Walking out to the car and standing by the back of it was, by far, the most comfortable I had been the entire night, in spite of the cold. We talked freely and easily then about Pixar and Civics and the Patriots. Here’s hoping that will be a more lasting impression than the one of me scrambling onto the tall stool like a little person and my ridiculous Dolly Parton breasts pushing and craning to be seen, because, um, I totally texted him when I got home.

Yeah, that’s right. I contacted him first. And we all know what that means.