First Dates

First Dates  

Easy come....Easy go!! 

I have had some terrible first dates in my life,

but I think my best first date story, as a divorcee, was yet to come.

I had no idea, how hard it would be to get my mind frame on a new person and off the fact that my family had just shattered apart.   Dating felt like the most monumental task from my perspective at the time.

So when I effortlessly meet a friend of a friend's relative one evening on a girls night out, I thought I had hit a homerun.  "Could it be this easy?" 

The guy was polite, a gentleman and gave me his number right away.  I should have had my radar up, but he was younger, in his 30s, and I was totally digging the attention.  Maybe I could get on board with this whole dating thing.

He was chill to text with, super complimentary and we spoke on the phone once. I will admit, it was totally weird at first, but I knew I had to jump into the dating cesspool eventually, why not now?

And than I did it, I made the date.

I kept it as casual as possible, because I still was not sure if I truly liked the guy or simply liked all the new found attention.  I wanted to keep an open mind and be nice.....just BE NICE I told myself.

In my younger years, I was not so nice.  If I didn't like a guy, I was a million miles away, suffering through a meal, trying to find any excuse to go home early and wondered how I would end the date without a kiss.  These were pre-cell phone days, when I had to make payphone calls to girlfriends asking for an escape.  Once I borrowed change from my date to make that call.  Proof I was not a nice date.

But, this time around, being older and wiser, I wanted to be cool and be a better person.

Sometimes, our intentions and what comes around are two very different things.  I was super open minded with just enough optimism to give the guy a fair chance. However, when the guy shows up two hours late, totally stoned things start to go in a different direction.  

He did bring a cooler of decent bottled beer,

but that was the only redeeming aspect of this pool side date.

I was polite, charming and sweet.  I did exactly what I was suppose to do.  In the meantime, I was thinking, How soon can this be over while I avoid taking off my bathing suit cover.  Thank goodness I had a prior engagement and the fact that he was late, the date only lasted two hours, a very looong two hours.  Either you click or you don't - this was definitely a non-click situation.

I made vague future plans as we walked to his car.  Deep down I knew those plans were never going to amount to much, but I was trying to be kind.    

Kindness is a double edged sword. You give and thee take-it.  And there are no returns on kindness, at least not in the dating world. 

People want to know, why you don't like them, or why didn't you return their texts? 

And they say things like, "I thought we hit it off so well."

And sometimes they get drunk and send you long, misspelled, rant texts that make you feel bad for cutting them loose.  I believe at one point I was called, "such a nice lady" I almost gagged.  No, I did F-cking gag - very much so.

Dating is awkward.  Occasionally you find someone you click with, but it takes a lot of non-clicks to find that one good-click.  

My next move would be towards dating apps, follow me down this rabbit hole next week.