One date with Стефани
Nov. 14th, 2010 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI ran randomly across Стефани's profile while my account was still set at "seeking friends only" from my last date with Лариса. I sent her a message and we struck up a conversation about bicycle travel, and it must have gone better than she expected because she asked me on a date.
We arranged to have coffee together and tell stories about our ambitious bike tour plans. I could see from the photos that she was very attractive, especially in the third photo she'd posted, of herself in a leotard-like halloween costume, shot from behind with her head turned, glancing over her shoulder flirtatiously. Her ass was a triumph of exercise and genetics and she knew it.
The second I rolled up to her on my bike, and again when I looked into her eyes, I knew that the photos had been truthful. I felt a nice thrill of lust jittering up my spine. And yet ... Two things immediately began to interfere with it. First, we went inside to order coffee, and I noticed that from some angles, she looked alarmingly like my older sister. It was confusing. I imagined looking over at her from my pillow in the middle of the night, in the haze of light through the blinds, and seeing my sister asleep next to me. NO.
Second, we began talking, and her attractiveness did not seem to increase as I got to know her. It stayed at a kind of blank, steady baseline. Slowly I realized that there was a wall up around her, over which only a few stray waves of enthusiasm could pass. Perhaps she was burned out from a recent breakup. Perhaps she was having an off day. Perhaps she found me profoundly ugly and was massively disappointed, and bad at hiding it. I couldn't tell. What I did know was that she was damped down like a campfire in a rainstorm.
Her sense of humor - so evident and charming in her emails - was not present in person. In person she was more like the profile that she wrote. Straightforward, frank, honest, but not very engaging or funny. As we discussed bicycling and travel and our jobs, I realized that she would make an extremely reliable, competent, useful companion to have along for an extended bike trip, but unless she had a wholly different side to herself that was currently hidden away, we would not be happy together. I chewed this over in the corners of my mind during our conversation, and I found it strange that she had decided to answer my message on the dating site in the first place. She had only been a member for about two weeks.
I asked her directly. "Of all the messages you got, why did you respond to mine?"
She thought for a while, and said, "You asked a compelling question. That was different. Most of the other messages have been like sales-pitches, or full of pretentious language ... or lame comments about my halloween costume."
"I can understand that," I said, going for the flirt angle. "Your halloween costume is pure dynamite."
She smiled shyly, but didn't respond.
Despite her closed-off nature, she had interesting things to say, and we had a good time discussing world travel. She stayed around for as long as she could before she had to bike home and go to bed, and she seemed eager to schedule something new, which I took as a positive sign. But as I was biking home, I put it to myself: "Am I actually interested in her? Do I think that this initially standoffish meeting could eventually morph into something better? Something open-hearted in the way I want? If I set up a second date would it just be because of her body?"
I wasn't sure. I needed her to be more alive, but I didn't think she would be willing.
A week later I had confirmation of that: She said that the vibe she got from me was "just friends". Mulling over what I knew, what stuck out the most was her admission that her dating profile was only two weeks old. I guessed she was in the aftermath of a recent breakup, and was absolutely terrified of anything that would start or become something real. She wanted a series of people she could try on like hats and then remove, to color the days while she sifted through wreckage.
Or perhaps she did just think I was ugly!
And there was another possibility. I didn't know enough to say if it applied to Стефани, but I had realized an interesting thing over the last year or so of dating as a grown-ass adult:
Some people who are emotionally shut down from a traumatic breakup go onto the dating sites in deliberate search of people who are not very emotionally present, or even people who are not very nice, because they want the distraction of a sex life, but they want it with someone they can walk away from, and have no danger of getting attached to. Feelings of attachment are the enemy for them. So if they go on a date with someone who seems charming and nice and expressive and appears to want the same thing in return, they will be instinctively repulsed. Take your potential attachment and scram, you lunatic!
So far, so reasonable. But here's the thing that I had to realize: Women do this as much as men. Women, whom popular culture insists are too wise to be driven by mere sexual need, and are always entirely aware of their emotions, can fall into exactly the same rut that men do post-breakup, and spend lots of time with nice-looking but audaciously flawed partners, choosing them instinctively, when they should be giving more attention and space to their own emotional health. Some poor souls get caught in this like a loop, and despair without irony over the fact that dating is miserable and impossible, and conclude things like "men are trash."*
I didn't think that would be Стефани's fate, but I wondered if she was heading into at least one round of "low stakes" dating. I wished her well. Perhaps I would see her around on bike rides.
* (As an aside, it's well weird, living in a part of the world where a man would never dream of saying something so demeaning and senseless as "women are trash," because he knows better -- but where I can sit at a restaurant table in a mixed-gender crowd and hear a woman shout "men are trash," and see the statement greeted with applause and praise. This is a place we need to get out of, and it's going to be a long, ugly road.)
We arranged to have coffee together and tell stories about our ambitious bike tour plans. I could see from the photos that she was very attractive, especially in the third photo she'd posted, of herself in a leotard-like halloween costume, shot from behind with her head turned, glancing over her shoulder flirtatiously. Her ass was a triumph of exercise and genetics and she knew it.
The second I rolled up to her on my bike, and again when I looked into her eyes, I knew that the photos had been truthful. I felt a nice thrill of lust jittering up my spine. And yet ... Two things immediately began to interfere with it. First, we went inside to order coffee, and I noticed that from some angles, she looked alarmingly like my older sister. It was confusing. I imagined looking over at her from my pillow in the middle of the night, in the haze of light through the blinds, and seeing my sister asleep next to me. NO.
Second, we began talking, and her attractiveness did not seem to increase as I got to know her. It stayed at a kind of blank, steady baseline. Slowly I realized that there was a wall up around her, over which only a few stray waves of enthusiasm could pass. Perhaps she was burned out from a recent breakup. Perhaps she was having an off day. Perhaps she found me profoundly ugly and was massively disappointed, and bad at hiding it. I couldn't tell. What I did know was that she was damped down like a campfire in a rainstorm.
Her sense of humor - so evident and charming in her emails - was not present in person. In person she was more like the profile that she wrote. Straightforward, frank, honest, but not very engaging or funny. As we discussed bicycling and travel and our jobs, I realized that she would make an extremely reliable, competent, useful companion to have along for an extended bike trip, but unless she had a wholly different side to herself that was currently hidden away, we would not be happy together. I chewed this over in the corners of my mind during our conversation, and I found it strange that she had decided to answer my message on the dating site in the first place. She had only been a member for about two weeks.
I asked her directly. "Of all the messages you got, why did you respond to mine?"
She thought for a while, and said, "You asked a compelling question. That was different. Most of the other messages have been like sales-pitches, or full of pretentious language ... or lame comments about my halloween costume."
"I can understand that," I said, going for the flirt angle. "Your halloween costume is pure dynamite."
She smiled shyly, but didn't respond.
Despite her closed-off nature, she had interesting things to say, and we had a good time discussing world travel. She stayed around for as long as she could before she had to bike home and go to bed, and she seemed eager to schedule something new, which I took as a positive sign. But as I was biking home, I put it to myself: "Am I actually interested in her? Do I think that this initially standoffish meeting could eventually morph into something better? Something open-hearted in the way I want? If I set up a second date would it just be because of her body?"
I wasn't sure. I needed her to be more alive, but I didn't think she would be willing.
A week later I had confirmation of that: She said that the vibe she got from me was "just friends". Mulling over what I knew, what stuck out the most was her admission that her dating profile was only two weeks old. I guessed she was in the aftermath of a recent breakup, and was absolutely terrified of anything that would start or become something real. She wanted a series of people she could try on like hats and then remove, to color the days while she sifted through wreckage.
Or perhaps she did just think I was ugly!
And there was another possibility. I didn't know enough to say if it applied to Стефани, but I had realized an interesting thing over the last year or so of dating as a grown-ass adult:
Some people who are emotionally shut down from a traumatic breakup go onto the dating sites in deliberate search of people who are not very emotionally present, or even people who are not very nice, because they want the distraction of a sex life, but they want it with someone they can walk away from, and have no danger of getting attached to. Feelings of attachment are the enemy for them. So if they go on a date with someone who seems charming and nice and expressive and appears to want the same thing in return, they will be instinctively repulsed. Take your potential attachment and scram, you lunatic!
So far, so reasonable. But here's the thing that I had to realize: Women do this as much as men. Women, whom popular culture insists are too wise to be driven by mere sexual need, and are always entirely aware of their emotions, can fall into exactly the same rut that men do post-breakup, and spend lots of time with nice-looking but audaciously flawed partners, choosing them instinctively, when they should be giving more attention and space to their own emotional health. Some poor souls get caught in this like a loop, and despair without irony over the fact that dating is miserable and impossible, and conclude things like "men are trash."*
I didn't think that would be Стефани's fate, but I wondered if she was heading into at least one round of "low stakes" dating. I wished her well. Perhaps I would see her around on bike rides.
* (As an aside, it's well weird, living in a part of the world where a man would never dream of saying something so demeaning and senseless as "women are trash," because he knows better -- but where I can sit at a restaurant table in a mixed-gender crowd and hear a woman shout "men are trash," and see the statement greeted with applause and praise. This is a place we need to get out of, and it's going to be a long, ugly road.)
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Date: 2025-05-21 12:48 pm (UTC)