A life update — including dating app tales

First, happy Juneteenth! Let’s all celebrate the end of that reprehensible part of this country’s past. (Well, let’s celebrate the legal start of equality. Institutionalized racism is a whole other subject, which I’m not well-versed enough in to discuss.)

Second, eek, it doesn’t feel like 2 weeks have passed since my last post! Probably because I’ve been running around like crazy and utterly losing track of time.

My busy schedule

As I mentioned in my last update (oh so many days ago), I’ve been socializing up a storm, including dating app interactions/dates, and getting ahead on adulting.

In the past two weeks I’ve:

• Gone to a socializing MeetUp event
• Wrangled Josie to and from the vet (including have to pin her down and get some gabapentin down her throat)
• Had two dates
• Had one go-to-the-same-event date (the socializing event mentioned above) where unfortunately neither of us was feeling it
• Had two trivia events
• Thrown a game night (including cleaning for it)
• Saw Pirate Party Guy (PPG) four times
• Worked my overtime weekend (it’s quiet but it’s still not having a break from customers for 12 days)
• Dealt with quarterly taxes: payments to the state and federal government, plus my S-Corp’s FICA.
• Had one maybe-date (I’ll get into that further down in the post)

All in all, I’m plumb beat. In fact, I actually cancelled a second date this past Thursday — but I didn’t realize how bad it was. That is, until I slept for 12 hours Friday night and 11 on Saturday night.

Don’t worry — I’ve promised my therapist that I will start scheduling a rest day after any two consecutive days of activity.

But now to the part you really tuned in for:

Dating

While I want to slow down overall, I still want to focus on finding some matches on OKCupid because the current few are TBD as people to see regularly.

The Fro-Yo Guy

This past Monday I met a guy for a chat and some frozen yogurt.

He and I got along well, but there’s a potential issue (too long to get into here). It’s sort of up to him, so it’s a wait-and-see game. But I’m not overly optimistic.

Still, I’m a bit hopeful. We had a great spark. But also, I’d absolutely love to have someone I’d refer to as Fro-Yo Guy.

The Would-Be Second Date

We had a good first date. He’s very nice and fun to talk to. But the more distance I get from our first date, the more I’m not sure I’m sufficiently attracted to him. He’s cute, but sometimes you just don’t feel it; and I’m on the fence.

So I may keep the date cancelled because, as PPG likes to say, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”

The maybe-date

This requires a fair amount of exposition.

I met this guy in late April. A mutual acquaintance of ours was having a birthday celebration at a local bar. (Should he end up being mentioned again, he’ll have the designation Birthday Party Guy.)

I thought he was cute, and we ended up having a pretty interesting conversation. So I put in a friend request via Facebook the day after the party, and he accepted the following day.

We chatted pretty regularly for about a week and a half, but the messages got more intermittent. Then a week or two later, our last message was wishing each other a fun weekend.

We’d been discussing our outlook/life goals, which were somewhat different. So I assumed he just didn’t think it was worth pursuing.

But he messaged me the night before my game night, apologizing for having just seen the invite. He already had plans, but thank you for the invitation — and how was I doing?

It turned out he’d also just gotten back on OKCupid. I gave flirting another shot, asking if he thought we’d come across each other’s profiles.

He said he didn’t see why not, and he could just send me screenshots or we could meet over a beverage to compare profiles and Q&A sections.

I consider a man asking me to meet for a beverage to be a low-key date request. However, there was a time last year that I was wrong — hence the designation of “maybe-date” this time.

We met up after a trivia event I held on the Eastside, since that was close to him. Despite our both living within the Phoenix city limits, we’re 26 miles apart. Yay urban sprawl.

We read/summarized parts of our profile to each other. Since we’d both answered hundreds of the (almost endless) user-submitted questions, we just compared the answers that we’d marked as Important. We answered the same or acceptably similarly on almost every one.

Of course, some of those answers led to us discussing life experiences or general thoughts on life — which meant backstories and tangents. As a result, we chatted for more than three hours — and we really only called it a night because it was almost midnight on a Wednesday.

So we seemed to have established some promising compatibility and it feel as though there were a spark between us.

That said, he’d read me the part of his profile where he said he preferred to meet people with no expectations beyond possible friendship, then see if anything more unfolds.

So I suspect that even if something does happen, it’ll be quite a slow build.

Bad dating app interactions

But of course, this is what many of you actually tuned in for: the hilariously bad exchanges I’ve had with guys since getting back on the apps.

I’ve posted some of these on social media, but for those of you who haven’t seen them…

Who would swipe on this?!

I didn’t even interact with this guy. I was just blown away by how his summary seemed designed to drive women away.

Self-deprecating humor is one thing. This is furiously waving your huge red flags in front of an “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” sign.

That escalated quickly

I got an intro from a guy who said his first reaction to my profile must be fake because I too good to be true but that he’d just read it again and believed I was real but just awfully cool.

How in the hell did I fall for that line? Guess I’m out of practice.

After a bit of messaging, I remembered to ask him if he’d read my full profile, since I refuse to meet with men who didn’t get the vaccine. (Admittedly, it’s more of a grudge at this point than actual worry for safety.)

He said, no he hadn’t. I said that in that case, it was a no-go.

His response:

“I admire your tenacity and compassion. You’re right that I wasn’t considering others when I made my decision. I think that since you are vaccinated, and since I have been completely healthy since before COVID, you and I have nothing to worry about. I understand standing by principles. I’m stubborn like that too, but it would be a shame to pass up on an opportunity for this to blossom into something beautiful for both of us.”

We’d exchanged maybe — maybe — 10 messages before this conversation started. There was no reason to think something beautiful was bound to “blossom.”

I replied that he really needed to learn that “no” isn’t the start of a negotiation.

He said he wasn’t “negotiating” with me. And that I was obviously worried about all the wrong things and overly self-righteous, so he was going to pass now that he knew that.

I was bored, so I engaged.

I said it was hilarious that I’d said no twice, but that somehow in his mind he was passing on me. And that I was impressed how quickly “I admire your tenacity and compassion” almost instantly turned to “self-righteous” when he realized he wasn’t going to change my mind.

He replied with four messages:

• That he loved that I thought I was so great. (I don’t think being able to see through thinly veiled BS — a second time, anyway — makes me great. Just not a sucker — again, at least not the second time.)
• That if gaslighting were a competition, I’d win. (I don’t think he quite understands that term.)
• If being a MILF with an attitude were a competition, I’d also win. (I don’t know if my attitude is actually on the level of medal-worthy, but I appreciate his faith in me.)
• That if I weren’t such a prude (???), he’d [fornicate] the attitude right out of me. (Such a generous fellow.)

Speaking of the vaccine question…

I was talking with a guy who seemed promising. Right up until I asked him if he’d read about the part in my profile about not swiping if you’re not vaccinated. (It’s the three-line first paragraph in my summary.)

He said he couldn’t believe people still asked that. Didn’t I know it expired after the three to four months?

There was more back and forth. But long story short, I was told that I should go get vaccinated every four months if I wanted, and he wasn’t interested in meeting a fanatic freak.

I told him not to worry, I was no longer offering. He replied “Disgusting” and unmatched the following day.

The “ugh” guy

I should’ve known better than to swipe on a guy who mentions his big vocabulary. I’ve already discussed what type of people tell others that they have a big vocabulary.

(The only exception I’ve found is when someone’s apologizing for using a hoity-toity word the other person did know because the first perons’s slot machine brain wouldn’t provide the normal one.)

But he mentioned the vocabulary in a (very) slightly self-deprecating way, and he was hot. So I took a chance.

Lesson learned.

I replied to his intro to say a big vocabulary was always good — that once a mild crush deepened due to the use of a 50-cent word.

His reply:

A polymath simply refers to someone who is well-versed in many subjects. Shockingly, he didn’t reply to the part of my message joking that he was missing an adjective, which I believed fit the term “smarty pants.”

But as PPG said, maybe he was just trying a little too hard to play up to what I said about big vocabularies. So I let it go and we talked about other things.

A couple days in, he sent this:

Who talks like that? Also, texting is unencrypted?

I explained that I prefer not to exchange numbers before I meet someone, since a friend had shown me just how much information you can gather with a cell number.

He replied that the information checked out, actually. Then he took the chance to plug that he was recently the IT Manager/Systems Admin for a cyber security start-up and could assure me that information is very accurate. Then he broke down the steps a hacker would use.

Truly, it was so kind of him to confirm — twice! — that the information I’d stated — without anything that could’ve hinted that I was looking for verification — was, in fact, correct.

The next morning I sent a reply to a message he’d sent and asked how his Sunday was going.

He said that he was utterly beat because he’d been helping someone who’d caused damage to the company RV and the employer was insisting the guy cover the cost of repairs.

(That scenario seems unlikely, since a company that could afford a $50,000ish vehicle –by the way, what business has a company RV? — would probably just revoke insurance on him and not let him drive anymore. But to be fair, many unlikely things happen in this world.)

He took almost a full screen of text to explain the situation and detail the various repairs. But wait, there’s more.

In the same message, he spent one and a half screens letting me know that this type of magnanimity was utterly commonplace for him. He just always helped people.

For example, he had come into some warm blankets in January and drove around town handing them out to people in need. And that he’d always help someone in need — hell, he’d give someone his last dollar if he thought they needed it more.

And if that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, I’d just like to stress that he took 1.5 screens’ worth of words to say it.

And just to add “weird or maybe slightly sleazy” to “own-horn-tooting” he ended with:

I was pretty much done at that point, but around 8:30 p.m. (on a Sunday, I remind you), he asked if I was already seeing someone that night.

I said, no, but it was far too late to start a date. And that, since many guys asking to meet at that hour think they’ll come over directly, he should know that I only meet in public the first time.

He said it was a good policy — we could both be axe murderers for all we knew — and that he hadn’t been asking to meet that night. Just asking.

I wanted a reply would either prove he could own up to BS or make him go silent — kind of a win/win, really.

So I asked why, in that case, had he used the word “already”? Because “already” is a word you use when checking for confluence either in schedules or some other intent.

I.e., wanting to see someone — “Are you already busy on [day]?” — of if you need a favor — “Are you already going to the store? If so, could you be a dear and pick up X?”

So it’s not a word you use just to see how someone’s spending their time.

Silence it was. Huzzah!

Okay, that’s about it. While I love providing you with hilarious horror stories from the trenches, selfishly I really hope that either one of the current guys works out or that I get a match with someone pretty great. But time will tell.

Howe’s everyone else holding up? Any good dating stories of your own?