Jim, I’ll Take Bachelorette Number 5; You Mean There Aren’t 5?

Dating.   What can I say?  It’s so….so….awful.  First dates didn’t used to be this painful, did they?  I wish I were Gilderoy Lockhart, a member of Hogwarts faculty, and render myself an amnesiac by my own spell.  Pretty cool how hip I am culturally, huh?  One of these days I’m going to read one of those Harry Potter books.  And, hey, if I actually knew any of the inhabitants of Hogwart, I could have them make the perfect woman appear, right?  And, I’ve been feeling just a little left out of this whole Harry Potter thing.

 The first woman I met was perfect on paper.  Bright, extremely attractive, employed—she also likes to cook.  She is wickedly amusing too.  And, even better, she’s a mom to grown kids. And, she dug me.  But, something wasn’t jibing and it seemed we were trying to force a square peg in a round hole.  Nice woman–totally great.  Oh, there was also that teeny minor issue—we were both dating others and discovered we were both dating the same woman.

 

The second woman:  bright, professional, and employed but with young children—who camps and doesn’t really cook (okay, two big negatives). Conversation flowed pretty smoothly, but, it wasn’t right either, just for different reasons.  For one thing, with a psychotherapist, I’d have hated to be constantly analyzed or feel as though I were—I have enough problems, k?  Turns out though, when she found out that I was also dating the first woman, she no longer wanted to date me.  Woman 1 and 2 are now together.  Did I mention how small the dating pool is?

 

Woman number three: a scientist—funny, with a sense of humor more closely aligned with mine, joined me for dinner one night.  My take-away from the conversation was I don’t need to buy organic because all of the ground is so contaminated from years of pesticide abuse – I think this is the scientific version of romantic dinner conversation.  It seemed to go okay, especially after her third drink when she began to speak animatedly and wave her arms around over her head each time she wanted to make a point, but definitely seemed buddy material in the making—my guess is we like the same kind of women.  We emailed each other after and then she was off for a weekend of white water rafting with 150 women—she was never heard from again.  Maybe she drowned, but my guess is she found her soul-mate, rented the U-Haul and will live happily ever after for the next 3.2 years.

 

Finally:  the hiking date with the medical doctor.  The phone call should have been a clue—half of which was spent discussing her ugly breakup four years ago and her unending bitterness.  I was all worried about not being up to snuff, what with her Ivy League medical degree, when in fact she was just as fucked up as me—possibly more so.  I knew before the hike ended I’d never hear from her again, but the masochist in me had to double-check by sending her an email with photos from the trip and a suggestion to get together for a hike after her vacation.  Her reply?  “Thanks for the photos.” 

 

I’m not blaming them—no, no—it’s me, all me.  I’m just not ready to do this dating thing.  My usual confidence in such situations has definitely ebbed—I think those pesky giant clumps of aortic material I keep trying to scrape up and stuff back into my barely beating heart needs fixing first.  I’ve consulted a heart specialist, and there is hope…I’ll just have to be a patient patient. 

 

[A] final comfort that is small, but not cold:  The heart is the only broken instrument that works.  ~T.E. Kalem