Despite the profile saying “Still after the dream of long term monogamy” she said she recently broke up with the love of her life and their sex is better than it’s ever been. This was towards the end of our video chat. A chat which she ended in almost business-like fashion by saying something along the lines of, “It was nice getting to know you. I don’t think we’ll need to have another chat… maybe we can stay in touch or something.” I don’t usually consider getting to know new people to be a waste of my time… but it was a really nice day today and I might have done something different with my time had I known some of those dynamics up front.
To think, I spend a lot of time wrangling with myself over how ready or not ready I am for a potential relationship while there are some folks out there still partially in the best relationships of their lives, still sleeping with their former partners, and maybe kinda trying to meet new people with whom they’re “looking for closeness and a possible relationship.” During the chat I tried to suggest the obvious – that maybe what they’re discovering is a way to have their “relationship” without the pressures of a relationship?
I didn’t mind that we didn’t connect. I’m genuinely sympathetic to people who are trying to figure out what they want. For the most part I believe that it’s difficult to figure out what you want in the confines of your own head – you almost have to put yourself out there and try. I also know it would have been a train wreck trying to date someone whose not even fresh out of their last relationship. While a connection wasn’t something I would have wanted to pursue, I was disheartened by the overall experience – it felt like another example of the morass that is online dating.
When we hung up, I began to think that I need to get back to basics on a few things… delete stuff, tidy up, refocus, maybe take some time off from the apps, get out into nature a bit more. I felt like I needed to revisit and revise, get some new material, slough off this old self – because what I’m currently doing doesn’t seem to be working. In those moments of contemplation, I can get carried away. In those moments I see less clearly the distinctions between babies and bathwater. Despite there being plenty of potential connections still out there, I deleted two of my profiles (the third has another week or so on the subscription). In this context, I thought about what a “clean start” might look like. Naturally, I thought about this space – not because it had any impact on this particular interaction, but because I frequently wonder if it’s served its purpose and is now holding me back in ways of which I’m unaware. Obviously, it’s still here (with a new post), but I am, once again, nagged by that question: to what end? And I’m stuck with the same old answer – I’m not sure.