There are some dates you go on where the puzzle pieces click into place and you realize you should have seen this odd behavior coming from a mile away.  For me, on one particular date, I realized that I should have known from his first message.  But, in my defense, you can’t tell tone from an email!  He contacted me, saying my profile was thorough and he thought he had the qualities I am looking for.  I thought he was joking around, keeping things light.  Now that I’ve met him, I know he was being completely serious.  When he texted me the day we were to meet, multiple red flags went up in my mind.  He wanted to tell me that we would only be going out for an hour and then we could decide if we wanted to go out on a real date afterwards.  He asked if I’d gone on many dates.  When I said I had been on my share, he said “good”, like he wasn’t interested in training someone in the ways of dating.  It looked like it was going to rain that day, so we were both keeping an eye on the weather.  He texted me many times that day; telling me what he was seeing with the weather, when he was leaving work, his updated eta.

We met in Faneuil Hall and as we talked he had to stop walking, telling me that he couldn’t walk and talk at the same time.  He freely spoke about his ex-wife and how she had pushed him into going to school and, ultimately, his career.  He said something like “At least she did that for me.”  He told me he’s not really a planner, that he’s more spontaneous.  I laughed to myself because, well, that self-assessment just didn’t jive with the day I’d had filled with text updates and rules for a first meeting!  We ended up at Ghirardelli and when he paid for my Coke float he made a joke that I owed him $6…yeah, not off to a good start.

He told me about his ADHD and about his medication (I suspect there is more going on than ADHD, though).  He got a cappuccino and said he probably didn’t need any more caffeine; an assessment I would agree with.  Before we even sat down he told me about his experiences on a couple of dating sites.  When he asked about my plans for the weekend he told me that he was talking to a girl from another site who had similar plans, and told me her name, as if I was going to know her.  Let me tell you, if I did know her, I’d warn her to run in the opposite direction!

We sat down and began our interview date.  He told me how he had come up with a list of first date questions with his therapist and proceeded to ask me some.  Why are you single?  I haven’t met the right guy yet.  Are you close to your family?  Yes.  When was your last long term relationship?  Define “long-term”…and then I sensed my answer to this last question was not satisfactory and I felt judged.  Listen, there was a long period in my life when I did not date.  I’m not ashamed of that.  There are a multitude of reasons; I was shy, I was scared, I wasn’t happy with myself, I was thinking my dream man was going to materialize before my eyes so I felt no need to search, etc.  In all seriousness, as loyal readers will remember from previous posts, I had to work on myself and get to a place where I was happy with me before I could be happy with someone else.  I don’t appreciate being judged for something as insignificant as the length of my relationships.  It’s my life, it’s my story.  Being (or not being, as the case may be) in a long term relationship does not define me.

He asked if I’d been on any weird dates and I bit my tongue to keep from saying “this one”.  He said he is drawn to “crazy”, but that’s not the best thing for him.  Clearly he has become very cerebral in his approach to dating, as evident by his list of questions.  He told me about a first date when the girl rocked in a corner and said she wanted to skip the dating part and just get married because she missed having a husband.  And then told me about a relationship with a girl who decided one night to spike his drink with whiskey, when he has made a conscious decision not to drink.  But perhaps my favorite part of our time together was when he told me that, more often than not, if someone is approaching their mid to late-30s and hasn’t been married, they are likely to never marry.  This was clearly a comment on me, not him, as he is divorced.  You would think I would be offended by that, but I just laughed.  I don’t really think I fall into that statistic, if it’s even a real one, so whatever.  In this day and age people are getting married later in life.  You can’t tell me that because I’m 35 and have never been married that means that I will never get married.  I don’t buy it.

Mercifully our time together came to an end.  He looked at his watch and said “ok, it’s 6:20, I’m going to say it’s time for me to go now.”  We said our good-byes and he told me that he’ll think about things, and I should think about things too, and he’ll get back to me either way.  If I had any questions, I had his number.  We parted ways and I had to keep myself from laughing out loud at his parting words.  I practically ran to my car so I could call my friends to relay all the details of this odd hour of my life.  One said “the date was either really good or really bad.  You don’t call if it’s just okay!”  Another suggested I should have told him immediately “I’ve thought about it and it’s a no”.  Of course I could have done that because I had decided within 5 minutes of meeting that I was never going to see him again, but curiosity usually gets the best of me.  A couple of days later I got the decision I had been waiting for with baited breath.  He enjoyed our conversation, but it was a no.  He did call me a good apple.  Though I thought it was “good egg” or “bad apple”?  Mixed metaphors aside, I’m going to keep searching for the right puzzle piece!