Sunday, November 01, 2009

Whereupon Our Heroine Breaks All of Dr. Warren's Rules for Online Dating Safety

Have you ever met someone you instantly felt you'd known for years?

I love it. It feels like finding a little bit of myself I've lost along the way...some little trinket I adored and then misplaced and then rediscovered years later much to my delight.

Up until Tuesday, I'd been in the guided communication stages with Tower1 so I really didn't know much about him. What I knew, I liked, but guided communication does not reveal much about a person except some possible creativity, some understanding of English grammar and spelling, and possibly some general common life philosophies. On Tuesday though, Tower and I reached open communication and that communication changed the experience dramatically.

Excerpt from Tower's first open e-mail to me:

I have one more thing to discuss with you. In the interest of full disclosure and honesty, I wanted you to know about this. I am on facebook. I have a lot of friends on Facebook. Browsing one of my friend's friends list the other day, I discovered you there. I didn't add you as a friend then because I didn't want you to be uncomfortable with that because we weren't that far along in the communication process. I also did NOT let my friend know that I was communicating with you through eharmony nor have I talked to him about you (I actually haven't talked to him in couple of months.)...It turns out, that you are friends with 2 of my friends, PJ and Dave.

Now just so you all know, Dave and I went to junior high together in Wyoming. We hung around the same crowd in high school. We connected down here in Denver a couple of years ago and he's one of my all-time favorite people...as in he is in my top 10 favorite-people-I-actually-know-in-real-life.

Needless to say, the fact that Tower and Dave were "good friends" immediately put me at ease. Because, you know, I have a lot of trouble explaining my life to random strangers. I think my life is, in fact, a little odd for a 37-year-old woman. It turns out, Tower and I have a lot more in common than just having mutual friends. A LOT more.

So when we scheduled a date for Wednesday night, 2 feet of snow be damned, I already felt as though I knew him. I wanted to give him something to reflect that feeling and was strongly tempted to make him a mix tape2 but decided against it, thinking there'd be time for that later once we'd met for real and revealed whether or not we had any chemistry.

Imagine my great surprise and delight then when he picked me up Wednesday evening, deposited me in his car, and handed me the case to a mix tape he'd made for me. Yay! By the time we'd driven the mile to Gabor's3, we'd already fallen into a comfortable rapport...the kind you have with someone you've known for years...except with chemistry...of which there was plenty.

We'd been at Gabor's less than an hour, talking, laughing, enjoying each other immensely, when I looked up at the door and someone I knew was standing there looking at me...then looking at Tower...then looking back at me. Who was it, you ask? Of all the people to walk in on our first date, it would most appropriately have to be Dave.

We asked him to join us and he did. So did the friend he was meeting...Kristen...a girl I was friendly acquaintances with in high school and who I had not seen since I was 16. It was an amazing, nearly perfect evening.

Which turned into an amazing, nearly perfect morning after due to the treachery that was the Denver city streets and the fact that I was unwilling to have him risk life and limb to get home afterward4. Call me kooky or selfish, I wanted him alive so I could see him again.

And so now I wait to hear from him again. Both of us had prior engagements for the weekend and a second date was mentioned but left unscheduled.

I hope I hear from him again.


1: Formerly known as TBD or "to be determined"
2: Even though mix tapes don't really exist anymore as the media has changed to CD, I still refer to them as mix tapes.
3: Yes, I spend a lot of time at Gabor's. It's my favorite neighborhood dive and, as it turns out, is also one of Tower's favorites too.
4: Dr. Warren's rules of online dating safety be damned.

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