Catching Up: March '09, Interpersonal, Part I
So, time to see how far I can get in this style of update. It's been an eventful six months to backtrack over.
I'll try to do one piece each day this week. I'm not sure how long each piece will be. Today, though, it appears to cover a single person.
Back in late January, I started talking to a woman on OkC who I considered rather interesting and attractive based on her profile. She was a redhead, for one, and a rather shapely one, in my view. We shared a bunch of common interests and such. Serendipitously, we determined early on that she had grown up and gone to school on the peninsula (Phoebus/New Horizons), right across the river from me. (Lucky people zoned for New Horizons!) She was at UVA while I was at Virginia Tech (though a year behind me). She lived in DC for a few years, not long after I stopped working there myself. She had moved up to the Boston area shortly before I had. So, we had a bunch of historical commonality.
She was also a rugby All-American in college, which, as some of you are probably aware, I find a terribly hot sport (and the fact that she was particularly good at it made it even cooler). She was coming out of a sexually-open, romantically closed relationship with a man who broke the back-half of that covenant. And her ex- was Jewish, so we had a bunch of judeophilia in common, as well. She liked board games.
So, all of that goes to say, I suppose, that based on the data I had about her, we seemed to have an amazing intersection of commonality.
We spent a couple of weeks having these fairly lengthy, multi-hour online chat sessions every few days. About a week into February, she explained how she didn't think she wanted to date me, and didn't want to waste any of her precious face time with people she didn't want to date, so I was pretty much relegated to chat buddy, which is about the only status in someone's life that I actively dislike... in part because, to me, people don't really become real until I interact with them in person. But, I rather enjoyed interacting with her, and my life wasn't particularly busy at the time, so we continued to have rather lengthy conversations once a week or so for the rest of February.
About a week into March, we had a late conversation one weeknight, and she explained that the reason I was uninteresting to her as a dating partner was that I struck her as rather... fandom centric, in the sense that I was one of those people whose life centered around my piece(s) of subculture. (Like the WoW players who'll plan their life around raids, or the Monty Python fans who try to find every conversational excuse to repeat as much of Holy Grail as possible.) But, within the context of that conversation, she pretty much talked herself out of her own viewpoint, and decided that, yes, she actually did want to meet me. She suggested I come over for dinner and a movie; I countered that since she was living the life of a poor vet student, it'd be more fun if I treated her to something she didn't usually get to do. Yo-yo Ma was coming to Symphony Hall, so I suggested we do dinner out and go to that. She agreed.
Since she was a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I picked the Elephant Walk for dinner. I don't think either one of us loved the meal. The performance was interesting and fun, although I don't think either of us loved the back half, which involved a particular style of medieval Persian singing. But, overall, we seemed to click. But she was still a vet-med student, so her schedule allowed only occasional social outings... I didn't see her again for almost a fortnight. On the up side, the next time I saw her, she spent the night.
So, about one night a week, for the next few months, she and I would spend a night together. I was definitely very fond of her, and I think, near the end, I started to love her. But we never defined what we had as dating, because she noted, fairly early on, that she did not see me having dog-life potential, or even mouse-life potential. I was not vegetarian, I did not actively want children, and I accepted that I was an evil murdering American by virtue of my lifestyle, and was okay with it, rather than doing things I thought was wrong and being a hypocrite. (Certainly, she and I would probably phrase that last clause differently.)
She had some interesting sexual escapades while we were together, and it was fun to hear about them after they happened. But, eventually, the boy she thought had dating potential started to push for a proper monogamous relationship, and she agreed. Around the same time, I hit on her roommate, which she felt way more strongly negative about than I expected; the combination of the two things led to a talk the night before I left for Origins where she officially downgraded me to "just friend". In the three months since, she's initiated conversation twice, which is actually about what I expected from the downgrade; her lifestyle doesn't lend itself to being social to start with, and I can't imagine her new beau really would be happy with her hobnobbing with her previous frequent fuck-buddy if he's the sort who'd request monogamy.
I was sad when it ended, given my depth of feeling... but it was a pretty unequal depth of feeling to start with, and she was tops at being open and honest, which really helped the process all the way through. It was certainly a good example of what I think of as a good relationship: the people involved knew what they wanted, expressed it to the other person, communicated well, and, overall, did the best to enjoy each other as much as possible until one was ready for it to be over.
I'll try to do one piece each day this week. I'm not sure how long each piece will be. Today, though, it appears to cover a single person.
Back in late January, I started talking to a woman on OkC who I considered rather interesting and attractive based on her profile. She was a redhead, for one, and a rather shapely one, in my view. We shared a bunch of common interests and such. Serendipitously, we determined early on that she had grown up and gone to school on the peninsula (Phoebus/New Horizons), right across the river from me. (Lucky people zoned for New Horizons!) She was at UVA while I was at Virginia Tech (though a year behind me). She lived in DC for a few years, not long after I stopped working there myself. She had moved up to the Boston area shortly before I had. So, we had a bunch of historical commonality.
She was also a rugby All-American in college, which, as some of you are probably aware, I find a terribly hot sport (and the fact that she was particularly good at it made it even cooler). She was coming out of a sexually-open, romantically closed relationship with a man who broke the back-half of that covenant. And her ex- was Jewish, so we had a bunch of judeophilia in common, as well. She liked board games.
So, all of that goes to say, I suppose, that based on the data I had about her, we seemed to have an amazing intersection of commonality.
We spent a couple of weeks having these fairly lengthy, multi-hour online chat sessions every few days. About a week into February, she explained how she didn't think she wanted to date me, and didn't want to waste any of her precious face time with people she didn't want to date, so I was pretty much relegated to chat buddy, which is about the only status in someone's life that I actively dislike... in part because, to me, people don't really become real until I interact with them in person. But, I rather enjoyed interacting with her, and my life wasn't particularly busy at the time, so we continued to have rather lengthy conversations once a week or so for the rest of February.
About a week into March, we had a late conversation one weeknight, and she explained that the reason I was uninteresting to her as a dating partner was that I struck her as rather... fandom centric, in the sense that I was one of those people whose life centered around my piece(s) of subculture. (Like the WoW players who'll plan their life around raids, or the Monty Python fans who try to find every conversational excuse to repeat as much of Holy Grail as possible.) But, within the context of that conversation, she pretty much talked herself out of her own viewpoint, and decided that, yes, she actually did want to meet me. She suggested I come over for dinner and a movie; I countered that since she was living the life of a poor vet student, it'd be more fun if I treated her to something she didn't usually get to do. Yo-yo Ma was coming to Symphony Hall, so I suggested we do dinner out and go to that. She agreed.
Since she was a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I picked the Elephant Walk for dinner. I don't think either one of us loved the meal. The performance was interesting and fun, although I don't think either of us loved the back half, which involved a particular style of medieval Persian singing. But, overall, we seemed to click. But she was still a vet-med student, so her schedule allowed only occasional social outings... I didn't see her again for almost a fortnight. On the up side, the next time I saw her, she spent the night.
So, about one night a week, for the next few months, she and I would spend a night together. I was definitely very fond of her, and I think, near the end, I started to love her. But we never defined what we had as dating, because she noted, fairly early on, that she did not see me having dog-life potential, or even mouse-life potential. I was not vegetarian, I did not actively want children, and I accepted that I was an evil murdering American by virtue of my lifestyle, and was okay with it, rather than doing things I thought was wrong and being a hypocrite. (Certainly, she and I would probably phrase that last clause differently.)
She had some interesting sexual escapades while we were together, and it was fun to hear about them after they happened. But, eventually, the boy she thought had dating potential started to push for a proper monogamous relationship, and she agreed. Around the same time, I hit on her roommate, which she felt way more strongly negative about than I expected; the combination of the two things led to a talk the night before I left for Origins where she officially downgraded me to "just friend". In the three months since, she's initiated conversation twice, which is actually about what I expected from the downgrade; her lifestyle doesn't lend itself to being social to start with, and I can't imagine her new beau really would be happy with her hobnobbing with her previous frequent fuck-buddy if he's the sort who'd request monogamy.
I was sad when it ended, given my depth of feeling... but it was a pretty unequal depth of feeling to start with, and she was tops at being open and honest, which really helped the process all the way through. It was certainly a good example of what I think of as a good relationship: the people involved knew what they wanted, expressed it to the other person, communicated well, and, overall, did the best to enjoy each other as much as possible until one was ready for it to be over.