I met today's rejectee on FreeVanilla.  We had several lively IM and phone conversations, which flowed easily.  He seemed quite attractive, and seemed quite certain that we'd hit it off famously in person.  I had a few misgivings about our relationship compatibility, but he was affable and charming enough on the phone that I didn't want to eliminate him without giving him a chance in person.

One of my misgivings was our age difference.  He's 12 years my senior, which would be the greatest dating age-difference I've tried and is on the outer edge of my age limits, but if I truly felt compatible with someone, age would be nothing but a number.  Plus, based on his photos, he appeared to be in his mid-30s, and appearance and personality are far more important than someone's numerical age.  He told me that I was 3 years above his cutoff.  I asked if his cutoff was to date women no more than 15 years his junior, and he told me that no, his 16 year old daughter had informed him he was not allowed to date women that were closer to her age than to his.

And that brings us to misgiving number two.  He has kids.  I'm not so interested in parenthood, and so I usually don't date guys with young kids.  Teenagers, on the other hand, are a bit more self sufficient and less of a social-life-killer, so I'm more willing to date guys with teenage kids (he has 2).  I'd still rather date someone without kids, but if he was super-fabulous, I could deal with kids.

Well, it's been a SmartyPants kind of week.  A few days ago, I said that if all dates went as planned, in my week following uneducated unemployed Nate, I'll have had dates with 5 gainfully employed guys with doctorate level degrees.  Encouraging yes, but in the end, just a big bunch of MEH.

Let's run it all down...

My weekend was... well... uneventful - at least in dating terms.  I had cleared my entire schedule for the weekend because my billiards team was competing in a regional tournement.  However, we didn't do as well as we might have hoped (but still better than I expected), so I ended up with much of my weekend free.  But I didn't make any last minute plans, just enjoyed a little time with friends and relaxed at home.

Monday night, I had dinner with a guy from PayVanilla, and it was... in a word... "meh."

He was ok looking, the conversation was fine, there was nothing WRONG with him... but there was nothing drawing me in, either, and afterwards I found myself questioning if I could even see myself spending a whole evening with him much less dating him on an ongoing basis, so, yeah, I won't be seeing him again.

Meh!

-Vixen

Let me count the ways my date last night was...  not for me.

When getting to know someone new in my Adventures in Dating, I take note of the things that are, shall we say, sub-optimal about them.  One or a few isn't a big deal, but the more they add up the more I lose interest.

So, before meeting, this one had a few strikes against him:

I recently went out with someone who’s a real charmer.  Oh wait… sarcasm doesn’t always drip from the page as it might from my voice, so I should clarify that by “real charmer”, really I mean jerky jerkwad.

We met on PayVanilla.  He was cute.  We chatted for a few minutes online, but he insisted that was a terrible way to get to know one another and wanted to talk on the phone.  OK, so we talked on the phone.  The conversation was OK, not great, not bad, but with several instances of the dubiously raised eyebrow (as in “Uhhh yeah. This guy might be a jerk.”)

After a few minutes on the phone, he says that that the phone, too, is a terrible way to get to know someone, and we should just meet in person and see how we get along.  I generally prefer a little more getting to know one another before meeting, but….

Well, actually, that’s not it – I prefer to get to know someone long enough online/on the phone to assuage any lingering substantial “this person might be a personality-free dickhead” doubts before deciding to meet.  Sometimes that takes mere moments, sometimes, a bit longer.  This one was in the big longer category, but I didn’t feel like making excuses for why I didn’t want to meet him yet, and I figured meeting for coffee would be fine, good for elimination purposes.

I find that there tends to be an inverse correlation between the discrepancy in my date's and my ages and the compatibility I feel with them.  The greater the distance between our ages, the less likely I am to find a man attractive physically, and the less likely I am to be attracted to his personality.  

I'm in my early 30s.  When someone in his early 20s contacts me, I'm verrry skeptical about our compatibility.  But I try not to eliminate someone purely on the basis of age, because they may be mature beyond their years, and their personality may be so great that age doesn't matter.  I blame TheActor for this.  I met TheActor on BDSMsite in the first few months of my Adventures in Dating, oh, around March or so.  He was only 24, and the youngest guy (relative to my own age) I'd ever considered dating.  TheActor was a graduate student in the last few months of his masters degree in Drama before moving to New York City to pursue what else, but his acting career.  When we met online, I was dubious about our compatibility largely because of his age.  In person I was very pleasantly surprised.  He was personable, charming, mature, intelligent, interesting, funny, and had a gorgeous face just made for film.  If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought he was a lot closer to 34 than 24.  We talked for hours, finding tons in common, and not only did we have lots of chemistry on a personal level, our physical chemistry was instant and off the charts.  He didn't need to be told how to push my buttons, he played my body like a piano!  From our first date I knew he was a keeper and that the feeling was mutual.

Buuuuut...  I also knew when I met him that he'd be moving to NYC in a couple of months.  So, we had some Very Fun Times, and parted ways fondly.  And it's because of him that I'm still giving the young guys a chance.  But every one since him has fit my nothing-in-common-with-young-guys stereotype.

And last night was another example therein.

So here I sat, home on a Friday night, having turned down two very nice offers for plans that just weren't what I was in the mood to do tonight.  As I sat here entertaining myself at home and unwinding after a crazy week at work, I thought to myself, self, I said, you've not done anything worthy of entertaining your readers in the past few days.  How inconsiderate of you!  You must find yourself an adventure for the evening, if for nothing else than to provide blogfodder to entertain the fantsatic people who take the time to read your blog.  It's the very least you can do, Vixen.

So...  it just so happened that at the time I was being IM'd by three web-boys that I've been talking with for varying lengths of time.  I figured if I was going to find an advenure I'd have to take matters into my own hands, and I started not so subtlely exploring the possibility of meeting one of the boys for dinner.  Boy 1, a graphic designer who moonlights as a male escort, was about to leave to drive out of state to visit his terminally ill mother.  OK, no dinner for you.  Boy 2 was also going to see his parents, for dinner, but suggested calling me later to meet up for a drink.  I won't be holding my breath for that one.  Boy 3 said he was starving and would love to meet for dinner.  Boy 3 was the one I was least certain I'd find attractive or interesting in person, but I had nothing better to do, and was feeling a responsibility to my readers, so I made plans to meet him at a restaurant around the corner.

Not all of my dates are absurdly bad (or fabulously good).  More often than not, they're just... lame.  I'll chat online with someone for a while, and they seem attractive, interesting, and like decent conversationalists with good personalities.  If they didn't seem to have all these qualities, I wouldn't take the time to meet them in the first place.

But then I meet them, and find that they're not nearly as cute as their photos made them out to be, and they're WAY more short on personality than our online chats would have led me to believe, guys that just can't seem to hold up their end of the conversation.  At all.

So I met a guy on SexSite recently...  after a few online chats and phone conversations, we decided to meet.  He seemed like he might be a good candidate... current grad student, former military, seemed charming and interesting and cute from his pictures...  

Note the word seemed.

In person...  his candidacy was... diminished.  Not nearly as hawt in person, and seemed pretty firmly to be looking for someone to hook up with now and then in a very no-strings-attached kind of manner, not so much with the dating, befriending, and being regular lovers kind of thing.  Between his job, grad school, and his special needs kid, he was very short on time, and between that and his cheating ex-wife, he was very short on interest in an ongoing relationship of any sort.  Charming!

Yeah, there was just something a little offputting about him.

And then he started totally creeping me out - not by being particularly creepy himself, but talking about our government and the things they can/are doing these days sans warrants.

You see, Mr. Top Secret Creep Factor was a federal agent, an investigator for the Department of Defense, and former state trooper (oh, and the State Trooper factor was SO obvious.  Probably contributed to why my pot-smokin' ass wasn't terribly interested in him).  

And he started telling me things that got me progressively more and more creeped out. 

I met ModelGuy on SexSite.  After a fairly quick chat where we discovered a shared interest in food, pot, and martial arts flicks, as well as a shared free evening that night, so we decided to get together.  Over dinner, I thought he was, well, kind of pretty.  I like my guys a bit more manly than pretty, but he was still quite attractive, so it was OK.  We were talking about cuisine and travel and it seemed he’d done an AWFUL lot of traveling in his early 20s…  I asked how it was he’d done all that traveling back then, and he admitted with some embarrassment that he’d been a male model, and traveled all around the world doing runway shows and photo shoots for the first few years of his 20s (not to mention doing and dealing a lot of drugs).  

I never really thought about the importance of eye contact when getting to know someone much…  that is, until I met Joe.  We met on FreeVanilla.  Had some good conversations.  He seemed like he’d be outgoing and interesting, so I thought I’d give him a go.  We decided to meet after work one day for a game of pool.  About 98% of the time we were sitting there talking he didn’t seem able to look me in the eye (nor did he seem able to actually move over to the pool table area, so we just talked).  Most of the time he was looking above and over my head – and I couldn’t tell if he was unable to make eye contact or he was distracted by the TV behind me – either one wasn’t a good first date behavior.