A Bad Dating Year is Not the Worst Thing

I’ve been studying awe lately. This is one of my favorite brain books of all time, and I haven’t even finished it yet!

So maybe that’s why the titular epiphany was easy to recognize when it came along. I’m sorry to be a Spotify commercial, but I love the Wrapped time of year so much. When I saw that I started listening to Frank Ocean’s cover of Moon River on February 6 and remembered that that’s the day The Shy One broke up with me, I was overwhelmed with giddy joy. With love. The beautiful absurdity of this year. It felt like my heart was laughing. It felt like a being-set-free.

After week-before-last’s bad review situation, I settled into it: There were highlights, but this was a bad year of dating. The past ten months especially have been full of grief, false starts, acting-outs, minor deceptions, and not-quite-right connections. Too many hookups in relationship-potential clothing. Deleted email drafts. More than one art project about grief. Setting a timer for ten minutes so I could moon safely over the Hidden Folder. It’s beautiful and ridiculous and I love it.

I rang in the New Year overjoyed, in a balloon-bopping collective effervescence with Rainbow Pal, singing to a sassy and sparkly cover of Dancing on My Own. When I left the club, WhatsApping across the ocean to the beautiful Shy Ones, a single golden firework popped over the parking lot. I felt like it was just for me. I kind of still do.

This year gave me so many gifts, not just the beautiful string of coconut-shell beads that well never look right on me. The wallpaper on my desktop is the lush pink and purple flowers I got from my Birthday Good Boy/Hookup. I’ve been building my collection of frilly things. My Duolingo has five languages going. I’m obsessed with Afrobeats, even though the genre gives me all the feelings. BECAUSE it does.

December is a relief, too full of crafts and gifts and next-year’s-goal-setting to worry too much about dating. There are three cute guys at work but I love myself and my job too much to hit on them. I’ll bring the car in before Christmas trips and flirt with the car place guy. I’ll visit the museum I was supposed to see last February. I’ll spend New Years with BFF or on my own or who knows where. Maybe I’ll just be starting a new puzzle.

Dear Shy One, dear Rainbow Pal, dear EVERYONE, I’m overflowing with love for you as if it were the first time and the last. You shine out of me permanently and I hope I can glimmer out of you sometimes too. We’re doing the thing, I’m so proud of us. We’re exquisitely and exhaustingly and delightfully alive.

Dearest, DEAREST 2023, thank you for all you’ve given me. Let’s type in some Rumi for the road:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and
rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each
other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell
you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across
the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

Guy With the Big Telescope Returns, Part One

Are sequels a bad habit? Maybe! But I haven’t regretted one yet! When I rematched with GWBT (He’d added Feeld to his searchings.) I got a good feeling.

On the first date (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2023/06/new-guys-old-triggers-real-dating-break.html) way back in May when the voice of heartbreak was louder than it is now, I decided we weren’t a match for one reason: He shushed me! In Emotionally Neutral Diner! Which, maybe, isn’t so emotionally neutral! It seemed like it would be a mistake to kiss someone who’d shushed me, so I didn’t.

But in the half-block between the diner and my car, we held hands. Here in September, I remembered vividly and with my whole body how good the handholding had been. And I remembered how he’d tried to send me home with lunch just in case my brunch French toast hadn’t been filling enough. I remembered the telescope I had yet to peer through. I wondered if he still had a tape deck in his car.

The pictures on his Feeld page were almost all on the beach and I felt a little pang for having missed my chance for summer beach drives with him.

My body wanted to see him again, to see what his kiss would be like, to let myself relax into him, somehow I knew I could. He offered to help me with my puzzle, still the endless, too-big-for-the-table 2000-piece one, and I thought that was very brave and kind.

He brought dinner, so much dinner. He asked if I wanted Jamaican food and I said sure, I’ll eat a meat pie. Instead, he brought heavy platters, oxtail and jerk chicken and fried plantains and rice. I’m so bad at flavors, but I tried everything.

He was hesitant to share his music collection with me on a second date, too eclectic, he kept saying. But he lost a bet (I knew I wouldn’t like plantains) and I got to hear it! His music just…lives in his phone?! No Spotify or anything. It turned out the be the perfect puzzling soundtrack: Classic techno gay bar tracks. Opera. Metallica. A pop song selection maybe more unhinged than my own.

About the puzzle, he kept wondering aloud: “There must be some kind of a system we could use to make this easier…”

I guess maybe sorting the colors into boxes is kind of a system?

I liked feeling his leg against mine under the puzzle table. I was suddenly entirely wet, way more turned on than one might expect to be under such wholesome circumstances, and with such a soundtrack!

When he found a piece that fit, or maybe the fourth or fifth time he found one, I said, dorkily, “Now you get rewarded with a smooch.”

It was a good one. Well worth the wait.

New Guys, Old Triggers, Real Dating Break, Part One

 

Please send good luck that this therapist will remain a match! The last one I tried used the phrase "sister wives" in reference to poly. She'd said some helpful stuff before that though!

Last Thursday was a two-date day, and I was excited about both! I was meeting the Guy With a Big Telescope for lunch at Emotionally Neutral Diner, and then Le Monsieur was picking me up (in his faaaaancy car) in the evening to come visit his new apartment. I felt horny and shiny and new, amazing how the optimism always shines through.

GWBT was sooooo cute, just the right combination of grown-up and boyish. (He’s 39.) I liked him because his profile mentioned the possibility of stargazing dates, perfect for summer! The big telescope is not a euphemism, he really sent a picture! He was hesitant about the writing-about-stuff aspect of things, but otherwise seemed like he might be a lovely match!

GWBT had warm vibes and was such a gentleman, even offering to have them make me a to-go order in case my French toast didn’t end up being filling enough. Less charming was when he watched out the window as a lady parallel parked, critiquing her entire process.

Still, SO cute. He loved to travel and talked about wanting to whisk me away for a weekend sometime. He was installing a new speaker system in his car just in time for beach trips. (He mocked his current system for having not just a CD player but a TAPE DECK, and I felt envious because I just have a CD player in mine.)

(Side note: Many things are uncertain, but it’s very clear to me that I would like to not be the one doing all the driving in my next relationship.)

Anyway, he was a somewhat plausible catch until:

He: I like your first date outfit, can’t wait to see what you’ll wear on our tenth date!

(Okay I like this line.)

Me: It’s cute that you’d think I’d wear clothes on our tenth date!

Okay, I was being a little obnoxious, but he literally said:

“Shhh!” and looked around like we were going to get in trouble.

I’ve had enough of that particular look-around for this lifetime and the next. And shushing on a first date!