[Parts of this were written yesterday. Deal with it.]
I am in the land several miles (or perhaps even a continent) past hung-the-fuck-over, struggling to hold on to basic functioning (and breakfast) while I "work" and sneak back toward "better". I will not ever actually be well again...because whatever I did to myself last night was too catastrophic. I am sooo stupid.
Be that as it may, it's time to move on with the OkC crew. First, brief updates on those that I've already covered:
UPDATE: No change. He is 'Dead To Me', which is an official status on OkC which signifies that I won't appear on any search that he creates, and he cannot send a message to me. It's just not worth the bother to allow it to go on.
UPDATE: As of yesterday afternoon, he likes me again. I never didn't like him. Date number six has been scheduled for two weeks from Saturday. No, I am not going to guarantee that this will happen.
UPDATE: His OkC status is now "available" rather than "single," meaning that he is seeing someone but holding out the possibility that he might see someone else, too. That means "Dead To Me." Jerk.
UPDATE: He has stood me up one too many times. I may still talk with him. And I might make dates with him. But I know that I will never actually go on a date with him again.
We traded messages briefly. He showed his hand, in a sense, by requesting a WTF report. (To explain briefly: WTF supposedly stands for "What To Fix" but is usually referred to as What The Fuck, obviously. It allows a user to compare match questions with another user. The long explanation, via OkC: "For each match question you and another user aren't perfectly matched on, WTF will display your respective preferences, your respective answers, how well (or poorly) they matched, and a damage score that tells you mathematically just how much messing up that question hurt the match between you two.") WTF reports are a "big deal" because they reveal the actual answers to questions, and not just a compatibility score between two people. It made some sense that he thought enough of our potential to request the report; our overall numbers were good (we currently stand at 75% Match/85% Friend/17% Enemy, which is slightly higher than it was when we got the report).
The problem? I've already alluded to it; the report shows the actual answers to actual questions. That means that a great deal of information--a lot of it very personal, as it turns out--was uncovered with the one decision to create that report. We hadn't really sent all that many messages back and forth before creating the report. We didn't really know each other all that well. And then all of a sudden we did. And it was...freaky.
My natural reaction to that? Acknowledge the freaky-ness, and compensate for it by talking about the curiosity that arose by looking at the questions. His reaction? Apparently, withdrawal. We sent a few more messages (mine, more revealing; his, more terse) over the next week or so. And then...nothing.
He remains nameless to me: that's the really disturbing part. I don't know anything about him except his education (he has a Ph.D. in a rather obscure field), his occupation (equally obscure, and fascinating), his general location (about 250 mi. from here). Oh, and I know all that incredibly personal stuff from the WTF report, too. He is 'The Bothersome One, Midwest U.S. version'.
- R.D. is a 5'5" auto mechanic in the City. The height thing is apparently a problem for him. (I'm not too wild about the thought of being involved with someone who's that close to my height, for whatever reason, but I think I could get over it with the right person. He is so clearly NOT the right person.) We had a relatively decent conversation, once, about the Cubs. I try to have an open mind, see. But this guy...ugh. He started talking about this huge tool that he's got. He tried to sort of pass it off like he was referring to something related to work, but it was clearly just a pathetic come-on.
Yuck. - Loser number two is K.O. You know that bear-like cartoon from the Cottonelle toilet tissue commercials? That's this guy. His profile picture shows him standing in a field in a downpour, wearing rain pants, a rain jacket, and holding an umbrella. And grinning like a complete and utter weirdo. Like, "Woohoo! It's raining, so I dragged my poor idiot friend out here to take a picture of me, thinking that it would attract someone who really likes people who do things like this. Come & get me!"
Good luck with that. When it's raining that hard, I'm staying inside. Because - and this might come as a surprise - YOU'RE GETTING ALL WET! - Finally, there's the guy whose profile name is a breakfast product with "dr" before it. When I, gamely attempting conversation, asked where his profile name had come from, he said, "Everybody likes waffles. And if you put 'Dr.' before another word, it automatically makes it funny!"
Oh. My. God. Please go away.
And I forgot to mention that he's in the Philippines.So, yeah, I'm as friendly as the next guy (by which I mean, only as friendly as I need to be), but, what's the point?
Maybe 3 weeks ago, he was going to a Cubs game in St. Louis. I sort of teased that he should bring back an autograph from Rick Ankiel, the Cardinals outfielder who used to be a pitcher. (Dramatic coming-back-from-adversity story...and very good looking.) We joked about it for a while before B. wrote something that changed everything. He said he wasn't going to get Rick's autograph for me, because he (Rick) would ask who it was for, and when B. told him, then Rick would want me for himself, and then B. would be left with nothing.
Uh, what?
It was literally the first inkling that I'd had that he was even interested, at all, in anything with me. And I was not, am not, interested in anything at all with him. So I "finished up" the baseball joking as quickly and easily as I could, and gently extricated myself from any other conversational threads that we had in the air at the moment, and just backed away. I guess it was naive to think that he just wanted to have somebody to talk to. But it was also quite a surprise to find out that way. Weird. Anyway, I haven't heard anything from him since then.
I'm setting this out as a way of introducing The Married Guy. I didn't know that he was married when he first made himself known to me, which was intentional on his part. Even being as fair as possible...if you know me, you know how I feel on this subject. I was innocent enough, or stupid enough, to believe (or to let myself believe) that if someone created a public profile for the intention of dating (which is, essentially, what the 75% of OkC profiles that have photographs attached are for), then that person is in a position to do so. And I really don't think that someone who's connected to someone is in a position to date anyone else.
I guess that's just me.
I should be more forgiving. It's complicated, and people stay in relationships for reasons that I can never understand, as much as people leave relationships for reasons that I will never understand. It's just that I don't want to be involved in someone else's destruction. I don't want to be a weapon in someone else's battle. I don't want to be the face that another person sees when she closes her eyes and imagines, "Why did my marriage fall apart?" Because even if he knows that that's not why, she might come to know something completely different. Life is subjective, and this sort of reality is particularly subjective.
The problem? I like him. I cannot say anything more than that; I like him. And he likes me. And that's the conundrum, you know? The element that makes the dog chase the tail. Because he likes me, and part of what makes me 'me' is that I'm not the kind of person that can hook up with a married guy. Or even a guy who just will not be there when I need him. And by definition, he would not be, because he's already needed elsewhere.
(And, yes, we were IMing once when his [eldest] kid needed something from him. Like having a bucket of cold water poured over my head--and then the bucket dropped on me, too--I was shocked back to sanity.)
So. I wish I'd never met him.
I guess it wasn't so great. He didn't write again. Man, OkC is great for keeping my ego in check.
On tap for the next - and good God let's hope it's the last - post:
[A couple of new characters have popped up since this thread began, but I highly doubt that they'll turn out to be worthy of inclusion. Call me pessimistic....]
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