Beautiful Mess

So here I am….

Not sure how I got here.

This blog is meant to be about dating.  But for those of you looking for exciting, romantic, or sexy stories…..you may want to look elsewhere.  My actual dating life has not been eventful enough to fill even one post, and certainly not exciting enough to keep the attention of strangers (or even friends). 

My hope, of course, my very fervent wish, is that that will change.  I can’t promise that if you stick with me here, it will all pay off in the end, or that I am qualified or experienced enough to offer advice or give good idea, but I will try.  Or at least try to try. 

I’m not going to bother starting at the beginning, or offering an in-depth bio and/or history of myself.  This is anonymous.  That is the only way I feel comfortable being COMPLETLY honest, and the only reason I am doing this blog is because I feel a need to put my thoughts out there, and don’t want to do it in a space where friends, family, and/or acquaintances will read my thoughts.   And while there is a very real chance that this blog will not be read by anyone, that is really not the point.   Of course, aspects of my life will bleed out in the posts as they are written, but I just don’t have the inclination to spend time writing some kind of long beginning blog telling all about myself.  So I won’t.  I’ll just jump right in.

So I met a guy through an online dating website, who we’ll call CityBoy.  I have dated CityBoy for about 5 months now.  From the day I met CityBoy I liked him, but knew he wasn’t someone I was going to get serious with.  Just didn’t feel it, and didn’t anticipate that I ever was going to feel it.  But I had no reason to not see him, so I continued dating him. 

So since the beginning I would see this guy about once a week.  Never more, sometimes less.  I think at the beginning he wanted to see me more, but for whatever reason, mostly because of our schedules, it never happened. 

I don’t want to go through the whole history of our courtship, because it will take too long, but I’m sure my entries will go back in time for a little while, just so I can get caught up, and write what I want to write.  Not to mention that I have no real dating stuff going on right now, so no new things going on right now. 

Anyway, we broke things off this week.  For reasons that I am sure I will discuss at some later time.  What I want to discuss right now is the idea of putting oneself out there. 

For years, my girfriends have been telling me that I “need to put myself out there”.  No mention of where “out there” is or how I can get there.  They just knew I wasn’t doing what I needed to be doing, regardless of the fact that they (along with myself) could not really identify what that was. 

So fine, I finally “put myself out there” by subscribing to an online dating service.  All my girlfriends are SO proud of me.   And all in all it was a lot less painful than I thought it would be.  It didn’t really require me to extend myself, is what I found.  And so I stayed mostly inside my comfort zone. 

What I’ve learned, through this 5 month very casual relationship with CityBoy, is that putting yourself out there to GET a date is nothing compared to putting yourself out there for a relationship, dating or otherwise.  I always thought I was just being agreeable.  I’ll-do-whatever-you-want-to-do kind of thing.  Making no demands.  Making no real advances.  Taking no risks.  While I was being agreeable, I was also saving myself from someone rejecting me.  The me that I really am when nobody is watching.   I scarcely know who that person is. 

So putting yourself out there is so much more than posting a profile and landing a date.  It involves allowing people to see who you are, telling them what you want to do, where you want to go, what you like to eat, what movie you want to watch.  Letting your feelings be known, calling someone when you want to call someone, asking someone to get together with you and coming up with a plan.  Maybe this stuff sounds easy to a lot of people.  But not me.  For whatever reason, I find doing those things very difficult and scary, not that I’ve ever really given it any thought.  But as I think about it in retrospect, it is definitely true. 

I almost never called Cityboy.  I only called him back when he called me first.  I was afraid that I would call him at the wrong time or that he wouldn’t want to talk to me right then.  I NEVER once asked him to do something, I always waited for him to ask me.  I was afraid that when I asked him, he wouldn’t want to do something on that day, or he wouldn’t want to do whatever I would plan, that he would find it somehow lacking.  I NEVER invited him over to my place.  I was afraid he wouldn’t like my place, that he would find it too small, too suburban, too generic, or not enough something.  Afraid that he would be bored here, that I couldn’t keep him entertained.  Afraid of so many things.  Afraid to really lay myself and my life out there to be looked at or judged.  So afraid that I must somehow subconsciously think that to do so would end in rejection.  That I wouldn’t be enough. 

I have more neuroses that I thought I did.  But the good thing is that while the relationship with CityBoy was casual, I learned a lot of things about myself.  Whether or not I have yet really truly LEARNED anything (such that it will makes its way into my scheme and change the way I do things), but I most definitely have become aware of things about me that I definitely didn’t know before.   As ridiculous as that may be at the age of (as today) 29. 

Well, more later.  These blogs will probably be pretty long for a while as I try to get caught up on everything I want to write about.  But after a while I should be able to shorten them as I don’t have to keep backtracking and can keep current.  Stay with me here.