Bleak

After this weekend, my perspective on the dating scene is quite dim. Friday night, I went out with some girls to a couple bars to celebrate the Irish in me (all 0%). Talking to strange men is all fun and good, but it makes you realize how bleak the prospects are. I danced with one guy (age 22) who really couldn't dance. Didn't click with him. Danced with another guy (age 24) who could dance, but wasn't very visually or intellectually stimulating. Met another guy (age 40) at a bar who only dated Asian and Latina women because he likes "the dark hair dark eyes" thing.

Yes, the prospects looked bleak.

Then Saturday night, I went out with the Guy. I won't delve into details but I'm almost sure my thing/non-relationship with Guy is nearing its end. I am both dreading yet secretly hoping that he never calls me again so that I don't have to go through the pain of ending this non-relationship.

So in these hard times, my mind wanders to my ex, my last great love. He was great in a lot of ways, we shared the same values, and I know he genuinely loved me. Yet the things that turned me off--i.e., that made me fall out of love with him--were his utter lack of conscience and resulting scathing sense of humor.

I enjoy biting wit once in a while. However his humor crossed many lines. It wouldn't surprise me if he made an anti-Semitic joke to a Holocaust survivor. Every time I think about possibly getting back together with him, I think of the times he has hurt me with his insulting comments and so-called jokes. The most recent instances include his joking about my dead father, and glibly calling me a bad daughter who doesn't care about her mother the widow.

In these instances, I hate him. And I hate myself for allowing him to disarm me and for letting myself become emotionally vulnerable to him.

Yesterday he called me to see how I was doing. He remembered my father died about a year ago and wanted to make sure I was okay. The conversation went well, we joked a bit about stuff. At one point, he had misheard something I said and I joked about his older age. Instead of responding, he measuredly said "I will not respond because I am more mature than you." I realized he was holding back the anti-Semitic-joke equivalent and observed, "Ah, it's not that you're more mature. It's that you know a lot of shit is happening in my life and my dad died a year ago. This isn't out of maturity. It's out of pity." I could hear him smile. You can hear a smile on the phone, you know. He said, "Yeah, you're right."

Bleak, bleak, bleak.

I was thinking this morning, maybe there isn't the One, but several Ones. Each of these several Ones alone could make me deliriously happy. I just need to find one of these Ones. I realized however that one could be in Nebraska. The other could be in Florida. One might be in Italy. What are the chances that one of my Ones will be here, in this city? And if he's in this city, what are the chances we'll bump into each other?

I'm afraid I've temporarily lapsed into the very person I did not want to be. The Formerly Optimistic But Now Jaded Romantic. Perhaps an inevitable result of having bleak prospects.