Dating

Why this silence, I hear you ask? Well, I've not been fucking very much (Lisa, Judith now and then) for various reasons. Instead, I've been dating.

I've had a profile on a dating site for ages; I put it up there a couple of years ago when I realised that the only friends I had were gay men (mostly guys I'd slept with) and that I didn't really know any women. I was fairly new in town. The one woman friend I did have suggested that, as a 40-something, the best way for me to meet women even as friends was to join a straight dating site. Just looking for friends.

It worked fabulously well. I put up a profile, said I was new in town, just looking to make new friends. And I had this cautionary note: "I'm unlikely to be the man of your dreams (I can elaborate)". That's how I met Claire, and also Iris and Prudence. My first ever phone conversation with Claire, she said "you either have a terminal disease or you're gay; which one is it". I told her I was gay, and that I had a boyfriend (Sam). And now I look back through this blog, I see that I lied to you about how I met Claire. It wasn't a party. It was a dating site. Bad me!

So a few weeks ago I rejigged my profile, put up a couple of nice pics and have been hit on ever since by about 4 or 5 women a day. Most of them I ignore for one reason or another (more than 5 miles from my place, have a pet, too spiritual-sounding, can't spell, like Robbie Williams etc.) but there's one or two a week who slip through all the filters.

On sex sites, men outnumber women. The demand for casual sex (men) far outstrips supply (women). So women have the power - they get hit on a lot, they can pick and choose. And while I know this isn't quite as great as it sounds (see this post) it's just the way it is. But on dating sites, men hold the cards. Especially in the city I'm in. There's a shortage of single straight (or, in my case, straight-ish), men. And then once you take out the men who are complete philistines or fratboys there's not a lot left. So I'm spoiled for choice.

So I go out on these dates. And sometimes they're a bit blah, but usually they're quite fun. I'll be having dinner or whatever with a woman who's generally pretty attractive, and thanks to my rigorous selection process, quite interesting and usually funny. We have dinner, it's fun. I can be charming when it suits me. Maybe we meet up again.. and then what? I've had about half a dozen of these, and except for the one I just plain didn't like, they were all fine. But I didn't get any sort of romantic buzz off it. Am I expecting too much?

When I met Claire, I was instantly bewitched. (Same with Sam too, now I think about it.) Is that what I'm looking for, someone where within a second of locking eyes I'm having palpitations and wanting to spend the rest of my life with them? Or is Prudence a better model for this? She and I were friends for six months or so before I started falling for her.

Of these women, the one I liked best was Terri. She's tall and sternly attractive. We'd been out twice and she's fun. Interesting, funny.. but extremely hard to read. She seems to like me, but I'm not sure why. I don't really get any sort of sexual vibe from her and while she's very quick and amusing in conversation she doesn't say anything much about herself. And then I start to wonder what I'm doing in this whole dating thing. Am I looking for a relationship? I don't know. Am I looking for sex? No, I seem to manage ok with that.

I was mulling over what to do about Terri last Thursday and had started sending her an email, then decided instead on a text, and was composing the text when Claire arrived to pick me up. We were going out for dinner, via a gallery opening. I abandoned the text.

Sure enough, at the gallery opening, I'm standing there chatting with Claire and one of her friends and I see a tall woman on the other side of the room heading towards the door. Even from just a glimpse of the back of her head I know it's Terri so I abandon Claire and her friend mid-sentence and make a bee-line for Terri, who I manage to catch up with before she leaves the gallery. She was with a friend, who, she told me later, had said to her "there's a man coming over here and he's heading straight for you..".

So once her friend had left I told Terri that I wanted to see her again and (having ascertained that she was around on the weekend) said I'd call her the next day. Then I introduced her to my doctor who, as it turns out, was standing next to us (it's a small town sometimes) and had the presence of mind not to introduce him as "Dr Dick the dick doctor", which is how I usually think of him, as his first name's Dick and he works out of a clinic that specialises in sexual health. And I also had the presence of mind not to ask him about the results of the tests I'd had done the day before to figure out why my cock was sore.

She went off; I went back to Claire and she could tell I'd been up to something because I had a huge grin on my face. She knows about Terri (or, as I call her, TallGirl).

So I took Terri out on Saturday night. We went to a movie. We had dinner. We went for a drink a a new bar that's opened up near me. Then a fairly chaste kiss. I was thinking am I supposed to be making a move? I'm so bad with this stuff. I usually err on the side of being too reserved and women get sick of it because they think I'm not interested. I try to remind myself that women fend off approaches from men all the time, and that Terri and I had by this stage been out three times and were getting on fine and that if she thought I was a creep or a sleazebag she wouldn't be there but I still can't do it.

As we parted she suggested I come over to her place for dinner one night this week. That's more like it!