Blog 4 - It gets worse before it gets better

My Roomie meeting a nutter hasn’t put me off, he wasn’t dangerous – just deluded! We are still spending far too much time on adjacent laptops scouring our new favourite website for the men of our dreams. I crack on with squeezing a few more dates into my already busy social calendar and it’s like my dirty little secret. A wise old lady once told me not to care what people think of you because other peoples opinions are none of your business. Fair enough, but I still don’t want to be judged as desperate or for people to think I must have something wrong with me (ugly lady garden maybe?) to be 26, not a complete minger and on a dating site! I find myself telling my Mum I can’t make dinner because I’m stuck in meetings after hours when really I’m sat waiting to interview the next candidate in a bar somewhere!

I exchange a few e-mails with an estate agent who lives a few miles away. I can’t say it’s a profession I fancy marrying into but surely it means he’s a good communicator and has the tenacity and drive that David could do with! He’s only got one photo and it’s been taken on his mobile in the mirror by the look of but I’ve given up judging appearances from photo’s. We have a quick chat on the phone and he’s really lively and enthusiastic and asks for a date straight away so coffee on Saturday lunchtime is agreed.

I’m not a lazy person and not even tired but for some reason I can’t be bothered to walk the 2 minutes from the nearest car park so I just take a space on the street with a maximum stay of 1 hour. I can see through the window of the little French café there’s a guy waiting with the tell tale posture of expectation. When I walk in he knows it’s me and immediately stands up to greet me politely. He’s very tall and dressed like…..something out of the early 90’s?? Pinstripe flat fronted trousers, larger than life loafers and an open collared shirt with a silver chain of the fake designer variety (maybe Giorgia Amandi – you know the sort!). I’ve noted this all in the space of a nano-second but (in text speak) if that didn’t make me ‘pmsl’ enough the glass eye did. I’m not kidding. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Bless him, he’s very clean and well ironed in the last decades fashions and has lovely manners but the failure to mention the replacement article in his face did leave me a little shocked. His nervous twitches and booming laugh at all the wrong points in the conversation did nothing to help me overlook the physical aspect of things. Thank god I have a bona fide excuse to leg it before I get a parking ticket just as I’d taken the last sip of my cappuccino. He was a cracker!

Later that day David called to ask me out for dinner and drinks the following Friday at this nice Marina in the next town, it sounds good and hopefully a few glasses of whatever will have the desired effect. In the meantime I’ve arranged to meet a guy called Mark for an after work drink on Thursday, he works in finance but is really into his music and festivals and comes across as really down to earth but my expectations have totally dropped after my encounter with One Eye’d Willy! Well I couldn’t have been more wrong, I walk up the steps and through the door of the bar to see Marks beautiful smile and enormous brown eyes. He looks pretty dapper in his suit but his hair is dark and messy and curly showing he’s not all squeaky clean! We sit down chatting and laughing and exchanging gig stories for about 2 hours. He’s relaxed and funny and it’s just all I had ever hoped a first date would be. We talk about family, friends and work and he just seems to catch my drift about everything. I don’t feel I have to sensor my humour (I do for most people!) and I leave on a high with dinner arranged for the following Sunday there and then.

So now I’m right in the thick of it dating like a New Yorker and what I’ve negated to tell you is that all this time I’ve sort of been ‘involved’ with a friend of a friend. So why am I still searching if I’m seeing someone you ask? Well I’ve known this guy for years and used to fancy him when I was about 18. We bumped into each other soon after I became single and lots of coffee’s, texts and e-mails ensued. I got quite excited about it all actually but it quite quickly became apparent that he was a commitment-phobe and was still reeling in the wake of a dysfunctional relationship. If truth be told I am still hoping it’ll work out but he knows I’m on this dating site and hasn’t tried to stop me so I guess that tells me it isn’t going to. I don’t have any intention of cutting it off right now though because I’m craving male company when it suits and a girl has needs to be fulfilled and I’ve got no intention of crawling bars and taking home drunk strangers for that!

But soon starts kicking up a fuss when I’m not as ‘available’ as usual due to my heavy dating schedule…..