So…when I left off, my wine was sucking but my car was ticket-free. I suggested why don’t we plan a time in advance to end the date no matter how well it might be going to avoid any awkwardness later. He liked the idea. I would have been generous and suggested 9:30 or 10:00 but luckily he jumped right in with 9:00. I liked that A LOT. We had the obligatory Match.com discussion where he seemed to say Match every other word and quite loudly at that. I’m not embarrassed to be doing the online dating thing but saying Match over and over when we were so obviously strangers only encourages eavesdroppers in the tiny space. It’s one of those words that grabs your attention from the next table, kind of like “nipple” or “fart.”

He had very unsettling conversational habits. A good conversation flows seemlessly from topic to topic. This did not. When he was done with a subject, he would stop abruptly and look right at me. There was no glancing away, no tapering off to let me know I’d be up at bat any moment. Just silence with a stare. It freaked me out, though not enough to stop my mind from wandering through most of his talking. I’m usually a very good listener but I was everywhere but there. He was just like his profile- nothing interesting, nothing memorable. At one point, I noticed how bad my posture was. I was sitting slightly to the side with both my arms and legs crossed. The body language experts would have a field day with that. Strangely, he was sitting forward on the table, which would appear that he was interested, but I knew he wasn’t. I also spent a couple minutes pondering how we would finally part and tried to come up with something to say but was soon faced with a stare and had to leave my happy place.

It seemed like we’d gone way over our 9:00 deadline but I didn’t want to check the time on my phone as it would be a reminder that I have a purse and that there’s money in my purse and that I might pay for my drink. So I kept hoping the waitress would come by and relieve me of my misery. That’s when he mentioned it was 9:00. I couldn’t believe it had only been an hour, less actually. It seriously felt like a good two hours or more.

Finally the server dropped our check. I paused for a moment while he reached for his wallet, then very slowly picked up my purse. There was no mention from him of buying. Hey, I can understand a guy not wanting to pay the bill for a woman he doesn’t want to see again. But the fact is, he wrote to me and I’m the one who drove out to his neck of the woods. Rather than choosing a location where it cost him $13 for a glass of wine, maybe he should have chosen one of the thousands of other places where he could have bought both our drinks for that price. Cheap ass.

We headed out and just as I guessed, we had that awkward goodbye moment. Usually when people leave each other, there’s some mention of a future meeting, but I knew that wasn’t coming out of either of our mouths. I just laughed and said, “Well, maybe we’ll write, maybe we won’t.” And with that, I left.

The next day, I thought about him not buying my drink and was curious to see if he’d listed his income on his page so I went to check it out. His profile was gone! I don’t know why it was gone, but it seemed funny, like he’d skipped town immediately. Later that day, I received an email from him. For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why he’d be writing so I put off reading it for a day. I finally did and it said:

I enjoyed meeting you last night. I’ll be honest and say I don’t think
we quite have the chemistry I was looking for, but wanted to at least drop you a
line rather than disappear from the planet Best wishes on your search.

I really can’t fault him for sending it but it couldn’t have been more unnecessary.

And that’s the end of Mr. Energetic (who was sooo not energetic).

One thing I learned for certain from this date is that I just don’t have it in me right now to try and make something out of nothing. In other words, there needs to be some sort of excitement on my part going into a date because I doubt that someone with little appeal on paper is going to surprise me in person.

The good news is, I FINALLY received an email from someone who really does interest me and who seems like a good match. I’m going to try not to jinx anything so I’ll write the details if/when there’s actually something to tell.