I’ve had a few recent failures. They’ve left a sour taste. Here’s one.
Nick’s profile showed a handsome, white-haired, fit man with an engaging smile. He was a writer/teacher, like me (a double-edged sword), and stated that he wanted a woman who was not bitter or angry, which implied the same was true of him.
We exchanged profiles and he wrote that he was attracted to my adventurous spirit. In our first phone call he said he particularly liked the answer to the “What would I find in your bedroom” question, which is “the freedom to be yourself.” Could I elaborate.
I began talking, not sure how I could answer this question. I asked him questions about himself, which he answered in snippets, then came back to quotes from my own profile. Abruptly he said, “Well, I think we’ve learned enough. If we feel like it we can contact each other again.” I had blown it by talking too much. But but but but but but but.
He answered my attempt at setting things stright by saying that he’d been wrong about my adventurous spirit. This pushed my anger button — how did he figure out so fast how to push my buttons — and I wrote him a short list of my adventures. You are getting the boring, obvious point. Sometimes you just ought to leave things be and move on.
He ended the exchange by calling me an “egomaniac” who had insulted him by forcing him to listen to me “ad nauseum.” He advised me to refrain from talking about my bedroom, and to look to my own house.
Every once in a while I get tangled up in a morass of bad emotion. Such morasses should be dumped early, which I didn’t do. He is an unpleasant man, and I was a jerk.