I have been meaning to get started with this blog for a while now. But things in my life have been happening so fast these past few months, time has gotten away from me. So here I sit, in my newly-nearly-empty office, on my second-to-last day of work (after a 23+ year career in the same place) trying to figure out what I could possibly say that anyone could find interesting! I guess I should start with a little background...
I am 45 years old and have led a fairly 'conventional' life, or at least it seemed so to me. I had not married and had kids like most of my peers; I took the 'career' path, starting with a job in my chosen field (microbiology) right out of college. But my day-to-day life was fairly typical. I worked in a Public Health laboratory on a major University campus, regular hours, Monday-Friday. I rode public transportation or walked to work. Much of my non-work time was spent pursuing my avocation, horses, specifically dressage riding. I spent time with friends, and had several monogamous relationships of varying lengths, with men of varying degrees of unsuitability. Though I had my ups and downs, I was mostly happy. Comfortable. Fairly resigned to staying at my job for the dozen or so more years necessary to earn my retirement.
Late fall 2010, my relationship of 3 or so years was tanking, badly. "On-again-off-again" was mostly Off. After trying my heart out for so long, I was done, really, but something (boredom? laziness?) kept letting me get sucked back in. So, initially as a diversion to keep me from the one who was clearly not the one, I joined a free online dating site. Over the next six months or so I met quite a few interesting people, and a few lying assholes. The information available on the site I was using allowed me to fairly easily weed out most people I would be totally incompatible with, and I was approaching things with an open mind. There were very few guys I would not have had a second (or third) date with, but vanishingly few who felt the same about me. (And the ones that did usually had a predictable agenda.) So overall it was fun, if at times a bit frustrating, with a few minor heartaches thrown in.
In mid July, after being blown off by someone I had thought was a "nice guy" and getting rejected for a second date by one I had some hope for, I was feeling a bit blue. I was staying with some friends who had AC during a bit of a heatwave, and declared that I was pretty close to giving up. Or some such hyperbole. There was one guy I had exchanged a couple of messages with, but since he lived 4 hours away, and was planning a move halfway around the world soon, I had not given him much thought as a possibility. He also did not score as high on the "match percentage" as most of the guys I had met, and declared himself a "christian" in several of the questions, which is usually a red flag for me. But....the more we talked, and as the website messaging went to regular email, then to the phone and later to Skype, I started to look at things a little differently... T.B.C.
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