Way too hectic

Life has been hectic and chaotic in the last few weeks since I put the CL ad out there. First, I received almost 50 responses. Almost half I could reject out of hand for the following reasons: included a nude pic with response, not within my requested age range, one line response that told me nothing. From there, I weeded them down to my top ten, and attempted to meet those ten. In fact, I only met 4 in person. Of the other six, two stopped emailing responses without explanation, one lives in another city and only visits here every few weeks so we've only emailed back and forth, one cancelled our date the day before we were to meet and never attempted to reschedule, and two I lost interest in as our emailing progressed.

As I was finding frustration with my CL guys, I was introduced to www.plentyoffish.com by, of all people, W. He is using it to try to find a woman to join us for a threesome. So far he has been completely unsuccessful. Unbeknownst to him, I put my own profile out there, dummying up just enough info to keep W from catching on to me if he runs across my profile without making it so fake that it doesn't really describe me. I mean, what's an inch difference in height or one year's difference in age? And after all, if I give an adjoining zip code rather than my own how much difference does that really make?

Now, if you just want the bottom line without all the gory detail skip on down to the summary section. What follows is long, and well, I just can't promise that it is all that interesting.

So I've had interest from about a dozen guys on POF, including G whom I'd met a while back when I answered his CL ad. He recognized my profile enough to ask if I had had lunch with him at a certain restaurant a while back. I never replied back. He was somewhat creepy when I met him so I wasn't too keen on getting drawn back in to a conversation. I replied back to four of the guys that expressed interest. Two of them were interested enough to schedule lunch dates for last week. Both cancelled within 24 hours of our scheduled dates, the first due to a work emergency resulting in him being called in to work the evening before until the wee hours of the morning to solve an IT crisis. Since then, he has said he would like to reschedule but has made no effort to actually do so. The other guy cancelled because he had to fly out to another city on short notice. He stayed in email contact the entire time, and he was anxious to reschedule our lunch date so tomorrow I'll meet him for lunch. He owns his own business, and is the only one so far not concerned about the cost of hotel rooms and such, and has said that if there were any way for me to get away he'd take me on business trips, such as last week's, with him. Hmmm. . . well, I've got to go to lunch and at least check this guy out.

Last Friday, I had a lunch date with S, one of the four CL guys I've met. He is tall and handsome. From his voice on the phone and the picture he sent I had assumed he was European with olive skin. In fact, he is a light-skinned black originally from Trinidad as I learned when we got together. Instead of eating at the restaurant where we met, we went to a park down the street and took a walk. We chatted about lots of things. We kissed, and maybe went just a bit further at a fairly private picnic table in the park. He is ready to move on to more with me. I'm thinking it over.

Also, H has asked until tomorrow to give me his final decision as to whether he can go forward or not. I didn't tell him yes or no about giving him that time. I did email him my pitch today as to why we ought to go ahead and go for it together, but I'm fully expecting him to stick with his "too guilty" decision and am really not thinking this one will go anywhere. Although if he does surprise me and decide to go for it, I would definitely go forward with him, putting all others on hold until I'm convinced he's really able to go through with it.

And what about J? Well, he and I were trying to figure out a way to get together this coming week. However, I sensed that he was so much less enthusiastic about it than I was so today I emailed him and told him that I don't think we should get together this week. I'm tired of loving him so much more than he loves me. I'm trying to fall out of love with him, and getting together with him is clearly not going to further that cause. And now that I have at least the prospect of sex somewhere else, I am no longer willing to accept J in less than a situation where he loves me the way I love him.

Throughout all of this, it has been very difficult to keep straight who is who, and I frequently go back to earlier emails from a particular man to remind me which one he is. I am glad that I feel this phase of the process is winding down.

So there we are, where I stand with all my men. The summary for those of you with short attention spans and who skipped down to see the bottom line:
W - clueless but happy that things are so much better at home
S - hot, sexy, very well could be my new affair
H - still not able to 100% let go, but almost certainly a no go
L - meeting for lunch tomorrow, will have some work to do to beat S
J - still trying to get over him, and think I might finally just be on my way