2:01 First there was T
Dating in the modern era mostly involves filtering people through online applications. This suits me fine, as I never was - and never will be - the kind of person to intrude into stranger's personal space in public places. Starting easy, with Bumble, I created a profile and started chatting with available women.
This was mostly positive. People were nice, and relatively interesting. It's probably helpful that I filter aggressively - looking for profiles that suggest intelligence and physical activity. The chatting portion is an opportunity to test my third main filter: communication skills.
T was the first person to crush all three requirements, and became my first in-person date. But before we get there, I really need to go back over the chatting portion with more detail. Because in the case of T, it's pretty special.
Among those below my arbitrarily-judged threshold for communication skills include people who essentially just provide text-grunts, people totally dedicated to small-talk despite deeper probes, and people who asymmetrically ask to be entertained without personally engaging. It generally took me too long to try to coax these people into some sort of connection, and I let myself be frustrated a bit too much. But it really is a rewarding feeling when you get past the superficial aspects and get to see how thoughts and feelings might mesh. If there is a spectrum, with 75% below my communication requirement, T scored as a >99% right away.
To start, T and I fell into essay questions and answers. Immediately complete with vulnerable personal truths and clear ideas. Which then lead to the following legendary exchange: (from memory, original transcript lost)
T: "Wow, you may be almost as bad at small talk as I am."
C²: "Yeah, my many many failures at small talk are the stuff of legend."
T: "Fuck small talk."
At which point, I could feel my metaphorical pants fly off. My entire friendship with T after that point has needed to co-exist with the fact that I have been completely seduced by this woman by virtue of just her communication. That one interaction might not seem like a big deal, but it hit me in the bulls-eye of my intellectual and emotional connection needs. And she has done continuous versions of this the whole time I've known her. Because it's more than just saying the right thing. It's saying insightful, pointed, caring things from a place of being entirely genuine and vulnerable about her own experience and thoughts.
So, as mentioned, this progressed to actual dating in person.
It really is a lovely thing to have a person be exactly as advertised. The way T existed in text conversation translated directly to how engaging she is to be with in person. There were only a few dates, all told, however. They progressed from simple and safe, through thoughtful and hopeful, to a date heavily laden with sexual tension and heady feelings. I have to fan myself to counteract the blushing I feel just remembering it.
Where it abruptly halted.
One of the side-effects of our conversational engagement was for T to look deeper into herself, and see how much processing she still needed to do regarding some aspects of her own needs. She expressed it as a very strong connection to me, but with a recognition of how much more she wanted from me than seemed possible to get. Where we had originally negotiated a low-demand casual-like intimate connection, she felt a painful yearning for something more solid. With her clear insight, she could see that I was still very freshly emerged from my previous life, and could not reliably commit to any particular form of existence. As she succinctly put it: she did not want to be my transitional relationship.
So she urged me to date others, allow some time and experience to wash over me, and to stay in touch.
I was very disappointed, but had to respect her reasoning. I mean, somebody had to be my transitional relationship, why not a person that I like and trust? But she was probably right, and her own complications were something I would never want to trample in a damaging way. So we became text buddies.
Sweet, supportive text buddies. All through the subsequent NSG roller-coaster.
Up until the day between our birthdays, where we went out to dinner together to catch up in person. Physically proximate for the first time since the breathless parting outside a movie theater. It was very, very nice. But ended with a chaste hug that, well, I could not really parse in a chaste way at all. She is really very sexy, and I'm all flustered anew. Which is fun.
Still the reigning king of the friendzone, though.