Bringing it all back home

It’s been a week since I last went on a date.

Normally I wouldn’t say that’s a long time, but normally I go on fewer than seven dates in a week. I almost feel like one of those college athletes who doesn’t know what to do with all his free time in the off-season. Not that I’m not keeping busy, just that nothing keeps you busy like having a date every night. That’s the first lesson I learned from this experience. What else did I learn?

I learned that everyone’s a little curious and excited about meeting someone new, but that it takes a leap of faith for someone to ask the another person out. And that leap doesn’t happen often enough. We’re all guilty, but it doesn’t help that half the population feels like they can’t do the asking. I understand that it’s hard to do. The thought of rejection is scary and it hurts, but it’s part of life. Not everything is going to work out all the time. Isn’t it better to know that then to sit around wondering? I won’t always be able to follow this advice, but I am going to do my best to be more honest with myself and others going forward.

I learned that I shouldn’t get so worried about going on dates. Maybe I should be worried about what happens on second dates (if I can get there), but that’s for another blog (7 second dates in 7 days). All of these first dates were fun and enlightening, even though they were essentially with total strangers. I got to meet a wide variety of girls and talk about a wide variety of subjects. And even when I repeated myself to different girls, I got to see different reactions. Maybe the next step might be asking out girls I already know I like (no offense ladies, I like you too)?

I learned that there’s a big difference between private thoughts and conversations and public blogging and commenting. Steve kept on saying that “you all” were clamoring for more intimate details (and he did post some e-mails to that effect), but very few of you openly commented on the blog about this issue. I’m not saying that I would have gotten into intimate details if I had been asked directly (I just couldn’t be that public with something that private), but any feedback would have made the process easier. I know that many of you had thoughts while reading that would have been helpful and interesting for everyone. And nothing would be better than recaps from the ladies (none of you had ANY obligation to write this time, but I think that this should be a requirement next time). The next dater deserves some more feedback and I’m sure that he/she would love to have it.

I learned that I still have a lot to learn. There’s no magic dating formula. Sure it helps to be polite and tell funny stories and buy multiple rounds of drinks (I did at least two out of these three things), but there’s still a certain inexplicable connection that’s either there or it’s not. Nothing is really going to change that and while I’m getting better at figuring out if I have it with her, I’m still working on how to figure out if she has it with me.

Thanks a ton to Steve, Steph, all the girls, and our readers. It was an enlightening experience and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I’ll leave you with this wonderful quote about girls from this wonderful article about tennis:

“If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. But if there’s like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story. I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.

@2 years ago