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Well, it's been seven months since I last wrote about my stumbling non-efforts to get a date. How is that going so far in 2007, the Year of Change?
I haven't done enough with the Yahoo Personals subscription yet. I had one woman send me a canned message, "I like your profile! Tell me more," but she then ignored my response. I tried contacting three other women on my own, after seeing their profiles while browsing - at least one of them also turned up as a suggested match from Yahoo. Two of them ignored me, the third actually bothered to write me a nice note to say she wasn't interested. Over those months I've also had another four to six profiles bookmarked at various times, but ended up deciding not to contact them. I realize that's not the right approach, but often it's too easy to give in to discouragement and decide they would never contact me back, because their profile already specifies they want someone taller than me or younger than me, or some other detail just feels incompatible. In any case, I haven't seen a lot of new and interesting profiles turn up on Yahoo in the past few months.
I started using my Salon Personals account again, after ignoring it for over a year because of their change to the FastCupid service. I still had credits available that were transferred from the old system, and although FastCupid still reserves the better features for people with subscriptions, the system seemed to be better than it was when I had last looked at it. So I updated my profile, started checking regularly, and did some browsing. I bookmarked about a half-dozen profiles, but only contacted one of those so far, and of course I was ignored.
However, like most of these sites, there's a page to show you who's looked at your profile in the past month. When I started using Salon again at the beginning of the year, there hadn't been any recent activity, and it stayed that way for a few months - which meant for one thing that the women whose profiles I looked at were not checking me out in return, and for another that no one else was. But then a few weeks ago I discovered that someone had checked me out, and it wasn't someone I'd already looked at. Her profile headline quoted lyrics that I recognized, she looked cute, and she sounded pretty cool - but she's living in Boston. Still I figured what the hell, if someone who I find interesting checks me out unprompted, I might as well send her a message, so I did. We exchanged a few messages there and have moved on to regular email. This may not go anywhere as far as romance, but hey, if I get a cool Internet friend out of it, that makes me happy.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I almost asked someone out, but it fell through. To be more specific, I met a friend of a friend last summer, and she seemed pretty cool. I saw her again in April at another party held by the same mutual friend, she was still very cool and I learned she was single, so I decided I had to ask her out. The trouble was, I didn't actually make a point of pulling her aside as we were leaving, because she was in conversation with someone she was going to give a ride home, and I felt it would be rude to interrupt them. This, I'm told, was a mistake, although not the reason it fell through. Because I didn't talk to her directly at the time, I had to ask our mutual friend for her contact information, so I could try calling or emailing her (preferably calling) to ask her out. Unfortunately, for reasons of her own, she specified that he could pass her contact info on for social purposes but not for romance, so that fell through.
However, also in the real world, I noticed a couple months ago that ToST Lounge, in the nearby neighborhood of Fremont, regularly hosts speed dating events put on by HurryDate. I like ToST, and it's easy to get to being a short walk away, so I've finally let go of my reluctance (as I talked about over a year ago) and signed up to their service. They host events for two age groupings: one event is for men and women ages 25 to 35, the other event is for men 35 to 45 and women 30 to 40, although they specify that people are free to attend events they don't "officially" fit into. I'm registered to attend my first event this Wednesday, which is for the older age group. Depending on how that goes, I may sign up to attend the 25-35 group in a couple weeks. One thing I wonder about is how much turnover there is: if I go to both these events, or to two older-group events a month apart, am I just going to be seeing a lot of the same people more than once? In any case, I'm going to at least one, and unless it's a disaster I suppose I'll go to another event or two - this is as much if not more about simply getting out and meeting a bunch of people as it is about actually getting a date out of the event, let alone a relationship.
So, that's how things are going so far. I'll credit the two "real world" events to the Year of Change. It's a change for me to decide right away that I should ask out the cool woman I've met and to (try to) follow through on that, rather than let months go by before realizing that I really like her and want to ask her out, by which point it's clearly too late. It's also a change for me to be trying the speed dating thing finally, after resisting for the past year or two. Small changes perhaps, but still, perhaps they'll lead to something better.
I haven't done enough with the Yahoo Personals subscription yet. I had one woman send me a canned message, "I like your profile! Tell me more," but she then ignored my response. I tried contacting three other women on my own, after seeing their profiles while browsing - at least one of them also turned up as a suggested match from Yahoo. Two of them ignored me, the third actually bothered to write me a nice note to say she wasn't interested. Over those months I've also had another four to six profiles bookmarked at various times, but ended up deciding not to contact them. I realize that's not the right approach, but often it's too easy to give in to discouragement and decide they would never contact me back, because their profile already specifies they want someone taller than me or younger than me, or some other detail just feels incompatible. In any case, I haven't seen a lot of new and interesting profiles turn up on Yahoo in the past few months.
I started using my Salon Personals account again, after ignoring it for over a year because of their change to the FastCupid service. I still had credits available that were transferred from the old system, and although FastCupid still reserves the better features for people with subscriptions, the system seemed to be better than it was when I had last looked at it. So I updated my profile, started checking regularly, and did some browsing. I bookmarked about a half-dozen profiles, but only contacted one of those so far, and of course I was ignored.
However, like most of these sites, there's a page to show you who's looked at your profile in the past month. When I started using Salon again at the beginning of the year, there hadn't been any recent activity, and it stayed that way for a few months - which meant for one thing that the women whose profiles I looked at were not checking me out in return, and for another that no one else was. But then a few weeks ago I discovered that someone had checked me out, and it wasn't someone I'd already looked at. Her profile headline quoted lyrics that I recognized, she looked cute, and she sounded pretty cool - but she's living in Boston. Still I figured what the hell, if someone who I find interesting checks me out unprompted, I might as well send her a message, so I did. We exchanged a few messages there and have moved on to regular email. This may not go anywhere as far as romance, but hey, if I get a cool Internet friend out of it, that makes me happy.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I almost asked someone out, but it fell through. To be more specific, I met a friend of a friend last summer, and she seemed pretty cool. I saw her again in April at another party held by the same mutual friend, she was still very cool and I learned she was single, so I decided I had to ask her out. The trouble was, I didn't actually make a point of pulling her aside as we were leaving, because she was in conversation with someone she was going to give a ride home, and I felt it would be rude to interrupt them. This, I'm told, was a mistake, although not the reason it fell through. Because I didn't talk to her directly at the time, I had to ask our mutual friend for her contact information, so I could try calling or emailing her (preferably calling) to ask her out. Unfortunately, for reasons of her own, she specified that he could pass her contact info on for social purposes but not for romance, so that fell through.
However, also in the real world, I noticed a couple months ago that ToST Lounge, in the nearby neighborhood of Fremont, regularly hosts speed dating events put on by HurryDate. I like ToST, and it's easy to get to being a short walk away, so I've finally let go of my reluctance (as I talked about over a year ago) and signed up to their service. They host events for two age groupings: one event is for men and women ages 25 to 35, the other event is for men 35 to 45 and women 30 to 40, although they specify that people are free to attend events they don't "officially" fit into. I'm registered to attend my first event this Wednesday, which is for the older age group. Depending on how that goes, I may sign up to attend the 25-35 group in a couple weeks. One thing I wonder about is how much turnover there is: if I go to both these events, or to two older-group events a month apart, am I just going to be seeing a lot of the same people more than once? In any case, I'm going to at least one, and unless it's a disaster I suppose I'll go to another event or two - this is as much if not more about simply getting out and meeting a bunch of people as it is about actually getting a date out of the event, let alone a relationship.
So, that's how things are going so far. I'll credit the two "real world" events to the Year of Change. It's a change for me to decide right away that I should ask out the cool woman I've met and to (try to) follow through on that, rather than let months go by before realizing that I really like her and want to ask her out, by which point it's clearly too late. It's also a change for me to be trying the speed dating thing finally, after resisting for the past year or two. Small changes perhaps, but still, perhaps they'll lead to something better.
◾ Tags:
- goals,
- loneliness,
- me,
- romance
