My date went extremely well. George is incredibly nice, and easy to talk to. Thoughtful, decently interesting, and much taller than I am.
But the thing is (and I can't believe it) I just want to be alone. I'm convalescing from a difficult summer. I'm slowly starting to get myself back, as it were. Yesterday for the first time in months I cleaned my apartment top to toe -- and how WONDERFUL to have a clean, neat, orderly living space again. To have a Sunday where I wake up, stretch luxuriously, and have all day to relax, without thinking, Ugh, my apartment is filthy, I really should clean it, but I just can't.
I changed the calendar hanging on my bedroom wall for the first time since April. April is when my life as a healthy-minded human being basically stopped. Now it's on September, as I'm greatly looking forward to that month. I'll be twenty-five in two and a half weeks, and it's good that another year is starting its cycle.
And with all that, I don't have the energy to expend on a new relationship. I just don't want to. At the moment, most guys, however nice and interesting, seem sort of flat when I consider dating them. I have been tremendously enjoying my time spent with groups of friends (hallelujah, the grad students are back), which makes my time spent in solitude all the more relaxing.
But there's been too much loss, too much regrouping, to get to know someone right now in the context of dating. I'm having a hard time dealing with the inevitable awkwardness, with the explicit intent from someone I've just met. I don't want to cuddle with, or kiss, someone I don't really know (touch is an indication of knowledge and trust. I don't like giving it to someone right away, and I hate how dating, as a means of getting to know someone, desacramentalizes human contact). I want to recover, and to heal, I've always needed to be more or less alone. And it all comes back to the reality that however much I love people, getting to know new ones exhausts me.
It figures, of course. I spent the entirety of last year freaking out about my single status and hating every minute of it, with no relief of offers to date from decent men. Now a decent one enters my life and I'm cringing away from dating him. Partly it's just not the right time; partly it's that I don't want to get seriously involved with someone who doesn't share even a modicum of my beliefs (I don't know why it's so difficult to discourse on faith with a dating prospect who isn't a Christian, when talking about it with general acquaintances and close friends is so easy. But there's an uncomfortable friction nonetheless); partly it's that he just doesn't have it. And I hate this because I don't even know what it is. It's like Dr. Potter's standards on the "A" paper -- he would always say, "I don't have a criteria, really. I just know one when I read it." Which is very frustrating to both grader and graded, not to know why one paper is an "A" and another is a "B." I can't say why one guy draws me and another doesn't. Maybe there's a fire of spirit that I need, and placid people just don't do it for me, which tends to be the quality that formulates the basic character of the "nice guy."
I tend to wonder if my standards are too high; if I'm too picky; if I'm too willing to shunt someone away without giving him a chance; if these attitudes and behaviors will consign me to years of unecessary unhappiness. But then I tend to consider that I don't have much baggage from prior relationships, and count that in my favor. I worry about everything more than enough as it is, without adding complicated choices made in uncertainty to the pile.
And I'm anticipating dealing with a couple more losses in the next week or two. There are a few things that I have to do. I don't really need, I don't think, anxiety and guilt from a new quarter to heighten the difficulty of the necessary changes I must make in more familiar realms.
All that being said, the baseline is that I'm just tired. I need to continue to heal. And always, for me, that's best done when I'm single.
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