Reasons I Stopped Dating a Woman

I haven't dated a lot of women, and I think of myself more as a dumpee rather than the dumper. The following chart shows women I stopped dating (that is, I stopped asking for dates, rather than the gal refusing them) after a time and the reasons. (The chart is not scientific--it's based merely on outings I remember.) In all cases, it was within the first three dates, and it was clear that these were dates. I think there are a lot more outings where what the girl and I were doing wasn't clear, so those relationships--more like friendships than dating--often just drifted away through circumstances (moves, other people in the picture, etc.).

In making this chart, I recognized a number of things. One, I haven't been very clear in the past regarding my intentions; something, I've been trying to change in the past couple of years. So I've made a lot of "friends" and never got the relationship I was hoping for. Most so-called relationships have simply drifted away rather than ending with a clear discussion about what we wanted brought about by me. Two, I really am the dumpee more often than the dumper. Three, because dates are so difficult to get, I'll go out with women who I am pretty sure are not a match to begin with, hoping they'll become one--they never have (which makes me wonder whether I should even give such women a chance--I feel like a tease when I do). Four, I don't tend to end the possibility of a relationship very clearly. More often, I let dating drift into friendship rather than clearly spelling out that I'm not interested, and for better or worse, I almost never cut off all contact. Five, the very few women who have matched all of the three criteria above have rejected me, sometimes before the first date (admittedly, in those cases, that we had "chemistry" was probably not yet established, since the girl never gave it a chance to develop, let alone see if there could be something there) and sometimes after a long series of so-called dates. Six, I've gone out on quite a few truly blind dates (that is, I had no idea what the woman even looked like before asking her out).

Authors I've Read the Most Books By

This list is somewhat unscientific, as I don't have a way to track books I've read more than fifteen years ago, except by memory. So I looked at authors on my shelf, thought a bit about authors missing from my shelf, looked at the works on their various "also by" lists and came up with the following. This lists only those authors who I've read more than five books by. (Apologies to authors of only four books, such as Salinger and Hemphill and West--I've read all I can. Apologies also to a few fine writers who come close such as Richard Ford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Milan Kundera, Jay McInerney, Kate Braverman, and Julio Cortazar. And finally, apologies to screenwriters playwrights, such as Sam Shepard and Woody Allen--I've read three collections of Shepard's plays, as well as a screenplay, but in the end, I wasn't sure whether to consider the collection as a book or each individual play as a book; I went with the former; with Allen, I've read three screenplays, in one bound volume, and his three books of "stories.")

Internet Viewing Hits 4

Here's another look at what I've been looking at online. For the last ninety days:

And here's just the last thirty days:

Movies Seen per Year

I haven't been seeing a lot of films lately, at least not in the theater, and now, I notice, not even on video. Reasons? There are probably many--lack of time being one. But another is how much films in the theater cost (too much, in my view). And still another is probably my switch, this year, to DSL, which now allows me to stream stuff--I end up watching stupid random stuff online (TV shows, home cat videos, skits, speeches, vlogs) and sometimes the occasional movie (without even venturing to the video store). Here's how the number of films each year stacks up:

The 2011 total for theater movies went up as high as it did mostly because of the return of the French film festival to campus--probably the last one we'll have, since the professor sponsoring it was tired of doing it. Cheap foreign movies--it was great. The theater movies total this year was zero until the fall, when my friend Al started asking me to accompany him to a few films.

Facebook Friends

I have a lot more women friends on Facebook than men. I feel a bit embarrassed by how disparate the difference, as if I'm some sort of love and leave them sort (this from a guy who's never managed to get them in the first place). I guess I'm just too nice a guy to have a gal take an interest in me as more than friends. Here's the breakdown:

Different parts of my life render different levels of Facebook friends. The church friends are probably where a large chunk of the women tally up (and I guess I did try lamely to date some share of them). Then again, so would work be largely female, since I work in a profession that is dominated by women (about 70 percent of my coworkers are women). And even my relatives--I have only one male cousin. I'm surprised by how many high school acquaintances I'm connected with versus grad school; I made no lasting undergrad friends. Local friends take up a large share; I wonder how much of that is a testament to how much I like where I live and how comfortable I am in this setting versus how much of that is simply a result of where I am/was living when Facebook came into being (that is, would I have more Texas friends if Facebook had come into being when I was living there?).

Roaches Spotted September versus October

I've lived in this apartment for ten years and have generally only had about five or so roaches a year, but I had an infestation this past summer. I'm not sure why or how, though I suspect it may have been the lack of a harsh winter. It's been a pain trying to get rid of them.

In early October I took a vacation, left the apartment for a while, left no dirty dishes in the sink. I was wondering whether the bugs would proliferate without my active presence looking to kill them or if they would die off without my constant feeding of them through cooking meals and such. It looks like it was the latter. (The x axis is the day [1st day of survey in September versus 1st day of survey in October, etc.], the y is the number of roaches.) Since October, I've only found about one per week or so, still higher than I'd like.

Emails Received versus Sent in October

Back in 1999, when I first got online at home, one thing I looked forward to was possibly meeting women to date, since I was never very good at doing this in real life. The first few months proved more frustrating than imagined--plenty of correspondents but few I was attracted to. I gave up, and then one gal showed up who became a friend for a few years, though we weren't compatible for dating. Over the course of the next year, my communication with potential dates grew, until, again, I got frustrated not so much with lack of attraction but with the lack of compatibility.

Online communication never did turn into much more than just that since then. And I've backed away from doing as much of it as I used to, while e-mail itself has been replaced by Facebook and other things that I don't use much of (I'm old school and stick to e-mail largely).

I decided to look at what kind of communication I do via personal e-mail. Interestingly, I do largely communicate mostly with women, as is evidenced by the following graph. And I send more personal e-mail than I receive.