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).