Fights with Girlfriend

She's the first official girlfriend I've had, me at age forty-three. I've tried before with other gals but have always been rejected before we reached the exclusivity stage. Things with this gal have been stormy, especially since exclusivity. A lot of it's my own fault, my own indecisiveness and anxiousness about the relationship, which I'm frustrated by. I really want things to work, so why do I keep sabotaging it?

Timing of Dates

So after a few disappointments in November, things turned around for a bit and even, to an extent, got to be a little stressful in terms of dates because I was spending time with more than just one really great woman--and it kind of saddened me to think that I would have to eventually settle on just one, assuming one would have me for something serious.

The Dating Game

I don't know how one can win this game, but I keep on playing.

Obviously, I created this chart in one of my more cynical moods. Seems like I've been rolling mostly threes and fives (with a few short-term sixes) in the last few years, though I haven't completed my second turn in one case yet--I'm still hoping a die will prove to have a seventh side and send me spinning into that ring. I suppose I should be happy I've even had a die to roll with the last few years, because I've gone long spans without even a chance.

Women in My Life as an Adult

Until about a week ago, I'd never had an official girlfriend--that is, a girl I was seeing exclusively who was also seeing me exclusively, with an eye toward marriage (sometimes I've had an eye on a gal and spent time with her and not had anyone else in my life, but when we finally got to "the talk," I've always learned she just saw me as a friend; likewise, there have been a few times when I had more than one gal in my life, which led to my own inability to be decisive, and I ended up losing out on all the women, usually in quick succession--something that almost happened to me again this past spring). Anyway, I was talking the other day with a rather consistent phone companion over the first half of 2013, and she noted that I probably always had some gal who was a friend who I spent time with to kill the loneliness. I said sometimes, but I didn't think that had been the case with me most of my adult life. Hence, I decided to do a graph to see. Below are women I averaged probably at least an hour with on the phone or in person each week during a particular span of time (these are estimates; it's likely I've undercounted time spent with a few women along the way and they're not showing up, just as I've likely overcounted time spent with a few of these women):

Pretty much, I've only had such "relationships" since graduating from college. Of those, the longest was a strictly platonic friendship--I had no romantic intentions and the woman knew this. Right around age thirty--the end of my time in Texas and the start of my time here--I had quite a few women in my life; unfortunately, none of them ended up quite suiting me. Since then, I've tried to stick to mostly spending that much time with women only when I had some real intentions toward them. It's not that I wouldn't have a platonic friendship again that involved as much time as that (or those--since most of the gals in Texas were women who I dated who turned into platonic friends) in the late 1990s; it's just that I've been more focused on trying to find someone I'd actually want to settle down with. Unfortunately, I lost out on the few women I'd gone for since about 2003, sometimes because I was unwilling to commit but most of the time because the woman didn't like me in that mysterious way. Quite a few women I've had a strong interest in don't show up here because I could only manage to get smaller snatches of time from them. Since 2010 I'd been fairly blessed by women's presence (though I keep expecting a return to a more consistently quiet and depressing time, as that has seemed more typical of my adult life).

Interest in and Success with "Ideal" Women

I'm defining "ideal" here in a most basic way: never married, no kids, of my faith, within my preferred age range (eight years younger to four years older). I'm then adding in the degree to which, with those basic concrete variables, I was actually interested. I am doing this because I occasionally spend time with women who don't meet this criteria, and I want to get into my head just how slim the chances of a woman who meets such standards showing return interest is likely to be.

Here, over the past thirteen years, are the number of women who never responded to messages, who responded a few times before dropping correspondence or explicitly rejecting me, who have stayed in correspondence but whom I have never asked out because of my own lack of interest, who rejected me after the first date, and who accepted more than one date. Also denoted are the degree to which I was myself interested in or attracted to these women. I'm basing most this off a singles site devoted to my faith, a site on which I contact every person so that I don't have to feel like I'm trying to pick anyone up, which tends to make me self-conscious, and on a few people/dates I actually recall.

Looks like the chances of getting a date are about 20 percent, which isn't as bad as I thought. However, only one gal of high interest to me (only two total) who meets this criteria has accepted more than one date in the past thirteen years (and none of mid interest; unfortunately, I only got two dates with that other high-interest girl). When considering that the pool of church women from which I'm drawing is about fifty (and finding women outside that pool is difficult), a 4 to 6 percent total for more than one date doesn't actually bode very well. And that's why I opened myself up to dating a mother, and I'm glad that I did.

Age Difference among Women I've Dated

I was discussing with a woman a few days ago how a certain man she knows constantly goes for women he has no chance with, hotties in their early twenties (he's in his late thirties). It made me wonder, since here I am still single and over forty, whether I have a similar pattern. I suppose it depends on what one views as an unacceptable age gap. A recent survey noted that women want a man, on average, about four years older than they are, with a good number of them accepting men up to seven years older. I can say I've mostly stuck to women within eight years of me (what I've long considered the base norm, one year above that seven years), though most women I've gone out with have been younger than me. As I've gotten older, the age spread does seem to have become more liberal, but it doesn't seem that out of whack, I don't think.

In the chart below, the difference in age is shown on the vertical axis, my own age on the horizontal axis:

The chart above is an approximation, based on memory (I haven't kept a record of each woman I've asked out, so it's likely I've forgotten a few, especially among those who I never ended up going out with). Women closer to my age rejected me just as women farther away from my age did, and women who accepted dates also varied accordingly. There doesn't seem to be an overall trend, outside of the fact that the few women I went out with or asked out in my twenties tended to be much closer to my age for obvious reasons.

Phone Calls for February 2013

I kept track of phone calls made to me and returned in February, which renders possibilities for all kinds of charts, some of them quite different from earlier charts regarding November 2012. 

Phone Calls by Gender

Phone Calls by Person

Phone Calls by Relationship

Number of Previous Partners of Women I've Gone Out With

Sex is not something that comes up immediately in discussion on a date, but if I spend enough time with a gal, previous experience usually does arise at some point. Because I date almost exclusively within my faith, the portion is probably skewed conservative compared to the general population--or maybe, just my perceptions are. In the following, I assume, given things such women told me, that they had had no experience, had had experience only within a former marriage, or had a few experiences outside of marriage. But I've been surprised a few times (previous marriages not mentioned, etc.). And then there are a few I never got a vibe from and never discussed such a topic with.

Estimated Time from First Contact to Phone Number

I'm not one to pick up phone numbers from women quickly or easily. Most of my contact with women is online, since I try to date largely within my church--and that is scattered, with women few and far between. So I thought I'd think about women I was interested in whose phone contact information I've gotten and how long it took (the y-axis represents the number of weeks, the x-axis represents the particular woman):

A lot of this delay is my own (note how, in the above, sometimes women ended up giving me the phone number without me asking), but often the women themselves delayed--I asked, but phone numbers weren't in the offing, at least not at the first request. In general, I think I've taken too much time to ask (if I'm interested, I should just move to phone and meeting as soon as possible), but interestingly, even exorbitantly long times of knowing someone have not always yielded a phone number right away.

Phonecalls for November 2012

I kept track of phone calls made to me and returned in November, which renders possibilities for all kinds of charts.

Phonecalls by Gender

Phonecalls by Person

Phonecalls by Relationship

Unfortunately, among the potential dates, the incoming calls came from one person, with whom a "just friends" clarity was eventually established. Apparently, in that regard, I'm not great at getting phone numbers to begin with, and I'm even less successful at getting callbacks or through calls.

Shoes Women Wore on Dates

A friend of mine asked me to make a chart of this. Unfortunately, I don't remember more than six dates back (that is, in one and a half years), so there isn't a large contingent from which to gather data. On the other hand, given the paucity of numbers, I at least can remember these. Here are the types of footware that women wore on the dates I went on (one date involved multiple shoes):

My own footware would be much more consistent:

Timing of Dates

I don't go out on a lot of dates, given the fact that I prefer to date within my faith (long-distance phone calls make up for that somewhat). The following schedule shows just how rare dates are. I had a nice string this past summer, but since then I've hit a dry spell again, for which I don't know the likely end (as evidenced by the "no's" and cancellations, although the last three cancellations were with a woman who, by then, was an established "friend only," so those probably shouldn't count as dates):

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).

Method of Rejecting Dates

I think it would be hard to provide an actual scorecard here of how proposed dates were turned down. Although I haven't dated much, twenty-plus years of dating is still a lot to try to recall. So instead, I'm trying to remember just the last ten years.

Below is a chart of ways girls have rejected my dating proposals. I'm including any women I asked out after a reasonable time of getting to know them as well as women who I actually managed to get a few dates with before being rejected for subsequent dates.

As the chart shows, women often don't tend to be very forthright. Rather than saying No, they tend to opt to make excuses at every invitation or, if possible, even disappear (easier with long-distance acquaintances, where I'm not likely to run into them again).

Among these, the ones I hate the most are the ones that involve a breakdown of communication: accepting a date then canceling and refusing to reschedule (particularly troublesome if substantive planning was involved), repeated excuses, and a failure to return messages. I hate the last two for two reasons: (1) I don't know what's going on for a certain length of time; and (2) I am left wondering whether I actually was rejected or simply gave up too soon. (After all, there have been women I asked out multiple times who finally accepted after a full year of discourse.)

I think as I've gotten older, I've become better at reading the signals. I tend now to understand better that no return message or repeated excuses (especially with no counter offer) almost always equal no. But that still leaves sometimes a month or two before I recognize what's going on (and even then, such excuses make it easier for me to continue hoping where there really isn't any). I'd rather be saved the hassle of asking two or three times and just be told no nicely but directly. I also dislike the lack of returned messages because sometimes it's killed what could have been a decent friendship.

I say I hate these techniques for turning down dates, and yet, I recognize how difficult it is to be that direct, since I've often used excuses or slower and less personal messages (I always return messages) as ways to distance myself from a gal who seems interested in me whom I don't fancy. Knowing how I feel about it, though, I've tried to be more direct in the past few years (as well as more direct in asking women out, so that I get clear answers). Still, it's awkward to be direct sometimes: I mean, why contact someone just to say, "Hey, I'm not into you." Seems kind of rude and strange. It's a little easier, for me, if the gal is the one contacting me--showing me lots of attention--since it gives me the opportunity to explain why she probably shouldn't be doing so.

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).

Approximate Distance Traveled for Last Five Dates

I'll go a long way for a date, especially since women of my faith are so few and far between.

First and Second Date Activities

It would likely be hard to put together a list of such dates over the course of my life, since--even though I have never dated a lot--twenty years is a long time, and it's likely I've forgotten a date or two in doing this assessment. There's also the whole question of whether the activity was a date in the first place. I've tried hard, in the past couple of years, to ensure that what I'm doing is being read as a date so that I don't end up accidentally in the friend zone (unfortunately, so far, it hasn't done much good).

So here's what I did on memorable/remembered first dates:

Or to break it down another way by activities involved:

Here's what I did on memorable/remembered second dates:

Or to break it down a different way by activities involved:

It looks like dinner is the clear winner for first dates, and it is often a feature of second dates. Why does lunch play so small a role? I think it's that going to lunch, for me, is simply too rushed. Even if the idea is to keep a first date short so as not to prolong discomfort, because I rarely live close to where my dates live, lunch is hard to come by.

In fact, a number of my first dates involved things, stretching into longer hours, that most people would reserve for later dates, scared as they are that the first date will go badly. I've generally known the women somewhat by the time we go on the first date, I suppose, which may be one reason I haven't always felt compelled to keep the date short just in case, though I have on the two most recent dates I've gone on. Even when I don't know the gal that well, if I'm out on a date with her, it almost always seems to go fairly well--I'm entertaining and nonthreatening and only a little weird (and not in a creepy kind of way). After all, the date is about getting to know someone, and that for me is fun, even if it's not a match.

Another thing: dinner and a movie--looking back at that, those were mostly dates when I was far younger. I would no longer choose that as an option--I want to spend my date talking. After age twenty-one, it's easier to extend a night at a bar somewhere, which allows for more interaction than a movie would.

Women I've Been Rejected By

There's no shortage of these, but the chart below focuses on women with whom I had an extended friendship/dating-type relationship. I have always had problems with closing the deal--by that I mean switching over from casual dating or friendship to something more serious, something clearly defined as a relationship, where there's a boyfriend and a girlfriend and all that that entails.

In my life, I've gotten around to the "talk" five times, and each time the result has been, "Let's stay friends, as I'm not interested in something romantic." Here's how long it took for me to get to that point with each gal:

So why does this always happen? (And I'm not being hyperbolic since I've never had a "yes" and thus never had an official girlfriend.) I think there's a combination of factors. One, I probably send off friend signals too much rather than romantic signals (especially because I really try to avoid too much physical touching: I'm more a believer in "courtship" than "dating"; that is, I don't want to do anything with a gal I wouldn't do with anyone else until a relationship is formalized--and wouldn't do most things until the wedding). Still, there are verbal signals one can send, and I really tried to do that before I got rejected this last time a few months ago, but alas whether it worked or not--I still got the same result. Another may be that my asking has often been part of a sense of panic rather than calm: another guy seems to be moving into the picture, one of us is moving away, the gal is spending less and less time with me. Hence, it's been bad timing on my part.

In some cases, part of the reason I asked, though, was so that I would know where I stood with regard to dating so that I could pursue other opportunities without guilt. So in that sense, I was trying to be honorable to the woman I'd been seeing. Sometimes, the "no" was a partial relief, sometimes not--depending on how real and immediate those other opportunities were and how interested I was in pursuing them.

I suppose one good thing for those who I ask is this: they end up married within a few years. The only one still single is the one who just rejected me. How long will she stay on the market? We'll see.

 

This other chart shows the time it took to end the possibility of a relationship with women I went out with for a period, who I never got around to asking for one reason or another: (1) I had serious intentions but the gal made clear we would only be friends before I ever got to a point where I felt certain enough about my own goals to ask; (2) the gal rejected me by disappearing because I wasn't sufficiently into her (which is true: I probably never would have asked); or (3) the gal threw herself at me (i.e., she brought up "the talk" rather than me), and I had to turn her down (in each case we remained platonic friends afterward, as we were before).

It's easy to boohoo when I get rejected, but the above chart shows that I've disappointed my share of women as well (and I'm probably not even listing all of them, since there wasn't a formal time when I had to do the rejecting in most cases).

I used to think it was easier to get rejected than to reject, but when I think on those friendships I've charted above, the hardest ones, in my memory, have been those I was rejected by. What I think I really meant, when thinking that rejecting was harder than being rejected, is on the short term: after one date or something like that, because it feels much more superficial in those cases: how can I reject this person to whom I have hardly given a chance and who by every indication is wonderful but who doesn't at all light my fire and who I suspect never will? Cases, in other words, where my heart says one thing but my head another. If the yellows in the bottom chart had actually asked rather than disappearing, perhaps my feeling would be that rejecting is harder, since two of those were clearly head versus heart cases.

OkCupid Contacts

So a few months ago, I was talking with a female friend of mine regarding OkCupid, a free dating site. She's not impressed by many of the guys' profiles on there, like, What are these guys thinking? Nor is she often impressed by the messages they send. I was curious about the number of messages she gets per week, mostly because I wanted to see how that stacks up with me, as a guy. Unfortunately, she didn't answer the question directly; she simply said it depended on how often she was on. (This is a true answer, though; the more one is on, the more often one comes up in searches and the more likely you look like a person who is actively using the site and thus like a person who might be dateable.)

I signed off of the site in December, when another gal contacted me and I realized that I really wanted to focus on one gal in particular who I first went out with in August. I hadn't written to many women on OkCupid in a long while anyway, since I have a very specific kind of person in mind to date and haven't really found it there--nor did I ever really expect to. If I were more keen on just going out on friendly dates with no real potential of anything more than a new friendship, as I sometimes get in the mood to do, I might be tempted to write more women. Indeed, to my chagrin and disappointment, I have returned to a period, as of last week, where that again appears to be the case and have thus returned to having a posting on OkCupid and other such sites.

I suspect that on OkCupid I probably get a 10 to 30 percent return rate on my initial messages. Such seems to have been the case in my memory. My profile has typically been rather untraditional--and it really hasn't said much about me in an explicit form. And that seemed to work, strangely enough.

My Plenty of Fish profile (which I also took down in December and refreshed this past week), by contrast, is quite sincere and generally has received no responses. I remember once, a few years ago, writing to about fifteen women on there, receiving two "no thanks" replies, and only one message that led to any kind of communication--that is, a string of messages and a planned date. In the end, the woman decided she didn't want to go out on the day of the date and then stopped communicating. (As I recall, shortly thereafter, I ended up going out with a woman from OkCupid, one who replied back of probably five or so I messaged.)

On OkCupid, I am just goofing off--I am not serious. But that is probably less threatening and more amusing; the fact that a woman doesn't know up front the kind of person I am looking for leaves more room for anyone to e-mail.

And it also has led to a few people writing to me out of the blue, rather than me as the guy taking the lead. So here's how many women messaged me to say they liked my profile or didn't like it or just wanted to say hello or whatever, by way of introduction, on OkCupid, by month for 2010 and 2011:
So basically, as a guy, I was getting, in those two years, on average about one message out of the blue every two months. I'd be curious to know how this stacks up with other guys, as well as other women.

IM Chats by Year

When I first got online at home, around 1999, I became an e-mail fanatic. Probably, about six months later or so, I discovered instant messaging, and that became a constant for many an evening for probably a year or so. But the IM usage dropped off precipitously once I moved here. There are likely multiple reasons for that: I have more friends here. I have less interest in trying to get dates online. Chatting online is no longer "new" to me, so its novelty has worn off. And finally, chatting online no longer seems as easy to accomplish as it once did.

By the latter, what I mean is that Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger--these services all no longer seem as prolifically used as they once were. Many folks text rather than IM, or they IM straight from the phone, or they chat via a social network like Facebook, and since one of the main reasons I chatted was to meet new people and Facebook seems more structured around helping you stay in contact with people you already know, I'm not as motivated to chat on it (but see above also: there are a lot of things these days I'd rather do than chat online).

Nevertheless, I present what few statistics I have in this regard, which only takes into account chat from 2005 on, when I got this particular computer. The chat stats for 1999 to 2005, unfortunately, were lost in a crash. By 2005, chat in my life was already in decline; nevertheless, if you can imagine the trajectory shown here going backward, you'll probably see a pattern you could plot out to years before.

The blue line on top represents chats along with chat attempts (often people don't answer an opening line on IM); the red line on bottom represent actual chats. Where the blue disappears, all attemps to chat were successful.
The 2011 chat is the reason for my blog entry. I had a wonderful online chat one evening with a gal I'd e-mailed back and forth with a few times. But to note how my feelings about chat have changed, I really felt more like talking on the phone with her, but more than that, I felt like being out on an actual date. It was loneliness after the cancellation of a date with another gal that caused me to check into Facebook in the first place. A chat, as wonderful as it was, was a poor substitute.