Frigid me

I just had a very strange encounter on a dating website. Somebody came up to me and said that she found my profile funny (who am I to disagree) and she asked if I would be her friend. I replied. The exchange didn’t go particularly well. Maybe I take too long to warm up to people. I don’t really know what she wants. She mentioned something funny to me, like she hadn’t slept with someone in a while but she was really picky. I wrote something back to her and I must have either sounded a little cold or a little snide but after that she abruptly said goodbye, after scolding me for being smug. I’m a little pissed off about that.

I wonder sometimes what it is about women who were blessed with good looks when they were young. It’s like you’re operating under a totally different set of rules and social norms. Then those people who lose their looks, hopefully they adapt to a second set of rules, otherwise the latter portion of their lives is going to be rather sad. In particular, I sense that what happened with that girl was she just blithely assumed that she had to be a little forward and all the guys would just swarm over. Well, not true. I didn’t have the intention to put her in her place, but I was a little irritated at how she seemed to think that once she offered some leg, I was bound to treat her like a queen.

But sometimes I wonder if I’ve been a little cold. I thought a little about the times when – I don’t know if I can say this without sounding too stuck up. First, there was this girl I met in Europe. We chatted, she seemed comfortable with me. Then she smiled and flashed me the tank top she was wearing underneath her coat. I was a little taken aback. It was a little awkward after that. That is something that I rather regret because I sensed that she was a nice girl.

On one of my last dates with codfish, I had just come back home from Snowy Hill. After the white heat of that relationship on ICQ (remember that?) I was meeting her face to face for the first time. We had already split up. She had already accepted a proposal. It passed in a blur. I was dead to the world. Later on, I reflected on her behavior that night and it occurred to me that I could have had my first kiss with her. But who would want a first kiss under such circumstances?

Then there was this time somebody came up to me on the internet, and got to know me. We exchanged phone numbers. Maybe she was lonely. We had a few phone conversations and it veered close to phone sex, even though I really didn’t know how to react either. In the end, she stopped calling and she told me that I was cold. I think that’s quite accurate.

There was this time I attended a digital music course in Snowy Hill. I recorded down my work on MP3 and let my sister listen to it. It was good stuff, but she thought that it was a little cold. That’s one thing I’ve always had to grapple with since Snowy Hill: I know that I’m a winter person. Goat once called me ice man. The name didn’t stick but it was not inaccurate.

Then there was cat woman. Not to be confused with Water Girl, who was also really into cats. She got quite friendly with me, and later on she asked me as a favour to send her cat to the vet for her. By then I had looked her up, read her rantings on Facebook and basically decided that she was carrying way way too much emotional baggage for my liking. So I let her be.

Meanwhile, on the dating site, there were a few women who came up to me. But they didn’t seem suitable, until the one who contacted me not long ago. Well, I think in the end she’s not suitable either. But I would have liked to be able to talk to her for a little while longer than to just have her brush me away just because she thinks she can.

Well I've sent the text to my sister and she hasn't replied yet and I was wondering why until I remembered that she was visiting her boyfriend's family. Yes, she's dating her first Asian American boyfriend after a whole string of white men who didn’t work out for her and for once she's happy. I wouldn't call most of her angmor boyfriends losers, but they were probably not level headed enough for her. And their values are sufficiently different that I sometimes wonder why - she's not a less smart person than I am - why she hasn't figured it out by now.

So while there are mitigating circumstances, such as my choice to pursue a postgraduate degree in a place where I wasn’t really interested in hooking up with anybody, it ought to be a great source of embarrassment that in the last few years, more women have made advances on me than the other way around.

I’ve been given pretty contradictory advice about what to do. On one hand it’s almost a cliché that people tell you to “be yourself”. On the other hand, people do tell me to “not be yourself”. So that’s pretty contradictory. I have to lose a little bit of that gruffness. Capricorns are not known for being tender. There’s always this tension when you’re going out on a date. On one hand you want to show your best side. (Well for me, I’m so rusty at this that I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to want to show your best side.) On the other hand, you want to leave in a few of your flaws because you don’t really want to be correcting them all the time. Unless you have already made your mind up that you’re actually going to eradicate them, which is a process complex enough that it deserves another post of its own.

OK, sister has written back. Her conclusion: I was too curt, and she was looking for somebody who was “curious, admiring, respectful, polite”. Gee being a boyfriend is pretty damn tough, then. She told me that I sounded like a classic INTP. The thing about INTPs is that they don't care enough about what other people think about them. If they want to go after some higher truth, they will be utterly and fearlessly devoted. Like Einstein - Einstein was an INTP. To do likewise for a lover, maybe a little harder.

Update: I was looking at my messages and I found that she changed her picture. It looked like a model - wow if that was her then she was really hot. Unfortunately she also looks like somebody who moves in totally different circles from myself. I checked back 10 minutes later and she had deleted her profile.