Flying Dutchmen, men in holding patterns

After much hoping and planning, I think I have managed to secure the night at the opera that Ian* agreed to some months ago. Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer has just begun a month's run at the Met in New York and hopefully I'll be attending the March 24 performance. 

Ian has been transferred from the Buffalo airport to JFK, which seems to be a relief to him. We talk rather infrequently these days, as nothing has changed between us. I am hoping to spend a couple of days discussing this while at his new apartment in New Jersey.

What I won't be discussing with him is that I recently made the decision to seriously look for a Relationship, as in LTR. A couple of encouraging beginnings have hit speed bumps but I'm fine waiting them out.

Last December I met a man online. He is in his late 40s and a former mechanic turned elementary school teacher (let's call him Eric). Although I admit Eric initially caught my eye because of his similarity to Obscure Object of Desire*, we ended up on a couple of dates. The first was fairly chaste, but the second got as radical as two people can get in a Chevrolet diesel truck without actual penetrative sex.

But then things changed. While I was keen for the third date, Eric seemed to lose interest the day after the date. His daily texts disappeared. 

I finally decided to ask him what was going on, and he admitted that someone he met about six months ago - someone he liked, but who had ghosted him after a few dates - had reappeared and apologized. So he wanted to see how how the reconnect worked out.

I politely backed away, but after a few days, we got into an innocent text conversation that quickly turned into hot chat/text sex. While I enjoyed this thoroughly, I wasn't going to be second place with Eric. So I waited a day to tell him that I wasn't going to complicate his other relationship.

While he said little about her, I quickly realized that he was more interested in her than she was in him. Anyone who ghosts anyone is either juvenile, unkind, an emotional coward, or looking for control. (Or a combination of these.) Yesterday he admitted to me that he couldn't even tell if she were serious about him or not.

The ghosting bit bothered me - being on the receiving end sucks - so I mentioned that I didn't tolerate ghosting and why, without running down Eric's reconnection. I can wait for her to ghost him again and see what happens. 

One big fat irony of my anti-ghosting speech is that after I ghosted Cincinnati* for over two months, he sent me a message out of the blue last week, asking if I were okay. 

While I wondered why he'd reappeared, I decided I wasn't going to re-engage as I always had before. I wasn't going to do what we'd spent half of 2019 doing: plan a date, back out on the date, rinse and repeat. It's like Einstein saying that if you do the same thing over and over, yet expect a different result, you're crazy.

So I didn't reply to Cincinnati on Instagram. Instead, I waited a few days and then sent him an email.

I pointed out that limiting our communications to Instagram chat wasn't working, and that I'd decided that I wouldn't do it any more. But I also mentioned that it was obvious that neither of us were doing that well from walking away from the other one, and that some sort of resolution was worth considering. I signed off by asking him to share his thoughts.

He did write back two days later promising to reply later in the week, but nothing yet. It's pretty much what I expected.

In the meantime I'll keep doing what I'm doing, and looking for prospective males when I feel like it. The rest of the time it's job-hunting (more about that next time), cycling, and my new love of Orangetheory fitness classes.

* See The Usual Suspects.