The other day a woman I went out with a couple times sent me a Facebook chat to give me well wishes on moving to New York. We went out a couple of months before I moved, though that was long after I had already decided to leave San Francisco. I never mentioned to her that I was moving, but she had read about it here. “It would have been nice to know that before,” she wrote.

It probably would have been awkward first date conversation to mention the fact that I was moving across the country in two months because I was still in love with a woman I used to date. Would it be inappropriate to go for a goodnight kiss after confessing something like that?

Everybody has baggage. Everyone has unflattering stories or ongoing issues that they’d rather keep tucked away in a back pocket to prevent them from ruining the present moment. Being in love with someone else would is a whopper of a secret to take into a first date.

Expectations ruin everything in love. A first date should be the one moment of time between two people where there are no expectations. Two people come together because they’re both attracted to each other. You can go in looking for love, a stable partner, a good time, or a few hours distraction.

I don’t know what I was looking for with all the different women I’ve been out with over the last year. I don’t know what I’ve really had to share with any of them. I don’t think I’ve been closed off from the idea of finding someone new to love. I haven’t had much extra love to share with someone else so the odds of actually finding a new special someone have been low.

Finding someone to fall in love with is the great canard of dating, and it’s one I’ve been uselessly tethered to for the majority of my romantic life.  I’d never understood the point of seeing someone if there wasn’t some rosy, romantic future insinuated against the horizon.

I was always looking for it; I had the dating equivalent of the hundred-yard stare. I’d listen to the women I was out with tell their stories while imagining what things might be like between us ten years down the road. How would we talk to one another in our first home, expecting our first child, one of us earnestly working their way through grad school. My eyes were glazed over with disengagement in the present because I was busy roleplaying in some imaginary future.

Now I have no faculty for looking into the future and imagining what might be there for me. The future is inevitable, and it’s always the things that are most unpredictable that end up having the biggest impact.

So should I have told women I was going out with that I was leaving? Odds are low that anyone would have gone out with me if I had. I did mention it to one woman who sent me an email through Hooksexup. She never wrote me back.

In the beginning, I forced myself to go on dates to shake myself out of the depression of seeing someone I loved leave. I was dating by rote, forcing myself to go through the motions. All I wanted was some momentary distraction, the relief of a few hours away from all the little empty spaces I was suddenly discovering all around.

That changed. I started meeting interesting people, and was having enjoyable experiences with them. It was hard to not compare them to what I had felt before, and every time I did I would see the watermark still above me, how high the wave was when it broke.

That was when I stopped thinking about dating in terms of the future. I stopped imagining what would come next with the people I was seeing. I stopped speculating about how viable a pair we might be over the long term, and started thinking about how entertained I was in moment. I began to enjoy going out for the absurdity of it; the stilted formality of it; the possibility of some unexpected joy on a Wednesday night, like kissing a woman I’d just met at a stoplight in the pouring rain.

If I’d made some mention of the fact that the future would be much harder and more complicated with any of those women, we probably never would have had met each other in the first place. That’s all a date ever is, an opportunity.I didn't want to miss any just because I was headed in another direction.

 

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test

Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender

Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?