Lately, after a little over twelve years, I’ve been thinking of getting back into dating.  My reasons for that are somewhat personal and I won’t outline them here, but let’s just say that I think it may be time and I think I may be ready for that.

And I may not, but only one way to find out, I suppose.

It’s a particularly scary thing to do, but not for the reasons you might think.  I’m not really too concerned about rejection.  Simple fact of the matter is, getting rejected is not by any means the worst outcome possible.  The worst outcomes possible all have to do with not being rejected by the wrong person.  So if I go into it with the attitude that “If I fail, I’m just going to end up in the same place I am now”, it isn’t really all that scary… for those reasons.

The scary part is trying to figure out how to present myself, and where to find people that won’t mind that.

When I was younger, it was a game, sort of.  You’d say what you thought would get someone interested in you, she’d do the same, you’d meet, maybe bump uglies after a little while, and at the end of the day it was mostly just a fraud.  We played each other.  This wasn’t ever an intentional thing, it was just how the game was played.  Both parties were expected to make themselves as attractive as possible, and hope that it progressed far enough that once they found out about your warts (on both sides) (and not literally) that they’d be too invested for whatever reason to toss you to the curb for that reason.

My warts, at the time, were massive, so I eventually got tossed.  And a couple of times I did the tossing, too.

It’s clear that this approach simply doesn’t work, and I’m getting too old for it.

To be brutally honest, the women I think I respect the most in hindsight were the ones who rejected me.  They weren’t wrong for the most part, and at least they had enough respect for themselves to do so.  Their reasons were often based on shallowness or misunderstanding, but not always, and I mostly don’t blame them.  I blame more the ones that got into a relationship with me and then dumped me, but it is what it is.

I’m not going to be attractive to most women, and I know this.  I don’t mean physically, I guess I’m painfully average in that regard, not some chisel-jawed, muscled superhero type, but not some morbidly obese, comb-over creeper either.  I’m just painfully average, and write run-on sentences too.  I mean personality-wise.  I don’t beat around the bush, I don’t play games, I don’t make much effort to be sensitive to peoples’ feelings if it means lying or prevaricating.  Also, I lean right, but I’m not Republican, so it is probably true that women from both sides will hate me.  The ones on the left, well, that’s pretty obvious.  But the ones on the right, well, I’m not particularly patriotic, nor religious.  I hate the word “pureblood”, I am not sure whether I’ll vote for Trump this year (though I’m not voting for Biden, that’s for damn sure), and I have an open mind that many more conservative people just simply don’t.

If I hide that in my profile, it’s kind of lying, in a sense, because I’m withholding crucial information that I know they will consider crucial information.  But if I’m too up-front with it, then I risk turning people off by being too up-front.  It’s a very delicate balancing act that I don’t think I can accomplish.

And worse, there aren’t many dating sites or apps that cater to middle of the road people like me.  It’s either right or left, and damned if I’m going anywhere near left women.  Let’s be frank – I’m a man, and I want to be treated like one.  Left women barely know what a man is, much less how to treat a man like he is one.  I’m not saying I want some submissive doormat or anything like that, but at least someone who’s not going to try to be a second man in a relationship.  That just doesn’t work.

And I can’t grow a man-bun or dye my beard red anyway.

But, maybe I should just go for broke.  Again, worst case… I end up right about where I am now, with a few failed contacts under my belt.  There could be worse outcomes.

I probably won’t keep you up to date.  I suppose if I ever announce an engagement here or something, you’ll know how it turned out.  Otherwise, well, I guess just more of the same.  Maybe I’ll clue you in on the dates that are particularly disastrous, just to get it out of my system.