Do you ever find someone “perfect” on a dating website, or rather find that they have the “perfect” profile? You sort of have that invisible check list you run down and you find that their qualifications to date you are off the charts. While you know the guy or girl might be totally different in person, every word they write, and every picture they put up is exactly what you look for on a profile. When you read it you smile and nod along to every line until it seems too good to be true. It usually is in the end, isn’t it? I’ve only found this kind of profile two or three times in all my years on dating sites. Of course, if all had gone to plan after finding them, I wouldn’t have this blog. I wind up excited over the potential, stressed about screwing things up in the conversation, and nervous about getting my hopes too high for some sort of later let-down. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled onto one of those pages, and we wound up in an excellent back and forth conversation. We both seemed to be so perfectly aligned on every topic, humored by each other’s jokes, and just having an overall great flow in conversation. I realized how long it’d been since I’d had a good conversation with someone and how much I’d missed it. It was more than just the basic getting to know you questions, it was stories and anecdotes that made it interesting and real. Just a couple of days into the conversation, I sent my number and said to text me so we could make plans to meet. Just a couple of hours later I got a text, and all seemed well…Until it didn’t.

I’ll spare you the details of most of the he said/she said, but plans to meet went into the works over a two week period with a lot of uncertainty on his side. “I might not be free? I have tentative plans with a flakey friend,” “As of right now I am free Saturday. There may be a work thing going on but I don’t think it’s likely,” and then “I should be good for tomorrow.” In fact the only time I got a “Yeah, definitely!” was when I said “Maybe some time when you’re free.” There were some excuses about work preventing answers via text with days-long gaps in-between. I got the feeling he’d recently met someone else and none of this was truly what was going on. When we were finally locked in with a place and time for Saturday night, I had a bad feeling about it. Sure, I’d been excited about it all week, but something told me I was going to get stood up. I’d been talking to someone okay, yet less interesting on the same dating site, so I hesitantly made plans with him for the same night. I’ve never done that before, had a date with a back-up date lined up in case one fell through, but for some reason it just felt necessary this weekend. I’d spent too many lame weekends in a row pondering what it’d be like to be out on a date again.

Three hours before the date, around the time I’d have been hopping in the shower, I checked into the dating site and sure enough he was on it. Of course, this didn’t mean a lot because I was also logged in, and I’d still been chatting with other prospective dates. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that until you’ve actually met someone and established some monogamous agreement in your relationship, but after already having a bad feeling about the uncertain language he’d been using, I sent a “So, see you there at 7?” final text. That’s when I got the latest story about “some shit going down back home” and how he was out of town, wouldn’t be back for over a week, and sorry for cancelling. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. It probably wasn’t. Either way, disappointed I sulked some. Why was this “perfect” profile this misleading about the person behind it? I started thinking about the flaws we all have. Everyone we ever meet has them and we’ve just got to find a compatible combination of our flaws. Almost everyone you’ll ever date is someone else’s ex for a reason. The “perfect” person is only perfect to you because you find the combination of their positive attributes and flaws to be flawlessly compatible with your own. Although I wasn’t psyched about my back-up date, I decided not to let the outfit I’d picked out go to waste that night and started getting ready anyway…

[Check Back For Details On The Date I Went On In The Next Post!]