Stage 9: Synchronized Minesweeping

Day 207 - Cider, I guess. Maybe more, I suppose we'll find out.

So I've decided to start dating. The decision, personally, feels rash on my part. I'm not "over" Dahlia. Six months and twenty-three days have gone by without her leaving my thoughts for long. It seems disingenuous to pretend that coupling is a good idea at this point in time. I can't say I haven't been thinking about it, though. If I'm honest, I've been thinking about it for a while now. Long before Dahlia passed, I was anticipating and fearing this moment.

To put it mildly, I don’t have a lot of experience dating, and the experience I have is about 12 years old and very Midwestern. That puts me about three decades behind the times in Seattle. I consider myself a feminist and internalizing both the theory and practice while rotating around the posturing involved in dealing with the opposite gender can be maddening. While I've got a lot of good advice from my friends, the only way to bring my knowledge up to date is to date several women and be awkward in as many new and different ways as possible.

Dating kind of requires that I know single women near me, and I don’t know very many. I know three, and the number interested in cisgendered, straight men is less than that. As someone in that position, I did what I suppose lots of people my age and younger do, and signed up for an online dating site. While the rest of it hasn't been quite as easy sledding, I do have a date tonight.

Part of me is really worried about stepping on a landmine. I'm worried about mentioning Dahlia in the wrong way and closing off for the rest of the date. I'm worried about the awkward silences. The other part of me hopes the date goes horrendously. I have a lot of awkward silences to get through. I have a lot of stumbling over mentions of my dead wife. The sooner it happens the better. It should happen while I don't know what I want out of dating.

This woman, let's call her Rose, seems like a very good candidate for a trial run. We're meeting for a drink at Capitol Cider. If that goes well, we may head to Sun Liquor. The date can end whenever we'd like to declare it. She seems like a nice and interesting person, but I'm not convinced there's going to be a spark. If it goes well, great. If it doesn't, there won't be much lost.

That said, a lot of thought has gone into exactly how much of my life I've made public to Rose. It seems impossible that mentioning Dahlia won't occur, especially if things are going well. I'm still having difficulty finding a way to talk about myself outside of the context she provides.  So it's clearly going to stumble out of my mouth sometime, but how much of a topic it becomes can affect how the rest of the night goes.

But I suppose all that is the point. The whole goal of me dating is to try not to be awkward, be awkward anyway, and try the process again. We'll see how it goes.