Dating update: breakup, old prospects

Jack broke up with me in the late spring, not much after I wrote about how calm and happy I felt with him.

Backing up, due to feeling so calm with him, after spending all of grad school on an anti-depressant, I decided to taper off. It felt like a huge coup. I felt normal for the first time in years not feeling dependent on the pharmaceutical industry. Suddenly I gained like 10 pounds. It's not a surprising thing since I lost almost that much after starting the drug, but due to having been on it so long I hadn't been thinking about that. So the weight was a surprise and frustrating. Seeing your girlfriend increase in weight by more than 10 pounds in the only 3 months you've ever known her must be kind-of worrisome. So I suspect this is related to why he had been acting increasingly distant.

Because of the distance, I knew it was coming. In fact that afternoon I'd emailed a friend and told her that the guy was going to break up with me that night. So I felt relieved once he did. He just said straight out that this wasn't going anywhere. I didn't cry, just felt frustrated and a little silly. I put everything he had given me into a bag later that weekend and drove it to his apartment and left it outside.

He called me that night after I dropped off his stuff saying he wanted to be friends. I demurred, but we ended up deciding to try to spend time together because we are good for each other just for personal reasons: he helps me be more professional and I help him be more personal. The upshot has been that we've spent some great times together, times that would have been terrific dates if they had been dates. But also times that reminded me why I didn't want to date him in the first place, such as ships-passing-in-the-night conversations and awkward uses of money. But I had lost much of the extra weight, back to "normal weight", wore an awesome dress, and he said I looked nice, so it was good confidence. Confidence that I hope I can bring to a real relationship.


The old characters are all dead ends:

1. Rob is still dating the 12 years younger than him girl and I'm guessing they will get engaged in December when he travels to visit her family abroad. I tease him about it, but obviously I'm just very jealous. He says he feels bad about the whole situation, but either way he's not the lonely one so how bad is it possible to feel if he really feels like she's the one for him.

2. Punk Rock Virgin came over the other night for dinner. We were going to cook together. He brought a huge grocery bag of alcohol, including wine and beer he'd brewed himself and an exotic beer that he'd picked up at a brewing exchange. Sounds like a promising evening. Even to someone like me who isn't a "bring over a 6 pack" kind of girl. The evening ended with him asking me for advice on getting therapy because he feels like he has to lower his standards in order to find a woman.

3. Simon turned out to have been pursued by a friend of mine in my former town for the 6 months after I introduced them. (How nice of me.) Apparently they only met up twice for coffee, he paid, and soon afterwards he got super depressed and cut himself off from all social contact other than work. So maybe he is not for anyone.

4. George seemed so into me: this winter while I was dating Jack, he had asked me to spend the night to cuddle with him in his hotel room. Of course I couldn't. On his next visit I was single and so looking forward to seeing him, and he completely stood me up.

5. The blind guy I met in February was thoroughly charming, smart, and also good-looking except that I found it unnerving not to be able to look him in the eye and that his skull wasn't the usual shape. I decided not to pursue him which felt unfair, but he keeps pursuing me. Even while he had a non-monogamous girlfriend, but even moreso now that he doesn't.


This time around, the dating prospects look both like closer matches and yet more remote, like a guy from a long plane ride away whom I met at a wedding. That's another post. But it's so sparse and uninteresting, maybe I will wait until I have something to say.