this new thing

warning long post ahead
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I want to chronicle my time spent with eHarmony AKA eh, AKA e-ha. I told myself that once I was at my goal weight I would sign up for said paid dating site in hopes of having better luck compared to the free sites. The week prior to Easter I just had a feeling. A feeling that if I didn’t join now, I just might be passing something great up. Maybe it was to meet J, maybe because I just feel like it is my time. I mean c’mon now I get that dating is a numbers game. You have to put yourself out there in order for something to happen, especially at my age. It seems as though the odds have to be in my favor as over the past 7-8 months I’ve been doing lots of dating. Something quality has to happen eventually, right?!...RIGHT?! And I truly do feel that something big is about to happen in my life, even if it is just a feeling of overpowering want. I can’t be single forever, right? So why not. (ok, so yes I do realize that I could be single forever, I just don’t want to be single forever.) So I said screw the “wait until you are at your goal weight” idea and just did it. Once I arrived at the site eh already had my email address. I got logged in and was pretty shocked by what I found. I had forgotten that I had joined eh during one of their free weekends back in 2007. They had my original profile back from four years ago!, including old pictures. Wow. Obviously a huge change. I am SO not the person I was in 2007. So after spending time cleaning everything up, and posting new pics, I was off.

I immediately got a few “nudges” of guys requesting to see my pics. I was completely thrown off by this, because when I viewed my profile my pics were there to be seen, and I had received the appropriate “approved” emails from eh telling me that my pics were up and running. As stated previously J was my very first match. In the world of eh you do no searching. About once a day eh sends you an email of all your new and compatible matches. This gets to be very overwhelming. You get about 5 or 6 matches a day. Example, right now I have about 90 matches…mind you this includes guys that I have “archived”, and this is what I have since joining on Easter four weeks ago. “Archived” is basically closing a guy..either I just wasn’t attracted to him, or didn’t like things he wrote in his profile etc… So basically right now I have 90 guys I could be interested in, if they would communicate with me. Out of those 90 right now I’m actually communicating with about four. The communication is very back and forth. The first move is the guy sends you five questions. These questions are e-ha questions. You select five out of like 30. Like on a Saturday night what do you like to do? Or your dream vacation would be…? Those types of generic questions, but at the same time the questions are good because they could eventually lead to full on conversations. Know that I can communicate first with a guy, I just think that the guy should make the first move. Now if a guy ever catches my fancy to have me communicate with him first, that my friends will be a big deal.

J immediately caught my eye. Super good looking, tall enough, witty in his profile, and things in common. By Monday I got my first communication with J. I honestly can’t remember the questions he sent me, but I responded and I sent him my questions. By this time I was navigating eh trying to figure out why these guys were asking to see my pictures. On my settings I had it so that you had to communicate with me first, and then you could see my pics. Mind you, J wasn’t one of the guys asking to see my pics. He had requested my communication without even knowing what I look like! Major points for J once I figured that out. I then updated my settings so that the guys could see my pics once we were matched, since I figured that was truly only fair.

By Tuesday I received back my answers from J. One of the questions I sent him was something like this: “What would you do for me if I came home from a bad day at work?” Now with these questions you have a choice of four options, or a fill in your own answer option. J went for the latter, and responded: “I would bring you take out, and let you tell me about all of the horrible women you work with.” This response immediately made me laugh out loud because it was funny, and I work with mostly men. I thought “wow this guy is funny, and he’s showing me his personality with this writing, which isn’t really an easy thing to do.” I immediately decided to skip steps 2 and 3 in the e-ha communication world, and go straight for the messaging. I wrote him a message stating that he made me laugh and that I wanted to tell him so. Now if things were still going strong with J I would invest in writing down the rest, but we all know how that ended.

I will say that eh definitely does offer me some more quality guys. And I think it is safe to say that majority of these guys are looking to settle down, which is good because ideally that is what I’m looking for. And because of the “match” process you do meet guys that you would get along with. Although lately I haven’t really put in a lot of my own personality with guys communicating with me. Mainly because of J. I have met someone else. And he’s ok. We met Saturday, went out again Sunday, and most recently Wednesday. He’s good on paper, but really so are a lot of these guys. But no really strong feelings toward this guy. I’m just not excited about this guy like I was J, but I’m putting in a good effort. I know I’ve said this before but for me what is so weird about dating right now is that these guys want to see me again. You could tell this new guy wanted to see me prior to Wednesday, but I have workouts, and as of right now I don’t deem him worthy enough to miss a workout, or to change my workout schedule to see him. I’ve also learned to not close a door completely because just when you do, something happens. I heard from M last night, which was out of nowhere, considering last I heard from him was almost three weeks ago. He had randomly called me twice during one of my initial dates with J, but didn’t leave a message. Followed by a text a few days after said missed calls that stated “I tried calling a few times so I won’t bother you anymore.” Now if you don’t give me anything to respond to, I’m not going to respond. You didn’t leave a message telling me to call you back, and who knows what I’m so suppose to say in reply to a text like that. Especially if I don’t really like you all that much to begin with. Why put forth the effort? Plus the past two times we saw one another he didn’t really show that much interest in me. He basically came over to hang out at my place just to leave. It was pointless really. So then the other night I get this out of nowhere “What happened?” I explain to him he didn’t give me anything to respond to. It eventually ended with an “I can see where this is headed. I wish you the best.” In which I replied “You too!” He then followed that up with “Just for the record, I did really like you.” I responded “Ok.” I knew that this dude liked me, my problem was that he never really showed that he liked me. Then more recently I heard from R. I mean c’mon…come one come all?! These guys are seriously coming out of nowhere. But honestly it gives me hope, that maybe just maybe, I’ll randomly hear from J, because that is really who I want to hear from.

In all honesty I can’t get this crazy gut feeling out of my system about J. The feeling of something is meant to happen with this dude. I totally feel like he didn’t give “us” a chance. I KNOW that this guy liked (likes) me. Now knowing a little bit more about him, he had some pretty strong feelings for me early on. Now as to what triggered his change of heart and when his doubts came into play, I have an idea, but truly have no clue. I wish that we could just start over, and right now I’m trying to decide if I want to fight for that. On Sunday I stopped by his work, and dropped off his eye-contact solution and toothbrush that he left over at my place on what was our fourth date. He wasn’t working, but he got the items Monday morning, and sent me a text “Thank you for my stuff!” in which I sent “You’re welcome. I want you to know I think about you.” His reply: “I think about you too.” I was very much so surprised that he responded at all, because I didn’t think that he would. Of course that response has given me this small glimmer of hope, that I have no idea what to do with. And as of right now I have done nothing with. Is it bad to hope that he has an experience like what I’m having right now? Where he meets another girl goes out a few times, but keeps thinking about me?! Because truly that is where I am at. Then hope that he’ll do some magical grand gesture to win me back?! …hey, a girl CAN dream, can’t she?! It is taking everything in me to not DO anything. Give it a few days, maybe a few weeks. And maybe by then I’ll be more rational about this experience. But I’m a doer, if I want to DO something, I DO it. Right now I want to CALL J and say to him “I really think we could be awesome. Can’t we just start over?” I also know that J is a doer. And that if he wants to do something, he too will do it. Which tells me I need to do nothing. But that’s so hard to DO!!!

Overall this week on e-ha has been a slow one, no new communication with any of my new matches. Sometimes I wonder if I’m trying to hard?! But then I tell myself the game that I’m in is a numbers game. And unless I keep dating, then my “one” might just pass me by.

elliptical 35min/treadmill 25min