Fruitcakes

So I've slowly re-entered the dating world, this time as myself. After having had some fun at the expense of men by pretending to be a woman on Tinder, I decided I really want to meet someone in person, build new friendships, and maybe more.

And I ended up meeting a couple of fruitcakes.

The first was a woman who was 11 years older than me. I've never dated someone so much older, but I'm nothing if I'm not open-minded. Besides, I liked her profile and thought she could be a friend, even if only a virtual one, or one you get together with once in a while over coffee or a hike. The conversation went swimmingly. A single mother of a college-going multi-racial son, she maintained good relations with her former in-laws. We chatted back and forth, exchanged email addresses and phone numbers. She sent long emails about her life, her son, her ex, etc. She was very open and generous with information, much more so than a lot of other women, who tend to be more guarded. But there was also something odd about her. She was so earnest that it appeared that she was incapable of laughing. There was no humor, no lightness in what she wrote. But still we decided to meet the following weekend.

A couple of days later, I decided to I wanted to temporarily suspend my profile since I was going to be busy. So I informed her ahead of time that although I was suspending my profile, I was still interested in keeping in touch with her by email & phone and meet her in person over the weekend. Pat came her response. She'd changed her mind about meeting me since she was already talking to a couple of guys and wanted to see how things went with them. I was cool with that and wished her the best.

A week later I reactivated my profile. And over the following week this woman visited my profile multiple times without writing to me. If she wasn't interested in meeting me, why did she repeatedly visit my profile? So I wrote her a message asking her how she was doing. She replied and said her meetings with the other men did not go anywhere. 'So, would you like to meet?' I asked. 'Sure,' she responded. So we exchanged more messages back and forth. She asked me a lot of questions about my physical condition: was I overweight, was I physically active, etc. No issues there as I have nothing to hide. We made plans to meet on a particular day.

A day before we were supposed to meet, she wrote saying she'd changed her mind again. She was concerned about our age difference. I have to admit that this pissed me off. I usually try to be very accommodating and understanding when it comes to dating, because it's such an intensely personal experience that no two people will have the same view on it. But this simply sounded like a lame excuse. Our age difference was known from the moment we exchanged our first messages a couple of weeks earlier. We'd even discussed it early on and agreed that it wasn't going to be an issue. And, yet, after two weeks of writing some fairly detailed emails to me, after giving me all indications that she wanted to meet me, she'd changed her mind again. I wanted to ask her what the real reason was? Was she already seeing someone and felt guilty about meeting me? Had I said something to annoy her? Had she met someone else? But I was too annoyed to want to have a conversation with her. I sent her a terse "Good luck" and that was that.

Around the same time I also chatted with another woman in her 30s. Talkative, lively, rotund, platinum blonde (not that it makes a difference to me), we hit it off quite well. She had a naughty streak in her and did not shy away from talking about sex. She even voluntarily sent me photos of her 40DDs.

We met one evening for dinner. She was talkative, as I'd expected, but I found her to be a bit too loud. She was oblivious to her being loud and talked about a lot of things that I'd rather that people in nearby tables around us in the crowded restaurant didn't hear. I tried to nudge the conversation to a lower decibel, but that didn't work. The less I spoke the louder and more talkative she became. It then struck me that there was something odd about her mannerisms. She wasn't nervous, but she was clearly not entirely in control of herself. She wasn't drunk or on drugs, but there was an element of involuntariness in everything she did. She talked a lot about her dog, like a mother would about her child. She showed me multiple photos of her dog on her phone. She slowly revealed that she'd had trauma in her life and that she suffered from debilitating anxiety issues. She took medication for this. She assured me that she was not at all nervous about meeting me since her job required her to meet strangers all the time and she was fine with it. But she was just anxious about other things in life.

I felt sympathy for her. But at the same time I was uncomfortable that nearly everyone in the restaurant could hear her. So I paid as quickly as I could and we left the restaurant. I suggested that we go for a walk and she readily agreed. I felt more at ease now. We chatted about this and that, and walked a few blocks. It was chilly, so we decided to go back and sit in the car. We spent the next hour talking. As she felt more at ease her oddities diminished as well. We flirted, we laughed, we debated social issues. And then we kissed. After the first kiss she pulled me towards her a few times and grabbed my lips in hers. Clearly she craved affection and intimacy. She then slowly pushed my hand towards her breasts. Being a man, I wasn't going to refuse the opportunity. I fondled her as we kissed. But we knew we weren't going to do anything more on the first date.

It was getting late by then. So we decided to call it a night and agreed to meet again in a few days. She hinted that the next time she would probably invite me over to her place. So over the next few days we texted each other throughout the day. I usually use a messenger on my laptop to text people since I find it very hard to type on a phone. We decided on a place to meet at for our next date. But a couple of days before we were supposed to meet, the conversation took a bizarre turn. She asked me why I used the messenger. I'd already explained my typing preference to her once and repeated it. I asked her if it bothered her. She said it did, because apparently she'd been scammed out of $2000 by someone else who used the same kind of messenger. As she explained to me, it was clear that she'd fallen victim to the Nigerian scam: a guy befriends her, tells her he's stuck in a foreign country and asks her for money. And like a fool, she sends it.

Okay, but does that mean she thought I was going to scam her? She'd already met me in person. I'm not sitting in some remote country concocting stories about my life. Just because a scammer used the same software, as do millions of other people around the world, how does that mark me as suspect? Does it make the other millions of people also suspect? What about the converse? Scammers who use other channels of communication? She had no answers to any of that. Her explanations made no sense. Exasperated, I told her as much. 'See,' she wrote. 'We're very different. I don't think linearly.' No kidding. Her reasoning was just nuts, completely illogical. 'You're right,' I wrote back. 'We're very different.'

I never heard back from her.

It must be fruitcake season.