Sheer: Part II

Continued from Part I.

The first meeting

The photos also began the long path toward our first meeting – which wasn’t actually that long at all, and probably felt lightning fast, to her.

The lead-in

We decided to meet Monday evening, and exchanged a lot of emails in which I included haha-only-serious jokes about how much I wanted to kiss her at that first meeting even though it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker if we didn’t. No wonder I get laid so seldom, I have no game.

We confirmed things Monday morning, and I wore my favourite suit. During the day, however, she emailed to tell me she probably couldn’t make it after all because her day was suddenly getting crazy, and I responded that, actually, that was fine, because my day was getting crazy too. Better to leave it to Tuesday than to rush to meet on Monday, and have a down-to-the-wire decision as to whether it could happen at all.

Normally, my pessimistic side would have been screaming inside my head – “She’s only cancelling because she’s got cold feet! She’s got another date with someone else!!!” – but none of those warning bells were going off in this case. It seemed like she was genuinely busy, and it was the same for me, so I took it at face value.

We exchanged a few more emails on Tuesday morning, confirming that we’d meet around 7:00 at a particular coffee spot. She was able to park in the area – her parents own a condo around there, that she could park at⁸ – and this was the only coffee shop in the area that would be open late enough for us to meet.

After that, the rest of Tuesday was spent on trying to keep busy to prevent nerves, and trying not to email her ad nauseum in the meanwhile.

The meet

She emailed me when she left the house, which was my cue to leave the office and go get us a table. Actually, I’d be getting there way too early, but I’m like that; I can’t not be early. In fact, it was even worse, because traffic was worse than she’d anticipated, so she was 15 minutes later than anticipated. Which is nothing, I hasten to point out, with our traffic, but feels like an eternity when you’re sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for a beautiful woman to show up, and thinking about all of the ways you might fail to measure up in her eyes when she arrives.

I messaged her when I got there, to let her know I was in the farthest corner I could find, and that I was in a black suit with a dark purple shirt and tie (in case she didn’t recognize me from the photos). And then I sat there, sipping my London Fog, trying not to be nervous, and looking at everyone who came into the place to see if it was her. At one point a… ahem…. less than attractive woman entered, and was looking around as if she was meeting someone and couldn’t find them. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Sheer, but I caught her eye anyway, just in case, and was relieved when she moved on.

And of course Sheer had promised to email me anyway, to let me know when she was on her way from the parking garage, which she eventually did. And then she arrived, wearing those same sunglasses on top of her head, and she was as beautiful as she’d been in her photos. Even more than in her photos, because in person her smile was much more radiant than the “I’m posing for a photo” smiles that had been in her pictures. She had an accent which I originally mistook for French (Quebecoise), but turned out to be Israeli. (I don’t know if she was insulted that I mistook her for a Quebecer. She didn’t seem offended, but who knows…)

As we talked, I got a much clearer picture of her home situation. With the financial considerations, there was serious doubt as to how quickly she’d be able to move forward with a divorce, and even if/when she did, she was of the opinion that she probably wouldn’t be moving in with anyone, because of her kids, of which she had four. (That’s right, four kids⁹!) She was worried about having to explain things to her kids, and wasn’t realistically thinking that she’d be in a permanent, living-together kind of relationship for a long, long time – if ever. Plus there was the fact that, for the time being, she was still married, and wouldn’t be able to let anyone find out if she had a new man in her life, so in a sense, she has as much need for secrecy as anyone else on A-M.

She also told me about her previous boyfriend, from A-M – the only man she’d ever slept with, aside from her husband. Things had gone very well with him, and they’d started to develop a pattern whereby they’d spend the night together once a week, on Sundays, at her parents’ condo. However, he ended up divorcing his wife, and so ended things with her (a common occurrence on A-M), which really hurt her, because they’d developed real feelings for each other. But (I was able to explain to her), he would soon be looking for the type of relationship that she wouldn’t be able to provide for him.

And frankly, her main hesitation about starting things up with someone new (viz me) was that she didn’t want to get hurt again. She’d obviously been hurt by her husband, and then she’d been hurt when she had to end things with her boyfriend… who was to say she wouldn’t get hurt if she started up with me, too? I couldn’t fault her for thinking that way.

Other than these topics of conversation, the date was a blur to me. We were both shocked when the place closed at 10 and we got kicked out – we’d been there for almost three hours, but the time had flown by!

I walked her back to her parents’ condo, so she could pick up her car, and we ended by talking in the building’s lobby. With the security guard sitting a few feet away at his desk. So for that reason, plus the fact that she was still very, very unsure as to if/how she wanted to proceed, I didn’t try to go in for the goodnight kiss. I did give her a peck on the cheek, though, because… I just couldn’t not touch this woman.

Back to square 1

It wasn’t long after that date that Sheer told me, again, that she couldn’t do it – but not for any of the reasons I would have thought. The more we talked the more I realized that she wasn’t just hurt by her previous boyfriend, she was still in love with him. Oy vey.

So things devolved into exactly what I didn’t want to be the case: I got friend-zoned, and was relegated to helping her deal with her feelings. Feelings resulting from having lost her other man. Which opened up the floodgates, so that soon I was helping her with all of her problems.

Which is fine, in a sense, I’m not complaining. I have lots of female friends, and was fine to have another. Obviously it would have been better if she wanted me inside her, instead of just wanting a friendly ear. To make things worse, she eventually stalked her ex on A-M again, pretending to be someone else, and it turned out that a lot of her relationship with him had been a lie. He was just another dude trying to get laid on A-M, saying whatever he needed to say to get her in bed, until he eventually got bored and decided to move on to someone else. The whole connection she felt with him was just him saying what he thought she wanted to hear. (Apparently it worked. He’s better at all of this than I am.)

Around this time I started travelling for work again, so I didn’t mind the fact that I couldn’t have a physical relationship with her; it would have been difficult to find the time anyway. But I also started to get mixed signals from her. Maybe she would be interested – who knows? Anything could happen. It’s possible I sparked the reversal with a form of reverse psychology, because I’d taken the firm position that anything physical was now off the table, since it would be a bad idea for her. We also switched from email to B-B-M, which made the conversation much more immediate.

Once or twice, when I was alone late at night in my hotel room, we’d start to get into something a little more risqué, but she was obviously not experienced with that kind of thing, and it never went far. Once when it was starting to happen I made some kind of comment about the fact that we’d stopped before we got too dirty, and she said that she thought we already had gotten dirty; we clearly had different ideas about what was tame vs. erotic.

Square 2?

And then, in one quick conversation, things suddenly changed. I don’t even know how it happened. In the space of a few sentences, we went from “this is never going to happen,” to, “why don’t I rent a hotel room this week and you can come join me?” The conversation happened when I was out of the city, but I was going to be back on the Wednesday night, so we decided to meet Thursday. She later realized that she was busy Thursday, so we moved it to Friday.

I was really on the fence. Of course I wanted her, but it had changed too fast by far. I didn’t want to get a room only to have to cancel it and lose a deposit or whatever. But she was adamant: she had made up her mind. So I booked it.

And I wrote these last few sections of the document from that room, waiting for her to arrive. By the time I write the next part, I’ll either have slept with her, or I won’t have. I do know this: I’ll have had dinner with her. That was the plan, dinner first and then come what may, and even if it wasn’t right for sex, there’s no way dinner would be a problem…

Nope. Square one. Friend zone.

A little bit of background: When Sheer had been seeing her ex, they had a long ramp-up leading up to their physical relationship. They used to meet in hotel rooms, on a regular basis – multiple times a week, and sometimes even multiple times in a day – where they’d just talk. This was long before they ever started having sex.

How do I know this? Because we spent 90% of our second date talking about her ex. The conversation wandered away from him from time to time, but always managed to find its way back.

So we didn’t have sex on our second date. We didn’t even kiss¹⁰. We had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant – she looked tired when she arrived, though I did not tell her so – and it was pleasant and comfortable. We talked the entire time, of course. If there’s one thing we can do, it’s talk. She insisted on paying for dinner, which was not my intention but I gave in. Eventually I suggested that we go up to the room, where it would be more quiet.

It was probably around 7 or 8 when we went upstairs. The room had a nice couch, so we sat there and talked some more. Much as I tried not to compare myself to her ex, it was almost impossible not to, since, as mentioned, so much of the conversation was centred around him. Any time she’d tell me how things had gone with him, I’d think to myself, “that sounds like how things are going with us.” When she told me about how often they’d met in hotels, before getting physical, I thought, “well, here we are in a hotel room…”

This was on a Friday, which left me the weekend to think about things. And I was left wondering: Is it worth continuing with her, if we’re going to be friend-zoned until some point in the imaginary future when she decides that she wants to take me inside her? I didn’t have an answer. As mentioned before, I don’t mind having a female friend; on the other hand, it wouldn’t be worth it to go through all of that unless I want to be her actual “boyfriend,” and start using the L-word, and give up all other women. Did I really want to do that? (That was a rhetorical question, but my readers should be intelligent enough to guess that the answer is a big fat no.)

I was sort of left with a tentative game plan of going back to assuming, with her, that we’re just going to be friends, and nothing physical will happen – ever. This would have two potential benefits:

1. It would free me up, mentally, to start searching A-M in earnest again, and
2. It might have another reverse psychological effect on her: if I tell her sex is off the table, is that going to make her want to hop on it? Stranger things have happened.

Upon further consideration…

A week went by after our second date, and we were uncharacteristically silent on B-B-M. We messaged on a regular basis, we definitely stayed in touch, but we didn’t converse. I’d send her a message saying “I hope you’ve had a good day,” and she’d respond back with “yes, it was busy but good,” and that would be it. The next morning I’d say hi, and she’d respond, and a couple of messages in, that would be it. As time went by, it got less and less frequent.

For me, the difference was that the spark was gone. After the second date, I didn’t relish the idea of being the guy who never measured up to her ex – especially given that her ex was an asshole who just used her for sex, so all the worse if I didn’t measure up – and although I was highly confident that I could eventually win her over, it would only happen if I was willing to commit to her in a very long-term way. I had been toying with the idea earlier on, but at this point, it wasn’t feeling appealing.

Beyond that, there simply hadn’t been any sexual tension on our date, so I wasn’t feeling that push to try to win her over in the first place. The more I looked back on the date, the more felt like it had been completely platonic, like two friends. And I don’t mean that she didn’t feel interested, I mean that neither of us felt like we were interested. I hadn’t been spending the whole time thinking, “boy, I’d like to kiss her right now.”

At one point she mentioned to me that she was also feeling a little more warmly toward her husband. So in addition to my own mental head space, of not lusting after her in the same way, it’s possible that she had her own head space going on, in which her husband was more of a focus than he had been. Well… a focus of something other than frustration and loathing.

Ghosting – er… drifting apart

When Sheer’s ex disappeared, she looked it up and discovered that there’s a term for that: it’s called ghosting. If you meet someone online, hit it off, and then they just suddenly disappear without a warning – something that’s much easier to do, in the internet age – you’ve been ghosted. So from very early on it became a running joke between us, that we’d never ghost each other.

So of course we eventually did. I mean, not really, we were still there in each other’s B-B-M list and could message at any time… but we didn’t. Weeks would go by in which we didn’t message each other at all.

We finally did break the silence, and I found out that her warm feeling toward her husband had been very temporary, but that – surprise!!! – she had gotten back together with her ex. I tried as hard as possible to be happy for her while still expressing reservations about her ending up with the guy who had lied to her in order to get into her pants, and that was that. Another couple of weeks went by, we messaged again, and it turned out that she had broken up with him. I had never been happy that she got together with him in the first place, but I was happy that she was able to get closure by being the one to end things¹¹.

This last series of messages was right before she was about to take a long trip. There’s a very good chance that it’s the end of the story, because I’d probably have forgotten about her by the time she got back to Canada.

So this is one of the longer stories on the blog, but it had the same outcome as the majority of them: nothing happened.

Footnotes

• ⁸ I found out later that she used to meet her previous boyfriend at the condo. Er… spoiler alert. (About the boyfriend.) ↺
• ⁹ FOUR!!! ↺
• ¹⁰ I didn’t even give her a peck on the cheek to say goodnight, as I had on our first date. After spending the entire night talking about her ex, I didn’t exactly feel eager to jump her bones. ↺
• ¹¹ Probably premature. She’ll likely end up with him again, at some point. ↺