Tuesday, September 16, 2014

When the Chief asked me whether I was still in mourning, one afternoon late last week, I promptly scoffed at the question. That’s not to say I didn’t feel a thing, because I certainly did. For me, heartache has always been less of an ache and more of a dull throb of someone missing. But this time, it didn’t last long. Part of the reason, I think, was the brevity of the relationship itself. Another reason–and I’ve seen this in my sister, too, so it may be genetic–is the capacity to recover quickly, with minimal pining and wallowing.

Sure enough, just a day after the split, I was back on all three dating sites. The routine fit like an old glove, really, or about as well as any glove about seeking human connection in the ether could fit. I have a system in place, too, which made reactivation that much easier. It involves spreadsheets! Yes, spreadsheets crafted for the sole purpose of attracting leviathans.

A leviathan-class match, you may recall, is hot and possesses a personality. The former fact alone means they receive a ton of messages, so any initiation on my behalf will likely disappear in the void. The Professor charitably suggested these women, leviathans they may be, lack the stamina to wade through a sea of cockshots before happening upon a thoughtfully penned missive from yours truly. My grittier take on the matter is a leviathan-class match would absolutely reply in short order, were a punchy message to arrive from someone who, say, looks like Channing Tatum. That is most definitely not me. I am the anti-Tatum.

Don’t mistake this for a lack of confidence. A general’s got to go to war with the army he’s got, is all, and for guys like me, these women retain the role of arbiter. They are the choosers. To stand out, I employ the boost functions on these sites to push me to the top of the heap, and then I get to testing, making sure to record time of day, sample size, number of views, likes, winks, and so on and so forth. Prior to running these boosts, I cull the raw search results to block the “never in a million years” matches, douche as it may sound, to shrink the denominator. And then, every once in a while, one lands on my porch. I’ve realized I can only juggle two matches at any given time, so it doesn’t have to rain leviathan. Just a trickle will do.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, September 16.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

It’s Sunday, on a cool Dallas morning, and I’m writing these first few lines in a coffee shop while I wait for her to arrive. The triteness begins and ends there, however, because this is to be a final meeting. How did we go from Thursday, packed with promise of the new, to this unraveling? I’m still trying to process it. I may never fully process it, either.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. There have been ups and downs since that first evening, as would be expected, but this development was a sucker punch to me. Normally I enjoy parsing people and situations with some degree of accuracy. Clearly I missed something substantial in this situation, though, and here, at this coffee shop, I would find out the whats and the whys.

We opened with small talk. On any other day, this would have quickly wended to interesting talk, but this time, we lingered on the inconsequential. And part of me could’ve stayed there, in the little topics, for a while longer. But I guided conversation back to the roads taken and not taken, revisited prior dates and conversations in a new light, and asked her other questions.

And the talk took its own course. She would deftly fill the natural silences, as was her way, and during lighter moments, there was that smile. But there were also moments when the timber would change: quieter, sadder, and it was fucking gutwrenching. I had three theories, I told her, for how we ended up here.

The first theory was that the cultural gap remained too large, and I didn’t exactly fit into the narrative she and her friends had written for more than a decade. The second theory was that I had misread her personality for chemistry. The third was that she had met someone else. It was the second theory, she said, and although I believe her in part, I also have my doubts because I don’t know if there is an alternative reading for every kiss. But you’ve got to take the truth with the fiction, and then you move on–because there are other leviathans in the sea.