I’m 30 years old. This is not my first time at the rodeo. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten much better at trusting my intuition about men and different situations in regards to dating, even when it pains me to cut myself off from people. I know in the end I’ll be better off and avoid more heartbreak if I stop chatting with guys when I first get the impression they are jerking me around.

I’ve been chatting with quite a few different guys on scruff and grindr which are apps on my phone. Only one has really gotten under my skin and by that I mean someone I start to fantasize about meeting, how great they are and how great it would be to fall in love with them. We had plans to get together tonight after my reiki class, but I’d already gotten the impression it wasn’t going to work out yesterday. I was really looking forward to meeting him. He was cute, we seemed to have things in common, and unlike most gay men he also appeared to have a soul. How wrong I was.

We were texting back and forth yesterday in the early afternoon. I was really excited to meet him and go on a date tonight. It’s been quite a while since I went on a date. We didn’t send each other any texts throughout the evening and when I got back to my friends’ last night I went on scruff and saw he’d looked at my profile about 15 minutes earlier. I sent him a text asking him how the rest of his day was. No response. Now this was the first big, blazing neon sign proclaiming something was wrong. Since I have a habit of jumping to conclusions when it comes to men and dating, I decided I’d be best to wait it out and to start treading more cautiously. Around 2 pm this afternoon I sent a text asking if he was still available to get together tonight. Again, no response. A couple hours later I logged into scruff and saw that he’d checked my profile earlier that morning. This confused me. I mean really, if he had no interest in meeting me I couldn’t really figure out why he would be checking my profile (or looking at my picture). Now when I get excited about meeting a guy and he ultimately blows me off there is a pretty specific grieving process I go through. On the one hand I’m mad, but more than anything I’m usually just really disappointed that yet again a guy that looked pretty promising had fallen through. So throughout the day, or a few hours, I go through this whole grieving process and then get to the point where I’m usually over it. Not that it doesn’t still hurt when I think about it, but I’m not obsessed with it and the bulk of the emotions I’ve processed. Normally when this happens I just let it go. I don’t ever reach out again to the guy. If there is one thing I won’t do it’s come across as desperate. As I was in my reiki class tonight I realized I should really send him a message. Not a message to pick a fight, but rather that I should tell him that he really did hurt me so that he knows that although he may not have had any consequences of his actions I was affected by them. As jaded as I am about dating and the gay community, I have to believe that most gay men aren’t inherently evil. I also think most of them could probably use a reality check that the tactics they are using have consequences for some of us who don’t have as thick skin as others. The text message I decided to send while sitting in class was this: There’s a reason I don’t try to go on dates often and it’s guys like you. Guys who masquerade as something different. Something better. Something to remain hopeful for. Yet, it’s always the same.

I didn’t actually send the message. By the time I checked my phone after class he had sent me a message. The message said that work was a nightmare, his phone had died and could we get dinner tomorrow evening before my class instead. Now I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after I’ve gone through the entire grieving process it’s hard to open up more than a sliver of opportunity again. I didn’t have plans before my class, yet, but had decided to ask a couple people if they’d be interested in getting together before hand, which I ultimately did. I texted him back saying that after class might work, but not before. I haven’t heard back from him which really means that had I told him I could get dinner before class he would have just bailed on me (probably without even letting me know) and I would have wasted an opportunity to meet fun people from class outside of class. I opened up scruff an hour or two after sending him the text and saw that he’d been online since I sent it. I took the opportunity to block him on the app. I don’t need that bullshit in my life. And really, it’s this kind of thing that I can sort of let roll off me once or twice, but more than that and I’m cutting myself off from the opportunity to meet any new gay men for dating because I simply can’t handle having my heart jerked around like that anymore and need a break. It’s very disheartening.

Gratitude list:
Reiki class
Making new friends
A good nights rest