Tuesday 7 November 2017

Am I just too slow for modern day dating?

I had lunch yesterday with a former work colleague, someone I’ve always got along well with that has left under a bit of a cloud.

It was early 2015 that he left his wife (that also works for us) for a girl that works on his team and was dating another of his team, she was promoted in this time and is quite frankly as useful as a chocolate teapot on a bonfire. If I wasn’t already suspicious about them once I heard she had been promoted I definitely was! However it was apparent before the split that they were always in the same place, despite the fact that they didn’t really need to be.

He and I never discussed it as he knew that I wouldn’t approve of the cheating and I wouldn’t approve of sleeping with one of your staff, it’s such a bad plan and to be fair it was, I’m pretty sure it contributed to his fall from grace, however both she and the boyfriend she left (who will be her husband next year!) both still work for the company, the only innocent party I see here is the wife, I felt for the boyfriend too until the muppet took her back and asked her to marry him, I see a rocky future ahead of those two.

So since early January he has left his (second) wife and been seeing the girl he promoted, they split and within weeks he was seeing someone else, within weeks he’d met her child and she his, they moved in together fast and they broke up in the late summer, since then he’s been dating which we discussed yesterday, since this time he’s had a short relationship with someone else and several dates.

He went on a date last Thursday, had dinner, then Saturday he stayed over and did the same on Sunday, in the space of the week they’ve been talking, he’s had several dinner, two overnight stays and met her parents.

Then you have me, for one I’d struggle to fit that many dates into four days, I wouldn’t be having someone stay over within the first week because I’d want to get to know them before they were getting into my bed, so my question is, am I too slow with all of this? Should I be upping my game and just moving them in by date three instead of cracking on with my life and being such a snail?
I seem to be kind of a slow dater, initially seeing someone once or twice a week is just fine for me, my weekends are usually booked up way in advance and I’m not making changes to plans I’ve already made.

At first I thought this gung ho chuck yourself into it was a man thing but there are women involved here too and what sort of woman introduces her kids to someone she doesn’t even know yet?
Lets go back to baggage boy, who I had 3/4 dates with before we decided that friends was the better option for us. One of our last conversation’s was when I told him that his son didn’t need to meet everything his cock touched.

In the short time we were friends there were more women than I could shake a stick at walking in and out of those doors, now at first I thought he was a good Dad, he had his son every weekend, which I was terribly impressed at, it was only later that it dawned on me that his little boy (who was four) just had to fit in with whatever he was doing, if he was going out on a date he’d get a babysitter and if he had a woman over it was no big deal, the little one many times went to sleep with a babysitter and woke up to a woman he’d never met, if she’d gone by the time he woke up I would have had more empathy with this but that wasn’t the case.

The little boy had a lot of issues, although Baggage Boy would never admit to them, there were a lot of issues with BB and the little boys Mum, I only heard one side of the story which of course made her out to be evil and him to be the hero, this I don’t believe but I can assure you that if Boy was my child he wouldn’t be meeting different women all the time as I wouldn’t have allowed that. He definitely had attachment issues, from the minute we met he was very cuddly, wanted to hold my hand all of the time, if we watched a movie he wanted to be sitting on my lap, now children to tend to like me but I think that’s because I’m a little nervous around them and I’m not one of these people that always wants to grab them for cuddles etc but normally I find children of that age are a little shy at first, he desperately wanted to be loved which made me a bit sad.

He also had some anger issues and wasn’t reigned in by his Dad, now most things I can tolerate, however one day when I was there I spotted him being cruel to the hamster, I don’t care who you are animals aren’t meant to be dropped from a metre in the air, so I told him that he couldn’t do that and got his Dad in, ‘he loves the hamster’ is what I was told and I could believe that totally, until he thought no one was watching, I imagine that quite a lot happens when he is unsupervised and his Dad is too busy entertaining to keep an eye on him.

He had a girlfriend in Germany for a while, a girl he’d met while he was with his wife and she was with her husband, but nothing had happened…… she was the love of his life, he wanted her to move over which was what they were planning, he’d also propositioned both me and a waitress when we were on a day out with his son at this point.

Then suddenly within days of all this on Facebook his relationship status changes to ‘in a relationship with………..’ a girl that didn’t have the same name as the girl in Germany…….. despite our conversation she had posted photos of her with Boy and him with her children and all of his posts were how much he loves his ideal woman and he’d never felt like this before…….. I know I’m a sceptic but……

We had a conversation about it and I told him that I felt he was rushing in, that while I was happy for him in the last year he’d told me he was in love many times and I had concerns and also concerns for Boy, he brushed them off, put it down to me not being happy for him, which categorically wasn’t the case.

The next conversation we had was a couple of months later, Facebook and Instagram were covered in how happy they were but our conversations were filled of how insecure she was, how she wasn’t as adventurous as him in bed and how he didn’t like one of her children.
The next minute they were on holiday and an engagement ring appeared, surrounded by messages of how much in love they were and how perfect for each other they were, he rang me after and I congratulated him, mentioning that it was only a week ago that they weren’t terribly happy and the holiday was make or break, that was the last I heard of him and I was deleted from Facebook.
They have got married, Instagram is covered in photos of how perfect they are, I did note that the child he doesn’t like doesn’t appear in a lot of the photos though, take that as you will.
A little side note about Baggage Boy, on a night in 2016 (before the now wife but when he was with the German GF) we had planned a night out, we were going to a car show, then for a night out and I was staying at his.

We’d gone to the car show and come back covered in dust, so I went to get showered and ready, as I headed into the bathroom he said ‘I’ll be in, in a minute’ which I laughed off thinking he was joking, he wasn’t. Now there was no lock on the door but it was shut, he then walks naked into the bathroom and climbs into the shower with me, very brazen, I’m not sure what he expected but I finished my shower, got out and went and put my dress on, I was pretty shocked if I’m honest but I’m not the sort of girl to wobble with something like that and I fronted it out, we had a brilliant night out but if I’d already worked out before this that he couldn’t be trusted but this really did clinch it, if I’d given him the slightest hint that I was up for it he would have been straight in there, despite the girlfriend, he spent the evening giving the come on to anything that had a pulse, even exchanged numbers with some and I was totally fine with that but he did then try it on when we got back to his, even drunk I’m pretty firm in my resolve, it did come up over the coming months how I’d batted off his advances but it was long before that we’d decided that we were just going to be friends and in the months that followed all of the reasons that was a brilliant idea became apparent.

So, should I throw caution to the wind when it comes to dating?

If I had I could have well ended up with Baggage Boy and many others that I’ve been saved from but does my caution hold me back because by the time I’ve worked out I do actually like them they’ve found someone else?


We all know that most people multidate these days, do I want to be with someone that isn’t prepared to wait? I honestly don't think I do but I wonder if I've wasted chances by being cautious, like the Shoe Guy, the friend of a friend from two Christmases ago that got in touch recently and today in fact. 

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