Rejected

It's kind of interesting - I feel like I don't really trust things to work out magically for myself ever, but there is always that irrepressible hope that will be alive in me that something will actually work out and be wonderful.  Take the past couple of weeks, for example.  I'm going out of town later this week, and I decided that as long as I'm paying to be online, I might as well try to get some dates while on vacation.  So I was forward and tried.  I had one guy take the bait and agree to a date.  I wasn't expecting to hear much from him between then and the date, but we emailed a couple of times.  Then one day he saw that I was online and I.M.'d, and we had a pretty good conversation, which was encouraging.  I sent him my number, he replied, and he invited me to be in touch.  Then a week ago he spent several hours texting me (a little overkill for me but still nice).  Then we actually talked on the phone the next day for well over an hour.

(Which, allow me to insert a little observation about online dating here.  When you meet someone in person, you take everything in at once.  Your impression is based on a combination of sensory input.  Online is different - in a strange way, impressions are formed more thoroughly, or at least over and over.  First, you take in how the person writes.  If grammar isn't a big deal, maybe you don't notice so much.  But if you're like me, you definitely notice, and the writing makes an impression on you.  Does he write intelligently?  Or is it text shorthand?  How's his grammar?
Then maybe you speak on the phone - yet another layer where opinions are formed.  Does he have a nice voice?  Is it high?  Low?  Does he have an accent (like the rancher I went out with awhile back)?
Finally you may actually meet, and then the physical appearance is added in.  You already have an idea on this because of pictures, but this is where you find out better the potential for attraction.
I think we make all of these judgements with people we meet normally - well, you don't see how the person writes, but by talking to them you get an idea of some of the same things - but do you see how online drags it out and can make each part of the person a little more important?  Anyway, I've been thinking about that with this most recent boy.)

So what started as just a thought of a fun one-time date started to change into something more hopeful.  I stalked him early on and found his websites and thought they were kind of neat, too.  Anyway, I hope you don't think I'm too stupid for looking forward to meeting the guy, and I hope you can understand my disappointment when the dude texted me today to bail.  It's just a shame that I don't get to actually meet him in person because I feel like we might be the same kind of nerds and we might have actually had a good time.  I felt like things changed after that conversation last week, and I guess I was right - sometimes it stinks to be right, by the way.  Not that I'm often right, but sometimes I am, and some of those times I would rather not be.  Well, he was a nice guy, and I guess if he doesn't want to go out, it's good that he let me know now.  He wasn't a jerk - he just met someone else he'd rather get to know or something.  I just wish I could suppress the hope a little bit so that I wouldn't feel the disappointment quite as much.