THE WARREN REPORT - Valentine's Day Contest

THE WARREN REPORT - Valentine's Day Contest

I decided to go ahead and enter the Valentine's Day contest for The Warren Report. The contest is a 500 words or less essay on how I feel about relationships in the era of online dating, FWB's, etc ... and to describe whether my glass is half empty or half full.

The entry follows:

I tend to fluctuate on the whole half empty versus half full thing in regards to romance. See, I have spent the entirety of my adult life in one relationship until two years ago; which means that I went from being someone’s high school prom date to 37 without ever having been single in between.

I made the decision to learn to dance and have apparently reached the point where I am a decent lead. Since there are far fewer men who can lead than women who want to dance it creates a nice dynamic when I go out since there might be more men than women in a place on a given night, but I end up with no shortage of dance partners. It has helped. This realization keeps my glass half full.

It seems like people today meet, flirt, date, and sleep together in a three to four week cycle, and then one of them calls on a random Tuesday morning to tell the other that they have too much going on in their lives right now and it all blows up. This has happened to friends in my circle enough times over the past couple of years for me to (almost) consider it the normal dating pattern. My friends talk about friends with benefits, hooking up, meeting someone online, and the like, and it is not something I was inherently prepared to deal with in my late thirties. This realization keeps my glass half empty.

So, I went out and met women anyways. What I have learned is that there are a lot of amazing women in this town. We have beautiful, smart, strong women in abundance. I have had the opportunity to dance with a lot of them and now consider many of them to be good friends. Men need more women friends. This realization keeps my glass half full.

For years I watched shows like Friends or various romantic comedies of pretty people my age getting all mixed up over the latest crush and could not relate. I watched Mad About You. Now, I see a rerun of Friends and I find myself going, “Ohhhhh ....” This keeps my glass half empty, because let’s face it, it is Friends I am talking about.

And so the great Catch 22 is ever present. I have a lot of women friends who seem to regard me favorably, but none of those relationships seems to have promise beyond what it already is.

Lately, I find I distanced myself from spending too much time with some of them because when I am with them I can't meet anyone else. It is fun to be with them, but if I really want to meet someone, being with another woman in public is not always the best way to say that you are available.

And so I go back and forth on it.

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