Meow

I'm passing the next three hours in a rather uncomfortable leather chair located in a seemingly unending concourse within an enormous, sterile and surprisingly un-busy airport smack in the middle of a midwestern, red state where half an ounce of cashews cost $6.79, wi-fi runs $9.99 and there's no Auntie Annie's anywhere to be found. This place blows.

Going on a vacation (or having to submit to any sort of forced separation) when you've just started dating someone, as I've recently learned, is a very interesting experiment. A litmus test, if you will, that can serve as a fairly effective (if not entirely failsafe) gauge of how you're both feeling about the burgeoning potential relationship.

And from the myriad text messages and nightly email exchanges during my four day sojourn into the heartland of America, M2's got it bad.

Real bad.

So bad, in fact, that he's decided his only option at this point, having shown his cards to such an astonishing extent that even this jaded and grizzled online dater can hardly believe what she's hearing (and reading), is to throw up his arms in defeat and let the proverbial chips fall where they may.

Fortunately for both of us, I like him back.

I probably won't see M2 tonight, though its going to take every ounce of strength I can muster not to summon him to my place once I finally do get home. But it will be late, I'll be tired, and let's be honest...a 10pm invite to one's abode really only means one thing, even if two people are both pretty darn sure they're on the precipice of something real. The old me wouldn't have hesitated for a minute. And maybe that's why the old me had such a bounty of recurring reasons to start this damn blog in the first place.

The great dates and the flowers and actually dating a man instead of a boy who holds my hand when we walk to the car and the pre-purchased movie tickets and the not-wondering-what-he's-thinking and the open, honest communication and the being-with-someone-who-wants-to-spend-as-much-time-with-me-as-possible and the not-doubting-his-intentions...none of it, really, can compete with tales of brooding, young 25 year olds who ride motorcycles and take me to castles or cocky Harvard MBAs who refer to my breasts not by their official anatomical term but instead by a word that rhymes with the nickname for a popular feline housepet.

Or...can it?

Date #4: tomorrow.