100 Emails, 20 Dates An SF girl's systematic quest to end her singlehood

Date 7.1: Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.

Editor's Note: I wrote a longer post, recapping the details of the date, earlier today. But then I realized I had already written about it, and I edited the post and the headline. Sorry for the mistake! (Also, now a couple of my date numbers don't match the URLs. Oh well.)

After O. and I went on our blind date, he gave me a ride home. (What a nice guy!) When he dropped me off, we talked about seeing each other again. It hadn't been a great date, but our mutual friend had warned me that he took time to warm up, and I was prepared to give it some time. Two or three weeks later, right before Thanksgiving, I got an email from him:

Date: 11/28/09
Subject: Greetings from Hawaii

Hi N.,

Just a quick note to say "Hi".  Sorry for being out of touch.  This trip has been crazy.  The windsurfing conditions have been unreal - so good that we decided to extend the trip another week.

How have you been?  Doing anything fun for the long weekend?

O.

Oh! He'd been out of town! He hadn't mentioned that. I sent him a friendly but short email the next day, asking if he had mahi-mahi and all the trimmings for Thanksgiving dinner. A week and a half later, he sent me a really nice email, in which I could start to see a glimpse of what my friend saw in him.

But nearly a month and a half had passed since our first date, and he was only available to meet up on weeknights during December. My weeknights were booked with Christmas parties and work. I could have--and probably should have--cleared my schedule one night to meet him. But I still felt burdened by the effort I was putting in, especially when his responses were so tepid.

I think, ultimately, that the blind-date setting was a bad way for us to meet. Maybe I'll run into him at one of our mutual friend's events. I hope so. I'd like to get to know him better, but dating just didn't feel like the way to do that.