My online dating experience so far has been short and relatively uninteresting when compared to Ned’s or Supersport’s experiences, but I started posting in this thread to chronicle my online dating experience. So chronicle I shall:
I met another woman from OKC for the first time almost two weeks ago at a nearby book store. After the always awkward first few minutes when nobody knows what to talk about, we ended up just walking the aisles of the store and chatting about everything from early American history to comic books to sci-fi to various art and artist to every music genre under the sun. I had only planned to meet for maybe 20-30 minutes tops, but this lasted nearly an hour and a half before we both had legitimate obligations that forced us to part ways. I’m used to easily being the nerdiest person in the room, but this girl knew more about many of those topics than I did. I didn’t go out looking specifically for a nerdy/geeky/whatever woman, but I found one. She’s not really a gamer though. I guess nobody’s perfect. However, I’m certainly not complaining!
Hell, she laughs at my jokes and I’ve told enough bad ones by now that if she were just being polite it would have become obvious long ago. In short, we “clicked”.
After that, I had a really great first date with the same woman this past Sunday. We went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Neither one of us had ever been there before so it was somewhat of an adventure for both of us. Overall, I wasn’t horribly impressed with the exhibits, but they provided a number of conversation topics that we both found interesting so as a date it worked out well. Again, we both seemed to “click” and had no problem talking about too many different conversation topics to list. It’s a relatively small museum and we covered the whole thing twice in a little over an hour without rushing at all.
One of the many topics we talked about was the movie Inception which neither one of us had seen. Normally I subscribe to the “less is more” approach to first dates and try to keep them relatively short and sweet, but since the museum didn’t last as long as we’d both expected and we seemed to be getting along great, I broke my own unwritten rule and asked if she wanted to go see Inception. Of course, she agreed. I hate movies on first dates and normally I avoid them like the plague for many reasons already listed in this thread and many other places, but this worked out well in our situation. Both of us are self-described film buffs and we spent the vast majority of the drive back to her place (about an hour from this particular theater) talking about all the various aspects of the movie (acting, casting, cinematography, visual design, etc.) and what we really liked and disliked. Of course, it helped that both of us thought the movie was amazing overall, but it was yet another great conversation.
Overall, it was easily the most “effortless” date I’ve been on. No awkward silences, plenty of actual dialogue (not an interrogation), she doesn’t seem psychotic and I have all of my extremities and internal organs intact.
As we all know, the entire point of a first date is to get to know one another a little better and ultimately determine if there is going to be a second date. In this case we just scheduled another date to take place this upcoming Monday. This time it’s going to be a picnic at a nearby park provided the weather is nice. Hopefully things will go as smoothly this time as before. I’m pretty psyched for it.
Now don’t get me wrong based on that great story above. I’m still cynical about this online dating thing and I’m not expecting much anything let alone a “soul mate” or whatever you wish to call it. I’m not jumping the gun. We’ve only been on one real date and still hardly know each other so I’m keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground. One positive experience does not equal a relationship and it certainly does not equal love, but this experience has shown me that there are great women out there on these sites. Even if this woman doesn’t develop into anything special, I’ve proven that there is at least one person on OKC I’m at least somewhat compatible with and where there is one, there almost certainly are others.
It’s no horror story, but I’m having fun with this and felt like sharing. Hopefully somebody besides me will find it interesting.
