I was yelled at this past weekend by a friend for sharing details of my love life with my Mom. As explained in an earlier blog, it is difficult to avoid the subject since my Mom and I talk so frequently. That being said, my friend had a point, namely, that I am a 36 year old adult woman and my love life is my own business. My mom was divorced with three children at my age and back on the prowl and I seriously doubt (actually I know) that she didn't share ANY details of her escapades (or sexcapades might be more accurate) with my Nanny Tessie (her mom). So, I have decided to take a page out of my sister's book and slickly (I hope) reduce the frequency with which we communicate. She calls me at exactly 3:30PM Monday through Friday. From now on, I am only going to pick up the phone every other day. We are going on 3 days and counting...

It's a good thing I made this decision before my date last night. I was set up with a Jewish Doctor. The man of my mother's dreams. I have to admit that I was not too optimistic going into the date. I am rarely attracted to Jewish men and those I do find appealing are rarely attracted to me. After my boss (and dear friend) Alan told me that an attitude like that might result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, I decided to go in with an open mind, especially since the person who set us up is always telling me not to sell myself short. She seems to have a lot of confidence in my appeal and I trusted that she would not set me up with a short, nebbishy, pocket protector bearing nerd simply because he too was single.

Despite my attempt to show up five minutes after our meeting time (so as to ensure that I was not waiting around, but not late enough to be construed as rude), I arrived at the lounge first and while there was a lone guy at the bar, I was pretty certain it wasn't "my guy" so I sat down, ordered a glass of water and pretended to check my Blackberry. After about five minutes, he showed up. I was not floored by his appearance in either direction, i.e. neither turned on nor repulsed but was actually pleased that he looked as young as he did as I was afraid he was too old for me and would look it. Unfortunately, that was the only pleasant surprise of the evening. I didn't like him. He was nice, I guess, but 1) he never looked me in the eyes. I like eye contact. Not freaky eye contact where you never blink or move your eyes away from someone, but he looked straight ahead, at the television over the bar, etc., everywhere except in my eyes which, by the way, are probably my best feature; 2) he didn't make me laugh. At all. It's not that we didn't engage in any interesting conversation because we did, but it wasn't "fun"; 3) he was a bit of a "know it all" and seemed unable to fathom that I might know more than him (or even as much) on certain topics including baseball, Florida, Spring Valley (my hometown!) etc; 4) he reminded me of my father, probably because of the "know it all" thing. I am not one of those woman who wants to marry a man "just like her daddy", quite the contrary; 5) I simply wasn't attracted to him. I wasn't moved to be flirtatious and, since we were on a date, the urge to flirt would have been a positive sign; and finally 6) I found myself thinking throughout the entire date (about 1.5 hours) such things as "if he asks me out again, should I go?", "how do I explain to the girl who set us up why I didn't like him?", "I just don't like him and that's that. I don't want to see him again", "Can I blog about this?", "What I am going to eat for dinner when I get home?" etc. If I liked this guy, I would be too busy enjoying myself to think about any of the above.

After the date, he said "you are going downtown, right? I am going uptown. It was nice to meet you" (insert hand shake here). Based on the conclusion of the date, I am pretty certain that he is no more interested in seeing me again than I am in seeing him and I am really happy about that. I hate being asked out on a second date by a guy I didn't like. I don't like rejecting others, in fact, I am think I am more comfortable being rejected than rejecting others. In this case, the "unattraction" is mutual and I couldn't be happier (unless, of course, the mutual feelings were of interest rather than disinterest).

The best part is that, since I avoided my Mom's call yesterday, she doesn't know that I went on the date. If she did, I would never hear the end of it. If I didn't like him, she would be begging me to first wait to find out if he liked me and, if so, give it another chance. If I did like him, she would be reserving a Synagogue for the wedding and getting the glass ready for him to step on at the ceremony. Further, she would hold her breath every time we spoke as she awaited the answer to her infamous question "do you still like him?".

While I would have, of course, preferred that we hit it off, I am not devastated. I have had my share of luke-warm dates and assume there are more in my future. That's ok. Every date with a "Dr. Wrong" hopefully brings me closer to my Mr. Right.