As time moved on, I grew a bit bolder with my initial messaging. Maybe I got a little abstract in my humor, but I didn’t need a hundred women responding, just one or two who really got me. I told a woman who listed dancing as her major interest that I was fantastic in both hip-hop and classical ballet. It was an outrageous falsehood. I had left it to her to figure out the likelihood of a 55-year-old white man being both a ballet and a hip-hop dancer was next to nil. Either would’ve been incredible. Nobody could believe I was attempting to pass myself off as both. She replied, “Lol. You’re a complete fraud!” Well, ok, I got a laugh, just the response I wanted. She got the joke, I thought. She’s even expanding on it a bit.
“I wouldn’t say a complete fraud,” I messaged back, smiling as I typed. “I’m just merely proficient in both. However, I can do a mean Pogo and a wild mash potato.”
A quick message back, “Just beat it!” Hmm, I thought, a Michael Jackson reference from the 80’s.
“And I can moonwalk too!” This was a lie as well, but she wouldn’t find out until after we had met and she had discovered how charming I was in person.
“Why don’t you moonwalk your sorry ass off a very high cliff?” This is when I began to think maybe she wasn’t getting my humor at all. A lot gets lost in text messaging. I cannot see if she’s smiling or frowning. I once used “dunno” answering a woman and she asked me if I meant “I don’t know.” I replied in the affirmative and she said, “No slang!” Then she blocked me. The blocking really bugged the crap out of me, because that’s a discussion I would have enjoyed. I wouldn’t be able to debate her on the merits of slang, the beauty of an ever-changing, living language. I couldn’t tell her how Shakespeare just made up words as he went along. She had concluded I was both lazy and stupid. All because I said “dunno”. I was left in a void with no way to rectify the problem.
One last message to my dance partner, “You do get that I’m just joking?”
“Fuck off!” So I did. And then I blocked her.
#onlinedating #middleaged #manspov
#middleageddating #lastfirstkiss #love #kissing #sex
#dance #dancing #texting
The Last First Kiss 