The Crazy Flag

The Crazy Flag

In an earlier post, I mentioned a woman I had been messaging with for more than four weeks, and unlike many of the other women with whom I had conversed via extended periods of emails and texts, this woman and I met, twice no less, and planned more dates in the future, including one on Valentine’s Day, where she agreed to come to my place for dinner.

The catch was after we’d made these plans, she tells me that someone else had asked her out on a date, and she wondered what she should do. I told her to go for it. Five weeks into a relationship, and a non-intimate one at that, I had no desire to tell her I wanted to be exclusive. On the other hand, it did give me reason to pause and pull back. I had peeled back the onion a bit, revealing my “true self” to her, and felt she had done the same, only to find out, contrary to inferences, that she was still seeing other people, or at least considering it.

Note, however, this was a mental pullback, with only minor real-world manifestations. What does this mean? Normally, if I was turned off by someone or my expectations had been unfulfilled, I would just quit writing and eventually she would get the hint and we’d both move on. In this case, I was more subtle. My messages became shorter, less revealing, less thoughtful, and more glib and superficial.

But she kept right on messaging like she had before she told me she was dating other people. Texts, emails, pictures, statements of faith. They kept on coming. When we first started seeing each other, I figured this was her way of getting to know me, her way of saying I want to incorporate you into my life. Now I’m not so sure. I think she is just kind of a faucet from which flows forth . . . stuff . . . lots of stuff, and what I thought was at least in part an intimate sharing of her life turned out to be more of an undifferentiated form of belching, a stream of consciousness that simply emanates from her regardless of whom she is communicating with.

This is OK, I guess.

I’m just not that way.

I don’t bear my intellectual, spiritual, and emotional soul to just anyone.

We’ll see how long the belching continues before she gets sore.