Today, I want to make you my 1950’s dream.

I want you in that dress, and in that sweater.

I want the wash of your dark hair falling across your eyes, hazy and unfocused, lost in thought. I come home and catch you sneaking a cigarette out the kitchen window. I watch in silence, the exhaled smoke catching the evening light, as a narrow bar of luminous dust dancing above the table. I clear my throat, and you start.

You look back, throwing the cigarette out the window. You’ve just had a hard day, you explain. You try to palm the pack. You’re scrabbling for excuses when my hand grabs your neck and pulls your face close to mine. Your fear makes me hesitate, just for a moment. You look surprised, in the short moment before my lips are on yours.

Teeth part, tension replaced by anticipation, and I can feel the heat as blood rushes into your cheeks. My tongue snakes between your teeth and meets yours, still smoky, tender. As our lips part, you look into my eyes with understanding. I stare back, the only sound our ragged breath, grinding my desire into you.

I unzip your dress, and then I step back: you look down, breaking eye contact, as the dress pools around your feet. You unfasten your bra, and let it slide down to join the skirt. You look at me asking if that is enough. It’s not enough, dear. It’s never enough. And you push your panties down, one bit at a time, until they hit your knees and slide to the floor. And now in the still, warm air of the kitchen, you are exposed. Vulnerable.

And when I pull you toward me again, there is no hesitation.

The deep hot moist gaze that radiated from above a rude smirk was hot on my skin and I felt myself become tense.

She was the perfect girl for just a moment, her spiky hair, the striped sock, the entire picture sent a vibration through my brain which was beautiful and warm and I think I may have dreamed her.

But when I turned around, she was gone. Disappeared into some house or another, and I drove on home, trying to shake that vision of her, on the bounce of an uneven gait.

Looking like she knew the secret.

“If I were as sketchy about sex as you are, and then my first experience getting back in the game were getting hit with that, I’d be tentative too.”

I’m paraphrasing here, but this has been said to me, in a couple of forms, over the years. And oddly, it’s not always about the same event. The reality is, I feel like a blind man in a strange house when it comes to sex and romance. I’m constantly stumbling and hurting myself and others in my flailing meander. It’s much easier and much less painful to just sit still.

And that’s the problem.

Many times now, in multiple different forums, I’ve been in a nice starting position with someone I find appealing. We’re past idle chitchat, moved to substantive discussion, and in normal situations, would be making the plunge toward more personal questions, but instead, I idle on the curb. The other person usually interprets this incorrectly as me being uninterested and moves on. And while I continue to make the same ineffective discussion, they are drifting further and further away. And typically, by the time I realize this and make one of my patently ridiculous and ineffective overtures, they’ve found a new applicant with less confusing signals to play the game with. In extreme cases, this overture may be years too late, causing consternation and drunken confusion and awkwardness, all of which only serve to reiterate that the best plan is to stand still and not even make the initial approach.

But each time, as I stare down a holiday or birthday or even a long weekend… I wish, and I think, and I fret, and eventually my loneliness overrides my brain and I make that first step. And then I sit, terrified to make the next one.

The real point here being that there’s a potential relationship I can feel running through my fingers right now, and I just can’t figure out how to make that next step naturally. I don’t know how. In all reality, I should probably take my dad’s advice from when I was a kid. “Son. Don’t worry about being cool. Just say it. I’d rather be the guy who ran up and said ‘You’re Pretty!’ than the cool guy who was too afraid to say hello.”

When I first signed on to OK Cupid because Fargo harassed me, I answered a few questions and then looked at my results, and I saw your lovely face looking back at me on the very first page of results. 84% match (very nearly the highest match possible for me at the time), and a list of interests that sent chills up my spine. I carefully made sure not to masturbate thinking about you (don’t want to jinx it), and pressed forward to make sure we were meant to be.

But something has changed. I don’t know what it was, but 100 more questions have passed, and I think we’ve grown apart.

You no longer show up on my first ten results, you’re back on page SEVEN! We are now only an 80% match, with 1% enemy! How did this happen? I blame myself. We never talked about it, I never made a point to find out why you hate me now. Was it my stance on polyamory? Is it that I mandate that gay marriage should be legal? I suppose now… I’ll never know.

You should go with your perennial runner up, Meliora84 (2% enemy, that bitch always hated me) and try to find a new life, together, reading crime fiction and having discussions about Rolling Stone. Try to find happiness, as you sink further away from my top 100 matches, and I will try to forget the purity, the power of our unrealized potential love.

I don’t know why every interaction has to be such a god damned chore.

You see, like most times when I post an personals ad, I got replies. Sure, I got the requisite random-letter-sequence@randomnumbers.ru Brunglish replies, but I also got a couple of genuine people. One didn’t respond after the first volley. One responded with “I LOVE TO LAUGH”, and was disregarded out of hand. Another responded and included a Myspace link that didn’t inspire a lot of interest. Another? Well… Let’s just say my interest was piqued.

So I mentioned that. And I mentioned that I might be interested in getting a cup of coffee (I have no idea what people “do” on dates, so this is the best idea I could come up with). I also included a picture of me.

And she responded with the sort of unguarded enthusiasm that is normally reserved for dental visits when you’re asked whether you’ll be paying by cash or check. There was a lot of heavily implied reluctance, along with plainly stated reluctance (the perfecta). But she also included a picture of herself, and indicated that it was I that had a choice to make, for some ill defined reason vaguely related to her age (Fargo and I both looked at the picture for a while, to see if I was missing something, she looks to be about my age to me).

Now, my natural response when someone does this is to run, not walk, in the other direction. I had a magnificently bad set-up with someone that started with this sort of – I’ll be generous and call it – lukewarm reaction. Nothing sets a date off right like showing up and having your date turn to her roommates to say, “Hopefully this won’t take long”. And that is the same gut reaction I had to this email.

Ladies, here is a free tip: If you aren’t interested, just fucking say it! And don’t think that I want to take out out to dinner for the pure unadulterated pleasure of buying you shit. Don’t make mealy mouth excuses about wanting to meet “all kinds of people” and “trying anything once”. If you have to make excuses to go on the date, you should really just man up and say “Hey. I’m not interested in you. Let’s both save an uncomfortable evening and not do this.”

I responded that I was still interested in going out, because I am holding out hope that this isn’t just some delightful game that translates to “Whoa, you’re not what I imagined you’d look like but I’m too ‘nice’ to just say no”.