NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!

See "Background" for why and how I endangered my sanity in the extreme sport of dating and find out if I'll be brave/crazy enough to try it again

Sunday, July 10, 2011

The Demise of the Dog Whisperer

No, the television show isn’t being cancelled.  I also thought of titling this post “Elvis Has Left the Building” or “I Give Up.”  For those of you who remember back 100 years ago when I first discussed the “Dog Whisperer” aka DW, you may we wondering what happened there.  I know some friends were torn as while they wanted things to work out for me, they also wanted to hear more exciting extreme dating stories.  I hadn’t provided any updates in a while as I didn’t want to jinx it, but from the title you can pretty much see that was all for naught.

For the full story on him, check out Stalking the DogWhisperer and Dorks Anonymous.  But basically, I developed a crazy crush on my neighbor.  Not just any neighbor but a neighbor whose house I can see from my own and so now I can torture myself by knowing if he’s home or not home or if someone is visiting him.  But yes, I developed this crush on DW, so named by my friend when we decided that I needed to ensnare him with my feminine wiles and that this would be known as “Mission: Dog Whisperer.” 
 

First on the agenda was training my dog not to hate his dog.  This took a little bit of work on my part as for some reason my faithful canine couldn’t stand the other dog.  It was insane – I gave mine treats and talked all sweet with him whenever we saw that damn dog and now, my dog thinks this dog is awesome and DW is like a paragon of men.
 

Then I started walking and talking with DW.  Nothing too exciting at first, despite the intrepid maneuvers of my friend who tried to assist me in my quest.  We would just walk around the block together and chat.  And it was great – we talked about everything.  Sometimes when we’d finished our walk we would just chat outside for a while, the dogs eventually laying down they were so tired or whining to go get fed. 
 

Wait, before the walks, there was the winter.  Yes, now I’m remembering correctly.  So in the fall and early winter we’d only chatted a few times but hadn’t really walked together.  Then we had one pretty crazy snow and DW helped me dig out my car and my neighbors.  I decided to thank him by delivering some home-baked chocolate chip cookies to his casa.  He was a little weird when I dropped them off but he later said he had fallen asleep on his couch and was a little out of it then.
 

Then we started walking together.  It was really…what’s the word? It was nice.  It was really nice to walk and chat with him.  And I started to like him even more.  He was in a band and played on a few different sports teams and he was close with his family.  I eventually determined that he didn’t seem to be dating anyone seriously and he talked about a few ex-girlfriends.  Around that point it was spring and I plucked up the courage to ask him if he wanted to sometime check out this restaurant we had been discussing and he said yes.  I was way too over-excited by this.  Especially because I was heading out of town pretty soon after our walk and we didn’t see each other again for a while. 
 

When we did see each other again on another walk, it came up that it had recently been my birthday.  We had been talking about work and I said I had been in training and while it was annoying, at least I got to see some of my old coworkers and friends and have dinner and drinks with them on my birthday.  He wished me a belated happy birthday and said we would have to figure out a time to go out.  Then a few days later, he showed up at my door with brownies.  Home-made crème de menthe brownies.  That he made.  For MY BIRTHDAY!!! I was sooooooo excited.  And they were really good brownies.  He came in and we talked for like two hours. It was awesome.  I was so super sure that he was into me.  Does that seem like a reasonable assumption?  I thought so then but now I don’t think it does.  Sigh.  Anyway, we talked for a long time and then he had to go as he was supposed to have dinner with his parents.  But we decided we would go out for dinner together the following Sunday.  And he even asked for my phone number in case we didn’t run into each other, so that we could figure out our plans.
 

As that Sunday approached, I have to say I became incredibly and insanely nervous.  I honestly don’t remember being as nervous for a date before – if it was a date.  When I hadn’t seen him by that Saturday, I texted him to see if we were still on and we made plans for dinner at 6pm.  I became even more anxious.  I must have tried on a dozen different outfits.  I called a friend and I was nearly hyperventilating I couldn’t figure out what to wear or how to act or anything.  This was highly odd as I have been on way too many dates to behave in this manner.  Usually I have a hard time working up any enthusiasm or sentiment other than certain dread. 


I managed to somehow dress myself and be ready by the time he knocked on my door.  That was when I realized I hadn’t warned him that in addition to my regular dog, I was dog-sitting – so he was a little ill-prepared for the sound of my dog and another very large dog hurtling themselves at the door and barking furiously at him.  I managed to pry them away from the door and fling myself out of it. 

He drove and the ride to the restaurant was a little awkward.  Normally we didn’t have a hard time talking but it was a little quiet.  When we got to the restaurant though, that all changed and it was more like it had been before.  The conversation just felt really easy and fun.  We talked for a while, had some drinks, and dinner and before I knew it, almost three hours had passed.  The bill came and when I reached for it, he brushed me aside and said he would take care of it.  We both said that we had fun and that we should go out again when we were both in town – he was going out of town the following weekend, and I was going on a mini-vacation with my sister and nephews after that.  Then he drove me back home and walked me to my door.
 

Here’s where I became less certain that we were actually on a date.  If you’ve seen my house you know that I have this really weird Charlie Brown type Christmas tree in my front yard, leaning out onto the sidewalk from my terraced garden.  When he walked me to my door he stood away from me with a tree limb in between us, such that if I were to attempt to make a move I would end up jamming a tree branch into my eye socket.  So we just said we had fun and said good night.  I saw him a few minutes later as I took the two beasts out for their last evening stroll and DW was out with his canine.  We chatted again briefly and then called it a night.
 

The next week we walked together again but no mention of the dinner or going out again. It was a pretty short walk though so I tried not to read too much into it.  That weekend he was out of town for most of the weekend and then I left for my vacation.  When I got back, I didn’t really see DW around.  I waited a week and then I decided I would text him to ask him out for that Friday.  He texted back something like “Got plans but thanks for offer” and then he pretty much fell into a black hole.  That was a month ago and I’ve only seen him a handful of times.  I’ve seen him at the gym (of course we go to the same gym – it’s not enough torture to just be able to see his house multiple times a day) and I’m pretty sure that he’s avoiding me.  When I said hi to him yesterday and asked him how he was he kind of brusquely said “good” and strode away. 
 

The result being that now I am torturing myself trying to figure out what the hell happened, or in darker moments asking myself what did I do wrong?  That and contemplating knocking him down and asking him/shouting at him “WHAT THE HELL?!!?!?” or egging his house or letting the air out of his tires. Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to do any of those things.  Mainly because I’m scared of what the answer would be if I did manage to force an answer out of him.  I’m mostly ok about it now except when I see him and it’s all strange and awful.   But it felt horrible the first couple of weeks – I really had allowed myself to hope and believe that this time was going to work out and to have that crushed out of me by my crush feels something akin to heartbreak.  No, I wasn’t in love with him – I recognize that I didn’t really know him all that well.  But I was desperately in love with the idea of just getting to be with someone who was actually nice and attractive and fun and a good, employed, dog-loving guy and who unbelievably seemed to dig me.  And this other thing, the reality of what has happened, just totally sucks. 
 

Thankfully when I was in the depths, I contacted my partner-in-crime in Mission DW and she came to the rescue with intense verbal barrages of his douchebaggery, alcoholic beverages, and sushi.  Plus we replayed the highlights/lowlights for her husband and he confirmed that DW had seemed to lead me on and he was in fact probably an evil bastard.  That helped arrest the spiral of misery before it got too melancholic to survive with any vestiges of dignity or self-respect.
 

Now the problem –other than the fact that DW’s house has not mysteriously been moved to another dimension—is that I don’t think I can bear to get back on those hideous dating sites and put myself out there again.  How much disappointment and insanity can one singleton take before she is put out of her misery?  Besides I’ve been on pretty much all of them at this point and none of them were so awesome as to make me want to run back to them.  For now I have to call it a night as I have to actually get in a real run tomorrow morning.  The dating decision dilemma will have to wait until another day.

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