This is Not Me Backsliding

The title says what it says because I think the post is going to convey the opposite.

I'm just frustrated, I think.  Like I was telling my friend this weekend (and I'm sure I've mentioned it here) I'm  upset with myself that it's taken me so much time to tiptoe out into the world of dating (gay or straight).  It's making me impatient.

Nothing is moving fast enough for me.  Not my therapy.  Not my own understanding of what I really want and desire.  Not my feeble attempts on online dating sites.

I exchanged exactly 2 messages with the guy I spoke about earlier.  His last message was, short, cryptic, and didn't really continue or start any type of a conversation (and the message before that was the one where he said my initial message pissed him off).  You can tell from my posts I'm not really a quiet person when I've got a computer keyboard between me and the other person, so having conversations a sentence at a time was annoying.  So I just wrote it off as him not being interested, because from that short exchange I knew that I sure wasn't.

So tonight I messaged someone else.  I thought it was kind of cute.  He lived in the same town my friend does too (which I thought was kind of cool).  I kept it pretty simple, but at the same time tried to make it longer then just a sentence.  I kind of wrote it as "if you respond great, if not OK" kind of thing.  Of course that's the way I'd want it to be, but in reality I was sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response.

I saw that he checked my profile, but he didn't respond back.  I couldn't blame him because I'm not sure I'd respond back to me.

I just don't like having to figure all this out.  I don't like the lost feeling I have when I try to write a message.  And I know I'm going to have the same feelings (or worse) should anything move to an actual face to face meeting.  I don't have the experience of other people my age who've been dating for 10 or 15 years.

I just have this feeling that I lost before I even started trying.  I missed my opportunity to find someone.

Maybe it's just that the online thing isn't for me, but then I have no idea how to do the old fashioned way at my age.  I'm thinking about asking my friend to take me to a gay bar/hangout over labor day weekend, but he's in a college town so there will probably be a lot of younger guys there just looking to hookup (and some of them may even get drunk enough to consider me).  I'm not really looking to just hook up.  One thing I do know is that doesn't really appeal to me (I'm not completely ruling out the possibility it could happen, but it's not high up on my list of things I want to do).

I also don't know of anyone I can really ask to fix me up.  I have a limited pool of friends to draw from, and I'm not wanting to discuss what's going on in my head with them right now.  Plus many of them are looking on their own, so I don't see that working out well.

There's a part of me that just wants to cry over it all.  I told myself a while ago not to get my hopes up, and never to expect to fall in love, and here I am almost 8 years later doing just that.  Back then I didn't think it would ever be possible, but now I think it may be, and I kick myself for writing it off.  It would have been easier to enter the dating world at 26 (although I would have been about 100+ lbs. heavier) then it is to try to  do it at 33.

OK.  So I let it out.  Yeah it's a broken record of some of the stuff I've written before (insecurities don't just vanish overnight).  I do feel better just getting things off my mind sometimes though, and that's one of the reasons I started doing this.