Blog Crawl Day 2: Simone Grant Writes Right Here!

I am so totally stoked to host guest blogger Simone Grant today for day two of the Single Women Rule blog crawl for National Singles Week. Simone writes prolifically over at Sex Lies and Dating in the City and I suggest that when you're done reading here, you crawl on over there to read more of her stories about single life.

Here is what Simone has to say:

I'm so honored to be taking part in this blogcrawl, and especially so to be guest blogging on Singlutionary as I've been a fan of this site for a while now.

I write primarily about dating and relationships (with the distinctive point of view of a 39-year-old happily single woman) and so it seems sensible for me to write about that here.  More specifically I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of my first date after a long dry spell.  

It was about a decade ago.  I was very focused on work and at a stage in my career where I had to work an unhealthy amount of hours a week.  At one point I caught pneumonia and had to spend several weeks home on bed rest to recuperate (I was in pretty bad shape by the time I finally dragged myself to the doctor).  My home computer at the time was pretty crappy and so the organization I worked for sent me a laptop via messenger.  I was sick as a dog, but they couldn't survive without me.

Anyway, it had been a couple of years since my last actual date.  And just before getting sick I'd been talking with friends about trying online dating.  So one of the first things I did when I got well enough to sit up for an extended period of time was sign up for the earliest iteration of match.com (I think it was match).  I figured why not take advantage of the fancy laptop? Back then there were very few people posting their pictures online.  All we had to go by were people's descriptions of themselves, which was pretty great in someways.

Within a few weeks I'd started and stopped communicating with a few different guys and had progressed to speaking on the phone with one man in particular.  And then he asked me out on a date but I was still too sick to go out.  My doctor kept extending the time I had to stay in (my own fault, I cheated and went into work too soon and ended up in the emergency room...).

He had no reason to believe I was lying.  I sounded awful.  So he offered to come by my apartment to bring me soup and keep me company one night after work.  And, for some demented reason, I said yes.  

I have no idea what got into me.  My first date in a couple of years was with a man I'd never met, had never seen a picture of, who was coming to my studio where I lived alone while I was too weak to defend myself.  Not to mention that I was still sick and looked sick.  But no matter, I was excited about the prospect of a date.  

And it was, for all of the weirdness, a good date.  He was a gentleman and handsome to boot.  And we ended up seeing each other for a while after that.  A few months.  Until we got the chance to get to know one another a lot better and then learned how utterly different and unsuitable we were for one another.

Anyway, I think of that story every once in a while.  Every time someone is telling me about their dating drought/how they haven't been on a date in years and don't know how to start again. Or when I hear people rant and rave about how all of the guys online are creeps.

What happened back then was an aberration.  I would never again invite a strange man to my home for a first date.  But I don't think that all the guys out there are dangerous.  I'd just rather be safe than sorry.  

And more importantly, there was no lesson to be learned about how I got back into dating.  I decided I wanted to do it and I did it.  I'd heard of online dating and it sounded like a pretty low risk proposition so I figured why not.    Then I went from not dating in a couple of years to dating a perfectly nice man.  And then more perfectly nice.  No magic.  Just a decision to do it.  Sounds easy, because it is.