Week Nine: Date Report. You be the Judge

Zilch. Nix. Donut. Nada. Nil. Naught. Zip. Diddlysquat. Not a single date. In giving Ultraman a serious chance, I stopped emailing or setting up dates with anyone. Unfortunately, the result is I have nothing going on during week nine.

I guess this means I have time to reflect on this whole crazy process. So first, I should say that although I liked Ultraman, I don’t really miss him. I felt disappointed when I told him things wouldn’t work out – but it's because I'm not in a relationship, not because I'm not in a relationship with him.

I’m thinking more and more that the whole “gut check” might be entirely the way to go, and I should just scrap that whole list I wrote in the beginning. As some people have pointed out (and correctly so) if I liked Ultraman a lot, I probably wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what he drove. And I don’t want someone who is a carbon copy of me. Upon reflection, I might have been using the whole values thing as an excuse because I just didn't like him enough. (although values are extremely important to me.)

I've definitely had some good comments/thoughts/suggestions from people. I appreciate the input! Here are just some of them:

"If you don't look forward to seeing someone, maybe you shouldn't be dating them"

"To me, making each other laugh, enjoying each other's company, respecting who the other person is as a person is HUGE"

The gut check – "Do you want to kiss him? Hug him? Shove your tongue down his throat?" may be more important than any of the other things

Respect is necessary, maybe more so than love

I need to be more up front with how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking

"You can tell a lot from a kiss"

"In the context of a committed relationship, it can be fair to ask someone to change their behavior out of respect for the other person's values. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to change their values to match your own"

"If you don't have good chemistry, even if you have the right number of cars and coffee cups, it's going to be hard to make it work"

I'm going to officially extend this whole three date a week thing until my birthday at the end of April. Maybe this will make up for weeks with not enough dates!