The tapping at my chamber door... only this and nothing more?

This is a rant.

Can someone fucking please explain this to me?

I see your profile. I drop a friendly note in your direction, you read my profile, and soon we're in this really creative, articulate banter. It's really nice. It's really good. We're relating, we're laughing, we're finding common ground on matters social, political, sexually conscious, and more.

"There's a part of me that wants to simply write a short note saying that I like you too much already," you write.

We arrange a date. We open up even further, Really Talk, and Listen. We discuss everything from social politics to raising children to our relationship war stories to my father the artist to your crazy exes. Just-some-wine on the pub patio turns into late lunch. I'm finding that I'm so distracted by how amazing you are, how truly cosmopolitan you are, how much I'm melting at the sound of your laugh that I actually ask you if you eat meat when we had just ordered a plateful of wings. We enjoy me making fun of myself after that brilliant move.

Late lunch turns into More Real Talking in the park. I am utterly floored with your sharp intelligence, the likes of which I haven't seen in years. You've written textbooks, for chrissakes. You've started your own fucking alternative school! And while the look on your face suggests to me that, ok, my background in kink may not be a place you'd be interested in going, the fact that your first response was to ask deconstructing questions about the why's and wherefore's behind my interests in it really twisted my brain in terrific directions.

Up comes the First Kiss.

"I so want to jump your bones right now," you say. The Second Kiss follows. But we've been out for much longer than either of us anticipated. Life beckons.

I suggest we leave something to look forward to. Your face tells me this was a Good Reply. You get on your bicycle, and I totally enjoy the sight of your round, pert behind under the sundress you're wearing as your leg swings over the frame and you settle on the seat. I have no doubt that it would smack firmly against my pelvis as I took you, hard and deep, from behind.

As much as I enjoyed your hair, as long and dense as the mane on a Peruvian paso. And this from a guy who fetishes shorthaired women. With your thick eyebrows, the black whispers at the nape of your neck, your hair told me what feral treats I might find under your navel, and in the back of my mind I imagined having opportunity to press my face against a rich, musky forest before curling my tongue around the round, red, thrumming, tender marble that I want you to have responding to me.

As you rode away, I realized that I had already become completely smitten with The Raven. That doesn't happen often.

...And then it had to come screeching to a halt.

Ok, you did say that you'd be away for a while. Fine. Ok, you did say that you've had some really, really bad "relationships" and you'd need to take your time. "I had trouble getting close to my cats," you said.

But, call me crazy, I didn't expect that meant you'd want to completely avoid contact after our date. No calling, no texting, maybe some emailing. ...Huh?

"Less is definitely more," you said.

Ok. So, I'm very much the support-my-partner type. Ok. So, yeah, if you Really Need This, I'm willing to help out. Uh, sure.

But, I gotta say this: there's a part of me that's wondering: what the fuck. You tell me that I'm the first guy you're interested in having a second date with after your last ten dates with dudes. Great, awesome, thank you, love to know it. But... was I wrong to tell you that, yeah, just maybe, I'd become smitten with you? I mean, isn't that, in the big picture, the desired goal? Is it possible that I somehow pushed you away because I decided that I Really Fucking Like You?

So, yeah, I'd still enjoy seeing you again. But, you know, it really sucked to have to suppress all that keen excitement that I was feeling the next day. Yeah, I am supportive, I'm doing it, but somehow that just didn't seem fucking fair.

Sometimes I think I'm too patient for my own good. I just don't get it. This one, I really just don't get.