Do Right Woman (Do Right Man)

Shockingly, after over a year of no interest on my part, I'm dating again. Or to be more exact, I've had a first date and a surprisingly pleasant second date (first dates are easy). Today.

And this is after a truly craptastic week. A neighbor complained at length about my kids. Up until now, I've had good relations with all of my neighbors, but I have a perpetually cranky person next door to me now who thinks that living in an apartment complex means that neighbors should be absolutely silent. It's not going well. And the neighbor didn't complain to me, but in a passive aggressive note to management. Ugh. I've given the girls a lecture or two about being considerate, but I hear my neighbors playing music, doing whatever, and I assume they can hear me.

Then I broke a crown, and have had some painful and annoying dental work.

Then I realized I had made a fairly large arithmetic error in my checkbook, and have very little money for the next three weeks.

So when I man I had met for coffee a few weeks ago asked if I would go hiking with him, I applied the Car Talk French Car rule to my life.* And it worked. I had a lovely hike with a pleasant man who seemed quite attracted to my middled-aged none-too-slim self. Which is weird, because I just haven't been interested of late, but I wanted to go on the hike, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. It was a middle of the day get together too, which takes the edge off. When the date is due to end at 3, you know no-one's expecting you to fall into bed.

Not that falling into bed is anything bad, with the right person (in Family Life class for Fifth Graders, that's the part where you say: "When a man and woman love each other very much *cough* . . ."). But I'm really not in the place I was in two and three years ago. I don't need the validation, and I expect that we'll maybe have a third date and then things will fizzle (as they most often do in the dating world). If they don't, good.

Yet a reasonably gentlemanly guy who likes hiking and has some basic snogging skills (really, many don't)? Nothing to sneeze at.

*The French Car rule is this: if you have a French car, you have enough misery in your life, so everything else goes well. Your job, your finances, your love life. Thus, my epically disastrous week is equivalent to owning a French Car. Even if the date were dreadfully bad, it would feel good in comparison.