And then there were two

Today I had every girl's dream date. Every girl with fibromyalgia, that is. J winks at me online. I write back. After the second email he asks me out and I say yes. He recommends places in driving distance and I write back and say I don't have a car, so he takes me up on my request to meet him at a place I can walk to.

Half an hour into the date he tells me that he's lost 80 pounds in the past 3 years, and he pulls out his driver's license as evidence of what he used to look like. He says he wants to try ice skating but is afraid he'd fall down. (He's 6'6" so it's not an unreasonable worry.) He is so open, so humble about his own health struggles, that I mention my fibromyalgia over my hot dog and root beer.

After our hour and a half meal he's not ready for the date to end, so he suggests a walk, which is exactly what I had wanted from a potential suitor, as evidenced in an earlier post. On the walk he asks me more information about fibromyalgia, and caringly makes sure we don't walk farther than I am comfortable with. He asks me if I have had trouble relationally because of my illness. I evade the question and don't tell him about K or about the surgery I had last summer. He respects my elusive answer and I respect him for being understanding enough to pose the question.

He walks me to a stream I've never seen and it's beautiful, peaceful. In fact, that would be a way to summarize our entire date. My friend teased me about my assertion that I would know whether I was attracted to J in the first 30 seconds of meeting him. Turns out, I was wrong. After a two-hour date I'm still on the fence. We say goodbye and within an hour he follows up with an email requesting my phone number. Sure, this is the way things started with K, but K followed up right after our date BEFORE he knew about the fibromyalgia. After I spilled the beans about my illness, he split like pea soup.

Now let's rewind a day. I spent last evening with my gay boys and the straight one I asked out by email on Valentine's Day. He's still traveling, but home for the weekend and invited me to a group gathering at a bar in the city. While J is quiet, D is loud. While J's eyes exude contemplation, D's are filled with excitement and fun. J and I took a walk by a stream in a sleepy town, and I met D on the gay hill after I took a picture on a stripper pole (though, according to one of my gay friends, the most innocent "pole picture" he has ever seen).

Now, I'm not the kind of girl who goes for players (though I do lust after them subjectively), and while it may sound like it from the description I've just given, D doesn't fit that category. He's loud, he's exciting, he's fun, but he's also, like J, a really sweet guy. Sure, he's a testosterone-y protector type who cracks jokes and likes to do damage to his liver when the time is right, but he's also a sweetheart whose eyes sparkle with genuine interest when he talks to me--and, most importantly, he's passed muster with my sweet gay boys who know him even better than I do.

J is ready to pursue something with a carless girl with fibromyalgia. But do I have to choose between the potential for passion and someone who wants to be with "fibromyalgic me"? Now I'm not saying I DON'T want to be with J. I like him more than I liked my ex-husband, and that's a step in the right direction. But J is safe, and for better or for worse, I've never gone for safe. Hopefully I'll have it all figured out by the time I need to make a decision. In the meantime, bring on the men!