Loose

After a month of being electronically monogamous, I have once again started responding to messages, and even making first contacts.

I was thinking last night, as I drove, how important framing is.  Once I framed the relationship with the photographer as a short term one, it made that outcome inevitable (not that it is over yet, of course).

I still seem to have this notion that perfection is obtainable.  And yes, that means finding someone I think is perfect, and making her mine, to put it in a more creepy phrasing.

Smart, interesting, attractive, with no intolerable psychological issues.  Everyone has a flaw, it's just a matter of finding someone with flaws that don't matter to you, or that you can be the counter-weight for.

The photographer is a likable person with little sexual experience.  She and I have many of the same interests.  The alt-rock connection we have reminds me of D, without the baggage, for example, in that we share our favorite songs and expand each other's horizons.

But, and obviously there's a but, or perhaps a few.

She hasn't had much chance in her life to build a history of experiences, at least positive and/or sexual ones.  I would rather, it appears, be with a slut than with a virgin.

She lives one to one and half hours away.  Not insurmountable, and were I not so heavily involved with my kids and soccer activities, we could have perhaps been able to see each other more than once a week.

She's not quite as attractive to me in person as in her photographs, which is unusual, as in most cases everyone is more attractive in person than in pictures, but she is a photographer, so that's could have been predicted.  She's not unattractive, but once you've had that chemistry, and I have, one looks for it.  There's a threshold, and she's on it.

Conversations are fine, but not stimulating.  I read an article awhile back that compared human conversation to chimpanzee grooming rituals - both have the usefulness of building a relationship.  We talk, we form connections, but we'll still fall back on the weather every second call.  The closest we get to intellectual-level conversations is talking about sex, and the pattern there tends to be, "Ok, you must have done something different or risky." / "No, can't think of anything." / "Ok, here's an example from my life." / "Sounds fun.  I was once in a similar, but unhappy and depressing situation."

Sigh.

I will see her a second time this weekend, and I hold out some hope that the opportunity to be together physically (and I don't mean sexually) will buttress the bridge between us.

But I've already made my frame.