The morning after [the first online date].

As those of you who've been reading the blog or eagerly following me on Twitter know (wait, what? you don't follow me on Twitter? Oh, you must fix that before we go on. Go here. Now.), I went on a date last night. The first fruit of my online dating labors. And a good looking fruit. Sort of like a ripe apple. But I digress.

I met this fellow on a small, new dating site--the kind that seems appealing because it's cool and it's quirky and the ratio of cute, normal looking dudes is slightly higher than on other sites, but is in reality so new and small still that the guy you recognize from work has now appeared 3 times in your matches.

So, I could tell you all about the date. But all I need to tell you for the purposes of the conundrum in which I now find myself is the following:

* We had a pretty good thing going over email before meeting. He'd write. I'd write longer. He'd write again. I'd write a novel. And so on and so forth.
* We have similar humor. Both on paper and in person. And that's saying a lot. How many times have we all met hysterical people [or so we thought] only to meet them in person and find out they've got Dead Face Syndrome (a very serious condition in which one's face is in a constant state of appearing constipated) or is, worse yet, just totally and utterly awkward. If the 'we' is 'me' in this query, than this has happened often.
* We had a good f-cking time on our date. Conversation flowed. Laughs were shared. Eye contact was made (I made sure of this with deep, long stares into his eyes that may have rightfully freaked him out). There were less than 5 stand-out awkward pauses (this is record breaking, really). And we discovered more things in common than 2 strangers generally discover in each other.
* The end of the date began just as it started--with a hug.

The conundrum is then of course--was there chemistry? Can a date be good without the romance being great? I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes. But even so, part deux of the conundrum--shouldn't we at least give it a second date to be absolutely, 100%, let's never say never, fair chance? Which leads right into part 3--why hasn't he called?!

I've always been a forward-thinking, independent woman of the 21st century. But, if for centuries before this one, the man courted the woman with some degree of success, maybe the 21st hasn't gotten everything quite right. And maybe I shouldn't have to be the first one to write post-date. And that's why I've given my texting thumbs a break today and steered clear of my date's initial in my phone's contact list. Cause no second date is bad. But being the loser in the game of post-first date chicken is worse. Much, much worser.