I'm really in a mind to not try getting a boyfriend for a while. Dating is such a confusing affair!

So far this year, I dated this one guy, whom I met over a dating website. I don't multidate, like some people do. I like to concentrate on one objective, and I do trust that the other guy is doing the same.

We had many things in common, never ran out of conversation, have pretty similar outlooks on life. The fact that we are both bi-lingual French-English was a definite plus.

After meeting him for the first time, I was aware that he was not quite my type: a little too effeminate for my taste and way too gay-looking for my straight-looking/straight-acting personna. But we hit it off on so many intellectual levels that I decided to let things run their course and to continue the relationship. After all, I have been known to fall in love with a person who was not necessarily my type (i.e. a woman! ) and subsequently have 12 years of perfect happiness which only ended with her untimely death.

Also, I thought that maybe I was still a bit squeamish about living the gay lifestyle and that this guy, who is clearly much more confident about it than I am, could help me assert myself.

So I went into that relationship half-heartedly, but willing to give it a chance.

Recipe for disaster

I should have known: where were the stomach butterflies I should have felt every time I thought about him? Where was the urge to call him every hour? To buy him a gift? To suggest we go see a movie?

Then a few weeks ago he sent me a text saying that we needed to talk. And I thought "Huh hoh, he's going to complain, and rightly so, that I'm not giving 100% to this relationship, that I'm not committed enough, that I'm letting myself float about at the mercy of outside forces, like a ball at the top of a wave".

Well, he had something entirely different on his mind. He told me that he had meant to tell me before but was afraid of my reaction: he's HIV+. This is a story I told there. I think I reacted appropriately at the time, unwilling to crush him there and then. And frankly I really didn't feel like crushing his hopes. However, after talking about it with some GA friends, I came to realise the dangers he made me go through by not telling me, and also that he abused my trust. This was the catalyst, not the main reason, for our break-up. We met in a café recently and he asked me point-blank if I thought our relationship was going somewhere? My silence was much more eloquent than any word I could have said. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very good with words at all.

I'm giving dating a wide berth for a while...

.... unless that really cute guy that I met once....

Oh damn it!