Repairing my date-dar.

Can someone help me hone my date-dar? Most people need gaydar. I think I'm OK there. I need date-dar. I can't tell when people are flirting with me until it's too late. Or I think they're flirting with me, and they're not.

It causes awkwardness. And, in the cases where I'm attracted to someone but the closest that I can ever get to them is fantasy, it causes callouses in my hands.

So I need to actually date more. But, to do that, I need to hone my date-dar so that I can start going out with people I'm attracted to who are additionally attracted to me.

In some cases, I go out with people I'm not attracted to ... just because they're attracted to me. Usually, this is a frustrating disaster.

In other cases, people are flirting with me seriously, and I think they're kidding. Or people are joking with me, and I think they're serious.

Midway through an actual date once with Crocker, I asked him if he thought we were on a date. He said yes, and then I went from just acting like we were friends and being relaxed to being sorta pent-up and tense.

I feel like I should know if a date is a date before I go on it.

Sometimes, I can't tell if my date was a date until I pick his underwear up off my floor the next morning. And, seriously, I think that's a bad way to figure it out.

I don't know how to fix all this.

Marley was talking to me about it a couple days ago, asking me to define whether me going to coffee with Mark was a "date" or not.

I told her that I didn't know, so I put it in the "non-date" date category, the category where I put my outing with Nick the Cute Waiter.

That's where you're going out to a place with someone that you technically could date, doing date-things ... but it's not a date because romance, though hypothetically possible, is not the intention. Hence, I suppose all my first initial outings with gay friends that I barely know are "non-dates" or "maybe-dates."

It isn't until after I've been on them that I know whether they're dates or not. (In both Mark and Nick's cases, they're both cute, charming and smart. But neither event was a date.)

Marley told me that I was making things too complicated ... again. It's a date. Or it's not.

I prefer to keep an open mind.