Half of the Time We're Gone But We Don't Know Where and We Don't Know Here

What I said to him:

So, even though I think it's really your turn to initiate this discussion, I'm already tired of being annoyed and passive-aggressive about it. Do you know that you're giving me the impression that you want us to be more than just friends? I talk to you, who I didn't know that well before I moved, more than I talk to people I've been friends with for 10 years, and I love talking to you, but I'm becoming unpleasantly confused. I know we already had a similar discussion, which is why I hate myself for bringing this up again, and you said you had a girlfriend, and I haven't heard that that has changed, but six months have passed since then and we seem to keep getting closer. If you genuinely aren't interested in being anything more than friends, then I think we need to take a step back here so you can evaluate how to bring the way you're acting in line with the way you're feeling (and so I can see if [Don Juan de Morocco] is still available). If you do have some more-than-friendly feelings, then I wish you would tell me so we can talk about it (and by that, I obviously mean so we can make out).

What he said to me:

I really have enjoyed getting to know you, mostly over email since you left [my former city]. You are wildly funny, a beautiful person, very insightful and have a unique perspective on life. Which is why I've gotten so drawn into emailing with you regularly, more so than people I've known my whole life, even though we didn't really know each other well before you left [my previous employer]. But I'm sorry that our conversations gave you the wrong impression and/or left you feeling confused. I do have a girlfriend and have viewed our closeness as friendship. Our friendship is great and I enjoy it tremendously, but I understand that we each need to treat it in a way that's best for ourselves. I'm not sure what the end result of this email should be, but I did want to be honest with you.

Love Will Be the Death of Me, Love is So Fickle, It Starts with a Flood and Ends With a Trickle

I decided I had to respond to Don Juan de Morocco's inquiry about applying for a visa to come here so we could be together. I didn't want to, but since I initiated contact with him, I felt responsible for his feelings to some degree. In addition to that, I at least try to treat others the way I want to be treated, and I would not want to be ignored.

The email I sent was perhaps not as strongly worded as it could have been, but I told him that I don't want him to come here just for me, even though it would be fun to see him. I suggested we see how things go and talk about it later. His response made me feel bad initially and then, as I considered it further, confused me. He said that, basically, he got the message that I didn't want to be with him (the part that made me feel bad, even though it is true), but that he didn't understand why I would say that he's only coming here to be with me and that he can just get a business visa instead. I would have to say that I thought he was only coming here to be with me because...those were his exact words. So, now I'm not sure whether I need to have some mild concerns that he's just going to turn up at my work.

I'm Sorry, I Can't, Don't Hate Me

Me: Part of me just wants to go ahead and marry [Don Juan de Morocco].

Mom: That part of you needs to shut the fuck up.

I'm still stymied on what to do about Don Juan de Morocco, so I decided to distract myself by going to see Sex and the City. I hadn't initially wanted to see the movie because I had serious problems with how ridiculous it is that Carrie and Big end up together when they are so clearly wrong for each other. ("Reformation of a cad" is one of my least favorite themes in film, TV and movies.) However, in the midst of all my blubbering, I came away with something from the movie that I think I can apply to my own life. In one scene, Carrie and Miranda take food from Pret a Manger (I love to eat there) to eat in Central Park and discuss Miranda and Steve's progress in couple's therapy. The therapist has forbidden Miranda and Steve from having any communication with each other for two weeks at the end of which, they have to turn up at a predetermined meeting place and leave the past behind if they still want to be together. Miranda, as she talks to Carrie, is agonizing over what she wants to do and whether she can show up to meet Steve at the appointed time and says she has a lot to think about. Carrie, in essence, corrects her by saying she has a lot to feel about. Carrie reminds Miranda that, as a lawyer, she can argue both sides of any argument but that she's ultimately going to have to follow her heart. Oh, Carrie. It's like you're talking right to me, girl.

In my own situation, my instincts with respect to Don Juan de Morocco are not to trust him. My heart says no, but my mind is trying to argue both sides. I was talking to Shorty, a friend of mine I met on the trip who accompanied Don Juan de Morocco and me on our date, last night about this issue. Shorty hated Don Juan de Morocco, but now that we're back in the U.S., she feels more sympathy for him, as do I. He's a young, well-educated, intelligent man in a country not exactly awash with opportunity. It's not hard to imagine why he might lock on to a woman that he likes from a first world country and try to leverage a mutual attraction into a ticket to a better life. I rarely think of myself as patriotic, but in thinking about Don Juan de Morocco's unfortunate and unfair situation, I have never felt luckier to be born in the United States. I don't think Don Juan de Morocco is a bad person or that he doesn't actually have fond feelings for me, and I don't fault him for wanting to take advantage of his window of youth and hotness to take a shot at better opportunities abroad (it is telling, in my opinion, that his previous girlfriend was British and that his Facebook friends are almost all women from first world countries), but that doesn't mean that I want to be the stepping stone he uses to get to the life he wants and probably deserves. I don't think that would be the life that I deserve.

Considering how little time I spent with Don Juan de Morocco, I have spent a lot of time thinking about him and I think he's changed me more in one meeting than other men have in far longer periods of time. He reminded me that I am not invisible to the opposite sex, and he made me feel good about myself. He also made me realize that I'm not as desperate as I feared I was, because I don't want to marry him even though I think I probably could. I was worried that my heart had turned into a cynical corn husk, but maybe there is still a little bit of romance pumping through there after all because I'm not ready to give up on the idea of meeting someone who is genuinely as excited about me as Don Juan de Morocco says he is and about whom I feel the same way.

Shorty asked me if I was sure that I didn't want to be with Don Juan de Morocco, and I am.

On the Boats and On the Planes, They're Coming to America

I heard back from Don Juan de Morocco, contrary to what I thought would happen. (This was also contrary to what my mom thought would happen, and she and I got into a big fight over how I was ruining a nice vacation memory for myself by pushing it too far. If only she were right.) He says he's filling out visa paperwork to come here to visit me so we can be together. (By "visit," I suspect he means "live indefinitely" not "hang out for a weekend.") I am in a state of sheer, unbridled panic. When I emailed him, I thought that if I received a response at all, it would be as colorless as my initial email and give me an update on how he has been doing since I left. As Lisa Loeb would say, "This is not that. I think that I'm throwing but I'm thrown."

Say What You Want to Satisfy Yourself But You Only Want What Everybody Else Says You Should Want

I decided to email Don Juan de Morocco. It was a two sentence email basically saying that I was sitting in a boring meeting and wondered what he was up to.

I agonized for days (as you may have noticed) over whether to email him at all and eventually deconstructed my feelings into what became yesterday's post. I have to say, it's a damn shame that Don Juan de Morocco doesn't live in my hometown because a relationship based principally on physical attraction would be a welcome change from my current life. (Maria von Trapp got more action before she left the convent. Climb ev'ry mountain indeed.) But as I hemmed and hawed and tried to talk myself out of emailing him, I finally thought, "Fuck it. Why not?"

Why not? I mean, it's obvious that I over-analyze everything. I have a blog, which is a sure sign of an overly analytical mind. In one way, I'm glad that I think about things because it's important to understand why I do what I do so I can change or keep habits as is helpful and appropriate for my goals in life. In another way, I'd like to become a little bit more impulsive because people who live in the moment always appear to me to be having more fun. I decided that it was sending an email, not getting a tattoo and that I obviously wanted to do it since I had considered it for several days and still hadn't put it out of my mind.

That being said, I don't really think I'm going to hear back from him. I'm mostly okay with that. Obviously, I'd like him to continue his unabashed fawning, but the actions I'm taking are more about me than him.

I Can't Forget the Glamor, Your Eyes Held a Tender Light

Having not heard from Don Juan de Morocco since we friended each other on Facebook, I surmise that I am not going to. This bothers and does not bother me in equal measure.

On the one hand, the relationship is not a runner. I believe that it is possible to fall in love with someone almost instantly; most people I know who feel they have met "the one" say they knew within a date or two. I also don't think it's necessarily an impediment to falling in love that two people be from different countries, cultures, religions. So, it was possible for Don Juan de Morocco and I to fall in love, but we didn't. I didn't, anyway, and I suspect he feels likewise. That said, I know he's someone I'll always think of from time to time with fondness because he was so refreshingly interested in me. The stumbling blocks to our having a relationship (the aforementioned differences of country, culture and religion) are not obstacles that I have ever faced in any serious way. The stumbling block I usually face -- the "he's just not that into you" problem best exemplified by my relationship with The Only Living Boy in New York -- was wonderfully absent. Don Juan de Morocco made me feel beautiful and chosen and he showed me a good time, and I love him for that, even if I didn't fall in love with him.

On the other hand, the exhilaration I felt at Don Juan de Morocco's locking onto me like a cruise missile is not a sensation easily forgotten or set aside. It is emotional crack, and I would very much like to continue feeling the same high over and over again. I forgot (or never knew) that dating could be fun and uplifting rather than a campaign of blitzkrieg for the self-esteem. For that reason, I can't seem to tie a bow around the Don Juan de Morocco experience and put it on a shelf.

I know that Don Juan de Morocco and I could never have a long-term relationship because of one simple thing: conversation. As an avid collector of "how we met" stories, I can state with some authority that a common thread in virtually all of them is that the couple said they just loved talking to each other and felt like they could continue their conversation for hours. I was really done talking to Don Juan de Morocco after about an hour. It's not that he is dumb or boring -- quite the contrary -- but we just didn't have a strong connection on that level. Our connection was more at the physical level. There are all kind of relationships out there, and I would not characterize any of them as "good" or "bad," but I will say that I am looking to connect at a mental and emotional level as much as or more than at a physical level.

Unfortunately, the man with whom I feel the strongest emotional connection and to whom I never seem to run out of things to say is The Only Living Boy in New York, and he is endlessly frustrating. I, who never think anyone likes her, know that The Only Living Boy in New York likes me and has liked me since we met. I also know that I told him at Christmas that I like(d) him, and he said that he and his girlfriend had been together for over a year, that things were going well, and that (in so many words) he did not intend to chuck her. My sneaking suspicion is that his relationship with his girlfriend is going to end (I have no idea what kind of person she is, but I am certain that she has "he's just not that into you" problems with him), and we are headed inexorably toward revisiting the issue of our being together. Part of me craves that moment, and part of me dreads it because part of me thinks uncynically that we are meant to be together and part of me, while still believing we are meant to be, wants to wring his neck because he should have broken up with his unsatisfactory girlfriend as soon as I told him how I felt. I love him (though I am not saying that I am in love with him, not exactly), but I am going to be a little bit annoyed if my fate is to marry an emotional coward. If he can't take the comparatively tiny chance of breaking up with a girl he's patently not that excited about to pursue an enticing alternative, what does that say about the chances he'll be prepared to take in the future? Idiot.

The ideal would be to combine Don Juan de Morocco and The Only Living Boy in New York into some kind of superman. So far, we have not found the science.

Do I Attract You? Do I Repulse You, With my Queasy Smile?

So, Don Juan de Morocco confirmed me as his friend on Facebook, but he didn't respond to my brief message to him regarding my safe return home. He also seems to have a large proportion of female friends, at least one of whom refers to him by a vomit-inducing diminutive version of his name. I'm disappointed on both counts, even though both were what I expected. Given that we didn't seem to have hit a conversational geyser on our one date, our prospects for being good pen pals are bleak. Again, I am disappointed but unsurprised.

Am I Too Dirty? Am I Too Flirty? Do I Like What You Like?

So, continuing my tales of what went on in Morocco...I kind of met someone there. Let's call him Don Juan de Morocco. Don Juan de Morocco works two jobs, one of which is at the carpet store where I met him, and has a masters degree in psychology. When we met at the carpet store, I looked like the wreck of the Hesperus, but he still zoomed in on me. He was chatting me up while he showed my married friends and me around the weaving area and the view over the city, and he asked me if I have a boyfriend. Since I thought he was smoking hot and rocking the body karate (we were all invited to the guns show), I admitted that I do not. He said, "The men in your country have no eyes." Swoon. He tried to get me to have dinner with him, but I said that I couldn't because I was obligated to have dinner with my tour group. He wanted to give me his contact information anyway, and while he was off fetching one of his business cards, my married friends urged me to give him the address to our hotel and suggest meeting for coffee or tea after dinner. He agreed to meet me at 11 that night. We spent the rest of the group's time in the carpet store chatting. He even asked me how many kids I want.

It occurred to me after setting up this date that it might not be the smartest idea in the world to go off late at night by myself in a strange city where I don't really speak the language with a man I've only just met. Occasionally, I use my brain. So, I invited my married friends and my other friend to tag along and keep me from being dragged along to the raperie. My tour guide was not so thrilled about my going out with a local, which I understand because if I disappear like that poor Natalie Holloway girl in Aruba, he's going to be the one to explain to my furious mother and the international media that he let me go because I'm a grown up and he couldn't physically restrain me. He visibly brightened when I told him that I intended to bring along chaperones.

The date was a mixed bag, but I had a great time. At the carpet store, we had been chatting pretty casually despite obviously being into each other, but he came on stronger when we grabbed a drink. I had spruced myself up as much as I could considering that I hadn't brought anything appropriate for a date, and he told me I looked beautiful, which was very nice to hear. He also wasn't any too amused that I brought my friends along. At one level, I understand his disappointment but at another level, he ought to at least make an effort to understand that you don't develop enough trust in a person to be certain he won't date rape you or abandon you late at night in a sketchy part of an unfamiliar city after knowing him less than one hour. My friends sat at a different table, so we had some privacy.

He gave me a lot of compliments during the date, which I enjoyed. Who doesn't like to hear that she has beautiful eyes and a beautiful smile? It's something I never hear except from my mom, so it was really nice to hear it from a hot guy. He also told me that he wants to be in a serious relationship, and that he really likes me and that he wants me to allow him to love me (whatever that means). That was also nice to hear. I have struggled for the past decade with the issue of always being the pursuer, so it was refreshing to be pursued, especially by someone much hotter than the guys I've been chasing around for ten years.

There were also things that I didn't like so much about the date. Mainly, there was a lot of talk about s-e-x. It wasn't dirty talk exactly but rather puns on the words "come" and "eating" and a soliloquy (by him) on the difference between having sex and making love. (Frankly, the only person I want to hear say "making love" is Sami Brady.) I am prudish when it comes to talking about sex. Even if friends want to tell me a story that involves a sexual escapade, I like them to plow through (no pun intended) the sex part as quickly as possible and get to the part about the emotions so I can give advice. He also laid it on pretty thick with a couple of stories that seemed a little dubious. Namely, he supports his parents and younger siblings financially (I tended to believe this part, and I have heard that it is actually somewhat common in Morocco for this to happen, especially given the country's high rate of unemployment) and that his last serious relationship ended two years ago when the woman died in a car accident. My friends did not believe his stories at all, for the record, and thought he was way too smooth.

I don't know what to think. He invited me back to his apartment, but he didn't push the issue when I declined. He wanted me to promise him that I would come back to Morocco to visit him and suggested that we could keep in touch via Facebook, instant messenging, Skype, and so forth. We discussed whether he would ever move to the United States (yes, if he met the right person, which is a fair enough answer), and whether he would want me to convert to Islam (he said I didn't have to but that he would be my slave if I did). We also discussed having kids (he wants two or three compared to my none and volunteered to take care of the kids under the belief that I would eventually grow to love our children). Did I mention this date took place in under an hour?

The other thing that I felt ambivalent about was the fact that he kissed me at the restaurant twice. We were seated outside, in front of Allah and the world. In Morocco, public displays of affection between the sexes are just not on. Men are more affectionate with other men than they are here and women can be affectionate with other women, but there is no public crossing of the gender line really. He's a good kisser, so I liked that part, but I felt a little uncomfortable about it as well because I doubt he would have done that if I were a girl from his own country. So, in that sense, I felt a little bit disrespected even though he asked my permission before kissing me. That doesn't make much sense, but even though I wanted it to happen, I felt like he should treat me the same way he would treat a girl from Morocco.

Anyway, we ended the evening with his letting me know that he doesn't have any of my contact information and I have all of his, so I should get in touch. My friends were happy for me that I enjoyed my evening, but they thought he was way too slick and disingenuous and that all he wanted was s-e-x. I wasn't so sure one way or the other what his deal was. It was kind of telling that I didn't really feel that excited about continuing the conversation beyond the brief period of time we had together -- when I hear "how we met" stories from couples I think are good together, there is always a component of wanting to talk to each other for hours and hours.

Given my confusion, I decided to invite him to be my friend on Facebook. It's a non-threatening way to get to know someone. You can restrict how much information the person gets about you while still having email and even chat access to him. He has yet to approve my friend request, so I'm coming around to the idea that my friends might have been right about his unsavory intentions. I'm not too invested in the situation, so if he doesn't want to be my Facebook friend, I'm not too torn up about it. It still makes for a great story, and it really kicked my self-esteem up a notch to have someone hot and smart showering me with compliments and putting forth such effort, even if the effort was only to get me to sleep with him. It gave me hope that one day, someone more appropriate and accessible might come along and see those same things and put in that kind of effort to win me over.