The Waiting Game

I’ve been kept rather busy recently – chatting via MSN and the phone – to a rather pleasant lady that “Winked” at me on Match.com a few weeks back. It’s been great fun chatting late on into the evenings on MSN and text messaging about complete nonsense. So it was only natural after a conversation on the phone that we decided to meet.

Unfortunately, work gets in the way of most things – plus she lives about an hour away - but these are just small problems to overcome as we search for our soul mate. And they were, and we managed to meet up at a shopping centre near Manchester on one of her days off. As it was, she was there with her family and she arranged to slip away for an hour.

They say the camera never lies, but I’d care to disagree, because I only just managed to spot her at our meeting point – mainly because she looked like she was waiting for someone. She told me that her hair had grown a bit since her profile picture was taken, but nothing could prepare me for the utterly stunning woman stood in front of me. She then invited me to peck her on her perfect cheek.

In the lull in her shopping we sat down to chat over coffee and I started up my body language scanning mode to see what the signals were. There was a bit of hair playing, but no hand touching, and there were no breaks in the conversation. She has been hurt before, and I suspect she was being a little guarded, but she talked about her two kids and even showed me a picture of one of them. I’m not sure whether it was just general chit-chat, or if she was judging my response to them, but I’ve never been shown family photographs before.

But our lovely time together was soon up and she had to get back to her family. So after saying our goodbyes and, along with another peck on the cheek, she disappeared back into the late night shopping throng.

This is usually the point where I get some lame excuse and end up back on the Match.com scrap heap and questioning my subscription. So I made sure that I sent her a text message to thank her and to say how nice it was to meet up. I got one back saying the same things too. There was no MSN chat that night though.

So I’m now in my worrying stage. I don’t want to keep pestering her with phone calls or text messages but, because she is currently working weekends and she has her girlie nights out on a Friday and Saturday, I won’t now hear from her until Sunday evening. As a result, I’m now on pins wondering how – of even if – our MSN conversation will go.

I’ve already prepared myself for the worse, but did she like me? Would she want to meet again? Or will she simply go cold and uninterested? I’m hoping not because, hand on heart, I believe there’s something there this time, but these flipping butterflies in my stomach and the endless supply of scenarios playing over and over in my mind is really starting to bug me.

It’s the waiting game – and it’s the bit I hate the most.