A Rose By Any Other Name....Right?

When is a date just a date and not a DATE? 

Never having been real good at figuring shit out, I never know what I'm supposed to be doing or how I'm supposed to go about doing it?  I know.  You'd think that at 40....

Anyway

I used to ask people what the difference between paranoia and intuition was.  I mean...you get a feeling or a thought or even just a stirring and you can't help but wonder to yourself, "Am I just being paranoid or is this going to come back to bite me in the ass?"  And really, there's never any way of telling until it's too damn late and nothing has happened, leading you to look around warily to see who was paying enough attention to make you feel stupid, or something gigantic has happened that leads you to then berate, "I KNEW I should have listened to that voice in my head!"

That's kind of like this whole date thing is for me.

I've asked people what their opinion was...asked them about the point when a date goes from two friends out to dinner, movie, monster truck rally to a DATE where there is an expectation of SOME sort of touchy feely something.  Honestly, I've gotten a lot of strange looks...ones I've translated, in my head, to mean, "Can you really be that retarded?"  I've gotten a couple of, "You just know"s.  I've even gotten a few, "Who cares?!  You shouldn't be going out with another woman anyway!"  Oh yeah, and then there was the one, "Go, have fun; you can even use my apartment." 

:-|

Asking my mother the hypothetical (which we both know isn't hypothetical at all and are both fine pretending that it really is), her sage advice was to set boundaries before one even makes plans.  That way, while you don't ever really wind up knowing what might have been, you will end up knowing what will be. 

I hate my mother.

So.  What have I decided?  Did I take my mother's advice?  Someone else's? 

That's mighty nosy of you, wouldn't you say?

Perhaps someday, I will share.