A couple of weeks ago, my roommate's fiancé was in town, visiting from North Carolina. I had met this girl previously, and if I had to guess, I'd say I didn't make a good first impression. It was a Friday night, I was still unemployed, and I was a few beers deep. I don't usually drink, so a few beers turns me into a certifiable idiot. Not that I need the beer to get to that point.

So now when I enter the common areas of the house and she's around, I get this icy stare from her. She's so clearly dripping with this animosity towards me, like "You live with my husband-to-be, and you're a loser, so I hate you for it." It's odd to me that anyone could get to that point about another human being. I have no reason not to like her, so I just shrug off her stares and go about my day.

They only recently became engaged; the wedding is in a year. I wake up one morning and they're out in the kitchen arguing about something wedding-related. This is tedious. I'm four years old again and my parents are verbally sparring about some bullshit. So I put my pillow on my head and went back to sleep.

Now, you know how your brain will take the noise from the real world and construct some sort of dream around it? The sounds of their arguing about their wedding wafted into my dreams like some kind of virus. I live in a house in Palo Alto, in a shared living arrangement. Here's the dream that my idiot brain decided to concoct: in my dream, I was living in a house in Palo Alto, but different than the one I'm currently living in, and in the dream, my roommate is arguing with his fiancé about their wedding, and I'm sitting in my room trying to ignore it.

Massive points for creativity to the gray matter between my ears. This is like one of those times you fall asleep hoping for a sexy dream with an attractive person, but you just end up having a dream in which you masturbate. Maybe it's a blessing when your dreams mirror reality so closely, because they don't set you up for disappointment when you awake the next morning.

A few months ago, I ventured into the realm of online dating. The Internet is everywhere, in every aspect of our lives; anyone who argues differently is probably some kind of religious freak. So the notion that dating is something that should never occur online seems terribly passé. To me, it's one more thing to experience in this wide, stupid world we live in, so I had no reason not to dip my toes into the water.

To be honest, the experience was an immensely positive one, overall. I attribute this to two things:

1. I was honest as I could be about who I am in my profiles. I didn't paint myself as anything I'm not.
2. I didn't approach any situation with unrealistic expectations. By that, I mean I never had any expectations whatsoever.

It was actually a pretty good way for me to re-enter the dating world, if for no other reason than to be reminded of what it's like. It's different than when I was in college; when you're 20, you can hold out some hope that when you start dating someone, it might lead someplace new and magical. Nope. I have trouble getting excited about dating any person these days because I know too much about what's on the other side. Cuddling is nice, but best case scenario, if things play out the way you might hope for long-term, you have to impress her, not just once but continually, and you have to impress her friends, impress her family, make an effort on every major holiday, make an effort every time a baby pops out of someone in her life, attend weddings of people she knows, have those awkward conversations about what you're going to eat every damned night, etc etc. I quickly learned that getting rejected was the best possible outcome, because you don't end up on the slippery slope to enmeshment, but you can still tell yourself, "Hey, at least I'm trying!"

I'm not saying having to do these things is bad; truth be told, if you're going to date, I think you have to be honest about this possibly being a part of the deal, at least eventually. I've just done all of these way too damned much over the last decade, and if I tried to do them again now, I'd be forcing it. It would be dishonest of me to say that I want any of these things. Being a halfway decent guy in a committed relationship just sounds exhausting. So I deleted my online dating accounts last week. Lesson learned; I met a few very nice people and had some nice pen pals online.

I tried it because I'm staring down the next few decades of my life without any kind of plan for them. I don't care who you are, looking at the world, as screwed up as it is, and trying to figure your place in it, is always a freaky proposition.