I had a date Thursday night.

(Wooohooo! Alert the media!!)

I met my date here on OKC, and again, OKC's matching system was validated for me. He and I are an 80% match, and the conversation was wide-ranging and interesting. We discovered we had even more in common than we knew; and also discovered a few dissimilarities. All in all, a great experience.

(Which, odds are, we won't repeat anytime soon. While he could be the right man, now is not the right time because of various things happening in his life. *Sigh*.)

Anyway.

One of the things we talked about was barricades...those layers of previous hurts, disappointments, misunderstandings, and other negative experiences that create hard candy shells around our hearts.

My date's barricades were about heart-high...I noticed them immediately when we met. It was like a scene from that old show Home Improvement. My date was like Wilson, the next-door neighbor who's always obscured by a fence. You can interact with him, but you never get the whole picture. Or enough of a picture to fully connect.

Now, this isn't to say that I don't have my own barricades, of course. I've had some relatively horrific experiences with men, dating, relationships, etc. And the subconscious is nothing if not a generalist. If one man lied to me, all men are liars. If one man cheated on me, all men are pigs. If one man hit me, all men are dangerous. Etc., etc. (Isn't it interesting how we generalize the bad things, not the good things? One man was wonderful and caring, so all men are wonderful and caring...)

So for me, getting to know someone new is always a balancing act. There's the appropriate level of paranoia a single woman should have when meeting someone new. And then there's the inappropriate paranoia generated by the reptile brain and past experience.

The tough thing is telling the difference.

One of the great things about the date was that the man and I had a pretty interesting discussion about our respective barricades. Self-awareness is hot. :)

Seeing someone else's barricades up close gave me more of an awareness of my own. It has also set me to thinking about my own "must-haves" in a relationship and in a partner. It's possible that I sometimes use my process to hide behind, instead of to narrow the field to a man who's a great match.

I'll have to do more thinking on that.