Funny as this may sound

Funny as this may sound
I had my first online date today.

(I guess I had just done all my
Dating the old fashioned way before...
Plus on hiatus during my ten-year marriage...)

But what I am struggling with
Is the notion that
You can unmeet someone
After you've met them.

She told me she'd decline to see me,
I was okay with that.
Then when she left
She walked to the lobby (of the hotel)
And I instinctively followed.

You see, early in our meeting
(In the bar of the Gladstone)
I had talked shop
And went on on ideas,
And she talked about her business.
Then she declined me.
THEN we started to click...
When I showed her my Police hoodie,
From a concert I saw of them.
She started talking about Sting,
And then the ice melted.

But she had declined,
So she left,
And I instinctively followed,
As if she were a friend.

Because I felt she was.

But there was obviously something
I didn't get.
She started to look scared,
Quickly,
Then suggested I go to the washroom.
Well I had to anyway...
So I shook her hand and we parted.

But only then did I realize I must've scared her.
And it was depressing for hours afterward.

But what I wondered now is
How do we make sense of this?
Human relatedness
And community
Is built on meetings with others
And that relationship.
If we begin to see that relatedness
As mechanical and modular -
Thanks to this Internet age of ours -
If we begin to believe that
We can control relatedness like that -
Then we start to engage in a kind of
Strange insanity.
An idea that we can "unmeet" others.
We start to see humans through a
Very functional lense,
But in a stranger way:
No longer just functional as in
Doctor, baker, lawyer, soldier, what have you,
But functional now in
This closer sense.

You can't unmeet someone.
Once you've met them,
You have a relationship.
You have a community of some sort.
You might see them only months later,
But there it is.

Why fear it?

Ah... Maybe this is just
Sour grapes...

But I am still troubled though
By this mechanical vision...
This reduction of human beings
In relatedness
To mechanical parts we attach
Or detached
To or from ourselves
At whim.

--- 18 May 2013