At least guys are still asking me out.

Within five days of returning from a fortnight's holidays abroad last week, I had two dates with different men. Hooray for me!

The first date was with a man who just barely meets the old requirement that one can only date people half their age plus seven years. Still, he is very mature, intelligent, professional, easy company and not bad looking. He is one of these spontaneous, jump-in-feet-first kind of people, which sits a little unevenly with my careful, analytical personality, but hey, it could also be good for me to be around someone who takes chances.

He comes from a very conservative and repressive ethnic background, and occasionally he appeared to be forcing himself to break through some internal barrier to share personal information. His livewire personality and buttoned-down heritage seemed to be in uneasy tension. However, as I mentioned, he was intelligent, easy to talk to and engaging, and there did seem to be a mutual frisson of potential when we hugged and chastely kissed each other goodnight.

Spontaneous, jump-in-feet-first people have a tendency to declare things in the heat of one moment that dissipate in the cool of the next. So I'm trying to take his observations that I have a "beautiful smile" and "kissable lips" with a realistic mind. Still, it's nice to be admired, even if you suspect that the admiration is shallow and transient.

The second date was more problematic. I want to see him again, not because I think there's any romantic potential in the relationship, but because I'd like to finesse my psychological profiling. He was obsessed with controlling his identity, to the point of making me promise that I wouldn't talk about him to any of my friends. Not that I have a lot to talk about - getting simple social data like his living situation or his work was like trying to uncover an Egyptian tomb during a sandstorm. Despite this, he talked incessantly, leaving me little space to do anything other than smile and nod. Amateur psychologist that I am, I'd interpret this as bluffing behaviour - filling the conversation with white noise to cover the lack of anything real being said.

He'd complain about men misinterpreting his gaydar profile, and when I explained why they would have misinterpreted it (drawing on my own experience and a university degree in semantics and language signifiers), he didn't seem able to understand that tweaking the profile would be a good thing. I'm always delighted when people offer constructive advice on how to make my profile more appealing, but he seemed to feel that it would be an admission of failure on his part, or pandering to the failings of his readers.

I also wonder if this inflexibility explains why he listed himself as a pure top despite having some fairly swishy moments: he doesn't like letting another man in, literally or metaphorically. It's not so much a desire to be dominant and in control as a deep, fervent desire not to be open or vulnerable.

Oh well. They both seem eager enough for second dates, so we'll see where this goes in both cases.