My "I'm new in town" story

This is the story of my second online date....

At the end of August 2008, I moved to Brighton for the first time. I have moved to Brighton twice now... I guess that I can't stay too far for too long from this city...

When I first arrived, I got a room for few days on Sussex campus, but soon I moved into a room that an Italian guy was subletting for the summer on the top of the pub Thomas Kemp in Kemptown...

The flat had three rooms, I was in the biggest one, another very quiet guy was subletting another one and a half- British half- Israeli guy was in last room next to mine.

For a brief period of time, the half-Brit-half-Israeli guy was the only person that I knew in Brighton.... I didn't know anyone here before I moved in so, soon I found myself hanging out with a 24 years-old, frustrated saxophonist, that fitted perfectly the stereotype of an early-twenties stoner: baggie clothes from his teens days as a skater, a general scruffy appearance from someone who has recently moved out of his parents house and still struggling to keep up with laundry duties and cleaning chores.

He had an incredible messy room that looked as if a hurricane had passed and had thrown all his belongings on the  floor. He was really funny, one day, I saw him staring at a painting from the Italian guy that was on the wall for about half an hour because he was super stoned...

Another day, he made an attempt to cook me an uneatable English baked potato with beans while he was high as hell as a payment from all of the food that he was stealing from my fridge on his regular night munchies... He was very funny and nice, but after hanging out with him for a couple of days, I realized that I needed to meet some new people...

I went back to my account on GaydarGirls that I hadn't opened since my first online dating story. I was determined to expand my social circle in Brighton that at that moment consisted only on a very stoned guy that enjoyed to play the saxophone at 4am in the morning since he had no concept of time whatsoever due to the fact that he was constantly stoned.....

I send a couple of messages to few girls that seem nice and approachable on the site. All of the messages started with something like: "I'm new in town and I would like to meet some new people ...". We all have send or received a message from someone that is new in town... it is a nice strategy to approach people on an online site, in stead of just sending a message because you are miserably lonely and want to get laid.... which sounds desperate, you now have an excuse.... you are "new"... and as a newbie, you have an excuse to approach strangers on the Internet without being judged....

Unfortunately, the excuse only lasts for the first few months that you are new in a city....

Since I barely use GaydarGirls and, I haven't edited my profile's headline in the past 6 years, I think that I am still using the tactic of "I'm new in town" as the headline on my profile... Oh well..., considering that I have moved a couple of times in the past 6 years... Is not that I've been lying all the time.... (mental note: change your status in the 'old' lesbian online site of Gaydargirls..., just in case.... New phone online dating applications not always deliver quality dates, at least this old site had provided me with some fun dates on the past.... )

Back to my story...., so I send few messages and one girl answered me saying that she was also new in town and that she would love to meet up for a drink. It all went very quickly... We meet up that Thursday for a quick drink but we ended up spending almost the whole weekend together.....

We both had a lot of time on our hands and too little contacts in Brighton... She had just moved down from Edinburgh to start a PhD in Sociology at Sussex in September. She was using the last few days of the summer to settle down into her new place and getting around in the city.

She was 27-years-old, very tall and slim, Scottish (without the accent....) with big blue eyes. Her conversation was very intellectual... she talked as the aspiring academic she wanted to become and I, at the time 23... found very attractive the idea of hanging out with a doctoral student. I've always been a bit of a sapiophile... 

I didn't know at the time that I will ended up becoming an academic myself, so in a way, it was like looking at me in the future... She was who I wanted to be when I "grew up"....

We had few night dates and few day ones..., I remember one afternoon that we were hanging out in my room and we were about to watch a movie when my stoner housemate came in his underwear and sat in the middle of the sofa with a spliff ready to watch the movie with us...

No one invited him, but I didn't want to kick him out since he himself did not have many contacts in Brighton either and he was probably as lonely as the two new lesbians in town... So I let him staying and watch the movie with us....

When the movie finished, he left to his room... The day after he confessed that he was hopping to have a threesome with us....  Of course a very typical straight male thiking, they meet two "non butchy" looking lesbian and instantly they think that they are in a porn movie and that we are going to act accordingly.... of course the threesome never happen... but I don't blame him for trying.... you need to act on your fantasies... but sometimes your fantasies are not others people's fantasies.... Anyway, he was a funny character.... I wonder if he still around Brighton...

The new lesbian in town and I had a brief thing for about a week or more, but soon after September came, we had to wake up, Greenday style.... the summer was over and the academic year began....

I started my courses and also, I started to work at the Student Union bars at freshers week. My routine went from having all of the time in the world to not having a minute to myself.... I spend the first week of term working everyday serving "snake bites" and "Jagger bombs" to a thousands of new University party hunter students. It was fun.... I met a lot of new people, new people from the new house I moved to, new people from the bars where I was working, and new people from my courses....

I went from having only a couple of numbers on my phone to have a pretty busy social life.... the bright Phd student was not my only "normal" contact in Brighton anymore...... and also, probably for her, my role in her life shifted to the background too... after the term started, it was not easy to meet up anymore.... we both had different social commitments and after trying for a while to arrange a next date without any success, she ended up telling me on the phone that perhaps we should take sometime off... which considering that we spend a lot of time together too fast, it was a very sensible thing to do...

We are still friends on Facebook and I have seen her around Sussex campus from time to time... She proof read few of my essays that term.... (she offered to do it....) but we didn't properly meet up again or kept in touch apart from the occasional 2 to 3 minutes conversation on campus every once in a while... I knew from the begging that she was not going to be the love of my life, but I was new in town and I wanted to expand my social circle.... and perhaps, I was trying to find a new adventure while waiting for the academic year and "reality" to start...

I enjoyed the time we spend together but, I knew that we both were in very different places in our lives and that we were not going to work once the academic year began... but it was a nice "I'm new in town" + "end of the summer" story.... Is it true that we are more likely to fall in love and have more stories when we first move to a place?

According to research we are more likely to fall in love during holidays and during times of change in your life since we have apparently a more open mindset..... Should I move to a new town again just so I can pull off again my excuse for contacting people online without the desperate lonely smell that an dating website message always has hoping that perhaps, this time I will find the love of my life....????

Naahhh.... I love Brighton too much to move out....