A Very Small Pool for the Fish to Swim...

Getting back out and dating again can be difficult after you have your first love. Actually, it's hard to put yourself out there after breaking up with anyone, I just have to take people's words for it because I myself have only had the one heartbreak.

So we're going to take this as a "in my experience" kind of way. Which, even though I have had very little, it doesn't matter about the quantity, it's the quality that counts. And I can truly say I loved, lossed, and am trying to go back swimming again - mainly because my brain can get weighed down by the past and I try to stay pretty positive.

There's really no way you can say the exact amount of time is takes to get over someone. The question is, "Do you really ever get over someone?"

I don't think so. Take my ex-boyfriend from high school whom I dated for 2 years. I didn't love him. He was a nice, quality, gentle, quiet guy. I knew after the first few dates that he wasn't "the one." But I can still remember my feelings when we kissed the first time. I remember so many great, special, sweet moments. Those things don't go away because of time and space. They last... at least for me. They get carted away to the furthest compartment of your mind and the cobwebs collect. But sometimes when I pass a Marie Challender's I smile - we had our first date (that I actually don't remember what we did) and before he took me home we stop and ate a slice of pie. I was 16 and it was the nicest thing...

Okay, back to now, present, current Rachel... Getting dumped sucks. There is no other way to put it.

But I keep telling myself that no matter how many love poems were written about "death if I can't have you," "heartbreak means death," etc - no one has actually died from a broken heart. Not even Christopher Reeve in the movie "Somewhere in Time." I think he died from all that weird time travel!

So the fact is that whether two, six, 12 months from now I'm not over the former-flame, does it matter when I start trying to date again? How long should I cry? I don't know. I thought I was done crying, but this morning proved otherwise.

There's a problem though... LA is a very small pool for the fish to swim in! I joined a dating site (where I happened to meet the former-flame and we dated for 8 months) and we'll call it "LotsofBait.com"

The problem with the title is that there is NOT Lots of BAIT!

The crying session this morning was because of just that. I go to log out and two things pop up that I didn't expect to see:

1) The former-flame had been on the same site just in the last couple hours! And there was the profile picture and the daunting little green letters under it "Online Today!"
2) The former-flame's ex was the profile picture one over!

This pool is too small! How am I supposed to mingle in a sea that's full of the past?

Of course I didn't cry over being mad that I saw their pictures. I cried because that loss is still fresh.

But we are both moving on... and that's okay. That's life. That's why there's another day tomorrow and there will always be better days than today... At least I keep telling myself that!