Getting To Know You

When it comes of getting to know someone I'm very much an inside out person. I want to know what a person thinks and feels, what they joke about. Physical proximity means little to me when I'm learning about someone, I want to know what he thinks.

I recently responded to an online post made by a guy looking for other guys to just hang out with. (The Strictly Platonic section of Craigslist personals has such ads, though a lot of guys seem to not know what platonic means.) It went nowhere because the guy didn't like communicating via email (though he could actually write coherently, a skill that's not so common with guys online who are seeking guys for friendship or hookup) and said he found visual cues useful in getting to know others. 

I find visual cues generally to be more or less useless in getting to know someone, and often completely misleading. 

People have misread me my whole life. Strangers tend to assume I'm mean, angry, or disinterested. In reality I'm easy going, friendly, and am interested in all sorts of things that others would like to share with me. 

My two best friends are guys who are misread by others as well. Both are seen as aloof and dismissive or generally uninterested by people who don't know them. It's for the most part just a misreading of their faces and inflections. (It even took me at least a decade to not read anything into their body language or tones which rarely convey anything about what they're actually feeling.) 

But those two friends are good looking guys. Good looking guys can get away with being misread as aloof or withdrawn. 

If I were a hot guy I probably would be fine with the let's-meet-and-see scenario for finding queer friends.  As it is I'm merely OK looking and my permanent angry face seems to overshadow that bit of OK looking.

So I'd rather get to know a guy via writing or talking before we meet. But there seems to be almost no guys who want to meet other guys that way. 

That basically leaves me back where I am right now which is pretty much living my queer life in my head and writing a blog about hat happens in there. To an outsider it probably seems sad and pathetic, but, to paraphrase Eeyore, it's not much of a life, but I'm kind of attached to it.