I'm not gonna title this one

So I was kinda setup to meet a woman a few weeks ago. We started by e-mailing each other, and everything seemed fine. After a few days, she wanted to meet, but I gave her my cell number instead. We had quite a few e-mails, and a few phone conversations from about that Saturday to the next Tuesday (I think). Probably about 4 hours of total phone time.

In that time I got the impression that she wasn't as interested in church as I am. For anyone that doesn't know me, I'm LDS. Religion hasn't always been such a high priority to me, but in the last year or so, I've made a real effort to attend church regularly, and now I attend pretty much every Sunday. It's also worth pointing out that here in Utah, it's kinda odd for a guy to be more religious than a woman. There were other things that made me think that this wasn't gonna go anywhere, but I won't get into those items here.

In one of those phone conversations, she wanted to setup a time and place to meet. I still don't know exactly why, but I was hesitant to meet her. Maybe it had something to do with my not being impressed with her from phone conversations. She wanted me to meet her at her work, which just didn't sound fun to me. I'd rather be on neutral ground, not sitting at her work around all her co-workers, being studied and evaluated. Well, I never committed to meet her there, and in fact I slept in rather late that day, about 4pm. She wanted me to meet her at about 5, and I had work at 6. Instead of going to her work, I went to Best Buy and bought a new bluetooth earpiece (the Jabra BT800) for my Nokia 3650.

She called me at about 5:10 as I was heading home with my new toy. I felt bad when she said that she was all dolled up to meet me, so out of guilt and fear of looking like a coward, I told her to head over to my work later that night. She showed up on what must have been the busiest night in our companies history. For about a half hour she sat there bored while I worked on 240 down T1's (3 switches with 80 T1's each). Eventually she asked if she should just leave, and I told her yes.

I hate to say it for fear of being labelled "shallow", but I was not physically attracted to her. I know, I've heard all about how there's nothing wrong with thinking that, but it doesn't change how I feel about it, there's a human being at the other end of that equation. Anyway, the next day she wanted me to meet her at WalMart to help help pick something out for a friend. That was supposed to be at 12:30, but I slept in to 2pm (I work from 6pm to 2am, and I rarely goto bed before 4am).

Later that day she text messaged me, asking is I want to "persue this any further" and "c what happens". Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the old "see what happens" line implies something romantic. I've never had a friend ask me if I want to call them later to "see what happens", so I saw this as her way of asking if I wanted to take our relationship from a friendship to dating.

I replied with this: "I don't think we should. The church is very important to me, and I don't think you and I have compatible views of our spirituality."

Maybe it was premature of me to call it off this soon, but I honestly thought that this was the best way out that didn't string her along. I put about an hour of thought into that one reply. Well this reply brought on a flurry of unpleasantness directed at me. She eventually came out with some line about how I was insulting her spirituality. This didn't come out until the next day, so I don't think this is what bothered her at first. My best guess is she felt I was rejecting her based solely on her appearance, and she wanted me to own up to that. It also had undertones of wanting to catch me being shallow, then I'd be the bad guy taking all the blame. That's what I think from a few hours of conversations (later on), but I have no discrete reason for thinking that.

After a few text messages and a few hours, I finally sent her one asking her to call me so we could talk this all out. She has a bad habit of ignoring the questions I asked in TM's, and ranting on about how horrible I am. We didn't get much resolved in the phone conversation, even after about an hour.

What bugged me probably the most is how she kept trying to vilify me with the spirituality thing. She kept saying that I insulted her by dissing on her spirituality with my first reply "The church is very important to me, and I don't think you and I have compatible views of our spirituality." Man, I don't know how I could have done better than that. To me that seems to be about the easiest let down in the history of the world. I spent some time thinking of alternatives, but this seemed to get the point across without hurting any feelings. I didn't think that I needed to include any of the other reasons for not being interested, as this, to me, seemed sufficient. After talking through all this with her, she repeatedly reiterated how horrible of a person I am for saying something so cruel.

I can understand her being a little upset that I rejected her after only a week or so, but I would have to think she deserves some liability there. When she asked if I wanted to "see what happens", if I had answered "yes", what would the next step be? Surely it would be a date. I didn't see a need for a date, I had already experienced enough of her to form a preliminary opinion of who she is. And she isn't a bad person, not by any means. But I would have to be VERY impressed with a lady to be willing to wait months or more for her to come back to the church.

And by saying "no" to her, I wasn't saying that I was unwilling to ever talk to her again. I just didn't want to "see where this goes", if you know what I mean. Had she asked if we were still gonna call and talk, I would be more than willing. I was never asked that.

Now that you've all gotten the proper and complete 1 side of the story, are any of you willing to comment? Was I out of line with my reply? I thought that my letdown was as kind as possible, but maybe my self-evaluation isn't as accurate as I think. What could I have done better here?

Adam