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So far I've met two women I had great initial success with but then blew it. Why? Simple: I was blinded by my success.

Let’s call them Jill and Tilly. I met both of them almost a year apart at the health club I go to routinely.

I met Jill first. Our eyes met, smiles were exchanged and she played with her hair as we talked during our initial meeting. When we parted, I felt bedazzled by her and astounded by how well I had done.

Fast forward to our second meeting several weeks later where she gave me a wave when she saw me and we wound up talking some more. Then I suggested meeting up at the club a few days later to hang out a little.

She was receptive but hesitant, saying she needed to check her schedule. Nevertheless, we parted with contact information swapped.

After several missed connections, Jill told me she couldn't make it on the day I suggested. I closed with a friendly "see you around the club" ... but alas, we never met again.

I suspect Jill's interest cooled off after I suggested hanging out. Why? Because for some reason my eagerness turned her off; an eagerness born of being success blind on my part.

Fast forward to Tilly several months later; again when we first met we exchanged eye contact and smiles, followed by a great conversation. And when I asked Tilly if she'd like to have smoothies at the juice bar, she accepted!

Boy was I nervous waiting to meet her in the hall outside the locker rooms. And how she smiled at me again as she rounded the corner out of the women's! More great conversation followed over smoothies and a stroll outside afterward.

Alas, I made one key mistake that night: just exchanging e-mails with her, not our telephone numbers as well. Result: even though she'd e-mailed me first, I didn't hear back after I e-mailed her in reply a day or so later.

Worse, I made another rookie mistake when I tried to get in touch with her via a colleague of hers a couple weeks later whom I had at first been corresponding with on purely business matters (her colleague was a freelance writer, same as me). Result: Both Tilly and her colleague became irritated and nervous because I was acting way too familiar when I barely knew either of them.

If I had remembered to swap telephone numbers as well as e-mails with Tilly, things might have gone better. For one thing, I would not have made the gauche error of dragging personal business into my correspondence with her colleague because I would have had another way of keeping in touch with her.

I cannot begin to express how embarrassing such social mistakes are, especially when you yourself have had a hand in the banal outcome. It is like you have been confronted with an insurmountable obstacle for so long that whenever it gives way you are so used to failure you have no idea how to capitalize on such a breakthrough and so waste your chance out of sheer inexperience. You get so brought up short it is like an irresistible force getting channeled into too narrow a space and repulsed by a smaller counter surge of energy that repairs the momentarily broken immovable object.

Moral of the story: beware of dating success! It can blind you far worse than a whole slew of failures.