Misssy2,

All good questions. I suppose there are a couple things if I be really honest.

She's cute, and It did feel good to have her talk to me.
She is at a Coda meeting, which I find attractive as she is working on herself.
She is directly around my age.
I find her humorous.

That's pretty much it. I know nothing else. Not much to go on...

Yeah, I suppose I am vulnerable.

I'd prefer to do nothing but at least communicate I find her attractive and then maybe go to the meetings I've never seen her at. Drop in every now and then. I would only be interested in a slow moving, kind of infrequent dating for a long time. But I also know that would be a challenge for me.

Haven't done anything yet, my Birthday is next month though and I told myself last year I wanted to go on a date for me but never did.

Thanks for questioning me.

Look at it a little differently:

You are learning to control an addiction. From what I understand, the illness of addiction affects people similar to how the body demands food when it is literally starving to death. I make this comparison because that is what I understand. I starved to the very brink of death from undiagnosed Celiac disease. I thought of nothing but how to get food. Because I was NOT absorbing the proper nutrition from the foods that I ate, my body was literally screaming for foods high in those nutrients. I ate 5000 (that really is five thousand) calories each day and weighed 98 pounds. Nothing I did would settle that drive to eat and eat AND EAT. There were times when I was literally out of my mind with the drive to eat more foods. The addicts with whom I have interacted describe something like this feeling of being driven. But they are driven for something addictive.

I have a cure to the drive to eat more food a 100% gluten free diet. I have to choose to ignore craving for pizza, pretzels, and delicious buns. Those things will kill me thru slow tortuous starvation. All day long I have to choose to eat boring foods. (Thanks to the U.S.A. federal government caving to manufacturers all those products labeled gluten-free are in fact loaded with sufficient gluten to sicken and kill me. Pizza Hut and Dominoes do NOT have anything close to gluten free. They are actually LOW gluten. That is a separate issue.) My point is that I only have to avoid a craving. I actually get the nutrition that I need to stop my bodies drive to eat. SO while I remember what its like. I dont live it day to day other than a desire to eat something different.

For addicts, it has to be a choice moment to moment, second to second to stay away from their addictive substance. I only remember. You have to live it.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to measure and develop your own ability to choose for yourself. If you ever choose to marry, you might face another situation where you feel that attraction. Do you want to go thru life subject to your attractions? Or do you want to choose for yourself?

Id give it time and come back to it when I felt less vunerable.

I honestly dont know what a 13th stepper is so I could be off. I am just comparing it to experiences that I have.

Many meetings have more then one group. This allows you and another person you don't want in your group, ie. spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, or whomever else to be in differrent groups. My trick was to discreetly Watch which group the other went to and I went to the other. No problem at all.
However we are to learn in CODA not to control others, because the only one we can really control is ourselves. Thus telling a person to go to another meeting won,t get you a guarrantee of the results you want. But if YOU go to another meeting then you will have the separation from the person you are attracted to and you can carry on with your recovery.
In the end, asking the other person to go to another meeting might render you less attractive in the eyes of that other person, to the point that theb person might bring you up as a nuissance at the monthly meeting the group might have. In your shoes I would be the one to go to another meeting until all else is resolved in such a situation I might be experiencing. in such a current situation is resolved.

Thanks middleman, I would never ask someone else to go to a different meeting, that'd be the opposite of me. :)

I actually did nothing for a few weeks and feel much more secure and not so attracted at this moment. It's funny, learning to live alone and in recovery is teaching me things already.