Here’s another appetizer while we wait for the next season (episode?) to begin. Well, depending on your tastes, I guess – you might want to pass if you require a more positive or dramatic finale in your dating stories. This one is a tad on the sour/bitter side.
My good friend recently made the statement in an email that he “doesn’t date”. This blanket statement prompted an exchange of minced words, until we more or less figured out where we each were coming from.
He included a report of a recent experience as a way of illustrating one of his issues with dating. I asked him if I could share it and got his blessing.
And don’t apologize for pick-axing, by the way, because I really like to go after the meanings too, as we’ve talked about before, and to keep splitting things down to more precise meanings, with the confidence that what’s being said and understood will eventually be what’s intended.
The atomic truth, in this case, is that I don’t make efforts to meet people, I just never do. If I’m at a bar I don’t start talking to anyone, women or men, and if they come up to me I find that I don’t have the moves that will make them stay. It’s an algorithm, hitting on women. Like everything else. But it’s not a sob story, either – because I know I can find a relationship in another way. So what I meant in those two emails was, I don’t date spontaneously or by arrangements but I do meet people who happen to be in the same boat with me, school or whatever, and we start talking, and then once or twice in my life it’s ended up leading to a kiss. But I’ve barely ever been on a formal restaurant or movie date.
It’s funny that this dating stuff came up now, because despite all I’ve said till now, just last night I was talked to at a bar. I’d gone down to see this woman play acoustic guitar at a downtown bar, a musician with a pretty good following here, and who used to serve me coffee at the cafe I went to, and for whom I had the mild hots, or at least I was very attracted to her as a musician. I actually did ask her once if she wanted to play music with me, and she said no. I’d read in the weekly paper about her that she was married, so I can comfort myself that maybe it was just an awkward situation.
So anyway I went down there to hear her play. This 26 or 27 year-old-looking girl asked me if I liked Guiness, because she was about to leave and she didn’t want to finish her glass. I thanked her and took the beer. She started talking to me, and thing which, as I’ve said, never, ever happens to me. It was a nice situation at first. She and her older woman friend, who was sitting there too, were both taken with my being a shrink in training and they asked me many questions about psychology. I should have known that when it starts like that you’re heading for trouble. About half an hour after we’d introduced ourselves this short, stocky head-shaved guy with an intense face, wrinkled with muscle, came up to her and, without her objecting, began kissing her neck, holding her waist and whispering to her. He took a moment to introduce himself as Nick, and at that point, I guess also by way of introduction, gave me a little ad for this ultimate fighting event about to take place at the Qwest Arena, where one of his best buddies was going to be fighting. I was surprised she liked him, I was starting to get the idea that she went in for softer guys like me.
Apparently they’d been friends for a long time and he’d been hitting on her for weeks now, and she kept putting him off. This was all said openly. We were all ordering beers and getting drunk now. The older friend was uncomfortable with him, she told me aside. She took off. Then Erin, me and Nick decided to go to another bar. And from that point on the pattern was that Erin would be talking to me, she would let me know that she wanted to go somewhere else, ostensibly to lose Nick, and just as we would start to leave she’d start talking to him again and he would follow us out. By the third bar she was talking to anybody just to get out of having to stay with me, though I’d made it clear to her more than once that I’d be happy just getting her number and calling it a night. Finally we were on our way out of a place, they’d turned the lights on and people were just hanging around after closing, and she gave me the sign we should go, and on my way to the door she peeled off and started talking to a guy she’d never met before. I heard her say as she walked up to him: “Hey what’s your name?” I realized it was crazy to to wait, and kept walking out the door and to my car, without saying goodbye. I know these are the tricks people play on each other, you just have to keep up and not be discouraged. It wasn’t that bad after all.
Anyway that’s my story, which I couldn’t not tell, because something actually happened.
