Deborah Lipp

I should like to ruminate, however disjointedly, on the notion of the first date.

What do you look for? Who is the person across the table? What’s the goal, here?

I kind of thoroughly reject the notion that the goal is to find the other person sexy. “Sexy” tends to derive from our subconscious stuff, our dysfunctions and sick expectations and bizarro wishes. All the “bad boy” stuff that doesn’t serve you in the real world and is best left in fantasy.

Yet while rejecting it, we hope for it. Because, y’know, why can’t I meet a nice guy I like who is also sexy to me? Fundamentally, the artificial confines of “date” world make that less likely. But then, if your ignition isn’t lit, you go home with the wondering. The ‘he’s a nice guy will he ever be more?’ thing. Because there are a finite number of dates you’ll go on with such a guy.

There was a guy I dated about 2 years ago. Exactly three dates. And I thought, if I knew this guy for like a year, if we hung out in the same social circle and sort of saw each other and were proximal to each other, I bet we’d hook up. Because we really do like each other and we really do connect to each other. But not in the boy-girl way. No spark. No sexy. And no time in which for it to develop. Again, “dating.” So artificial. Three is really as many as you can do. Especially because he wasn’t exactly local. So sometimes I think we kill the possibility of relationship by dating. But what else are you gonna do?

So you eat a nice meal and have a nice drink and you talk. And what I mostly notice is the persistance of me. How I can’t stop being me in all the ways I annoy me. How I am charming and funny and over-monopolize the conversation. How I distrust a man being charmed by me because I know I’m too good at that. And how I wish I had the trick of silence because I want to listen more and I don’t.

And here he is. Nice man. Not sexy to me tonight. Doesn’t mean he won’t be in the future. Doesn’t mean he will be either. And there is nothing to do about that except ride it out.

We are bad at creating relationship in this culture. We suck at it. I have Hindu friends with traditional arranged marriages. And I think, who are we to look down on that in our patronizing Western way when we don’t have a better answer? Our answer is to be lonely and to struggle and to hope. And to eat nice dinners and talk and wonder what it all means.