Two

By Saturday afternoon, I was in a bind. I was sitting with my best friend in a nearby theater, watching a play that a friend of ours was starring in, and I was resigning myself to a dateless week. No date and it was only week two! And Thanksgiving was the following week, which was sure to throw a wrench into my dating schedule, what with travel and stuffing my face with stuffing and most likely sitting at the kids’ table for the twenty-sixth year in a row. I couldn’t not have a date for week two!

I spent a significant amount of time online on Saturday, scrambling for a date, writing emails, answering multiple choice questions, long answer questions, and trying to seem clever to twenty-seven different men at once.

Can I take a minute to express how exhausting this process is? I suppose a lot of women subject themselves to this on a fairly regularly basis. The thrice-weekly trips to the bars, the clubs, the concerts. It’s exhausting. It’s, frankly, dehydrating.

I’ve never been that girl. One night a week is plenty of social time for me. The rest of my week can be contentedly spent on the couch, curled up in bed with a good book, or, on the rare occasion, in a bubble bath. According to Myers-Briggs, I have extroverted tendencies, yes, but I’m an introvert at heart. It was the one letter in the equation that could have gone either way for me, thirteen years ago when I discovered the results to that infamous personality test, sitting in a hard plastic chair in middle school health class. I’m not complaining about this process. Oh no. I think this is the most fun I’ve had in a long time on my own, but, let it be known that, this morning, I woke up at six in the morning to respond to match.com emails, and, tonight, I skipped the gym to write these date reviews.

But then I had a hit. A local guy who liked Pearl Jam. Normal looking enough, but with pictures angled in a way that suggested he was really, in fact, overweight.

Whatever, no time to be picky. He emailed me his phone number, and I texted him immediately. He was at a concert at a hippie bar, and we made fun of hippies for a bit. Good start. I hate hippies. He told me that he grew up in Connecticut, that he moved here for a job in aviation, that he was looking for friends and if something more developed then great.

No neediness? Sign me up.

We texted back and forth for the rest of the night, covering topics from iPhones to Stephen King. Apparently he loves Stephen King. I didn’t bother to dub this a red flag because, if you’ve walked a mile in my dating shoes, you’ll know that most men you encounter don’t actually read. The fact that he did, and was excited about what he read, was encouraging. Luckily I had just read a book review written by Stephen King and had been pleasantly surprised by how good it was. So I pulled off the conversation with a few choice comments from the review. The rest I googled and pretended to throw out as common knowledge. Did you know that his new book is mostly political and a massive tome? Did you know that he’s writing a new Dark Tower book?

“But he finished that series. That can’t be!” he texted back.

“Oh, but it can,” I responded, sending him instructions to google it.

Fake it until you make it, I say.

I think if he had had his way, we would have met Sunday night, but I had family in town early for the holiday, and instead, I sat on my mother’s couch with a baby sprawled across my lap and watched Up. I’m pretty sure that’s better than any date I’ve ever been on.

The next night we decided to meet at the local sports bar, a sports bar so local that I could walk to it from my house. It was raining, so I drove and wore heels. I threw on a pair of jeans and a bright purple sweater. I hate dressing for sports bars.

On the way there, something happened: I got nervous. I don’t get nervous for first dates. Ever since a very good male friend of mine told me in 2005 to chill the fuck out because chances are my date was just as nervous about impressing me as I was about impressing him, first dates are no sweat for me.

But this one felt different. It felt like stage fright, like that moment that you’re waiting in the wings, as I pulled into the parking lot. Why did this feel so different? And then I did the worst thing that I could have done to myself in that moment. I thought, “Maybe I’m so nervous because this is The One.”

If I were to write a self-help book it would titled “Ways To Psych Yourself Out Even More When You’re Already Going Crazy,” by 104. It would only be one page long and that page would have “Telling yourself before a blind date that he might be The One” in large font.

I fumbled in my purse. I played with my phone. I took too long to get out of the car, to walk across the parking lot, to walk in the front door.

And then I looked up. And I looked up even further because HOLY SHIT this guy was tall. He was tall and, oh no, incredibly attractive. Not a spare pound on him. He wore wire rim glasses, a blue long sleeve thermal shirt and a perfect pair of jeans with a perfect dark wash.

Oh no. No, this was not good. This was not good for Two. It was not good for him to be perfect and perfectly normal. No, he was supposed to be fat!

We both agreed to sit at a booth, both commented on the flat screen TV at each table, were both carded by the waiter, and both ordered a beer. And then the conversation started. I tend to ask a lot of questions when I first meet people. Not annoying inconsequential questions. I pay attention, I probe a little. Most people like this. At least I think most people like this. I think it makes them feel comfortable and like I’m interested in them. So people actually listen, it’s shocking. It’s also probably the characteristic that has led first dates to tell me they were felons, or had slept with ninety-seven women, or had cheated on their former fiancées with four of her best friends, two of her cousins, and a stripper.

This was all one guy, by the way.

Hence my enthusiasm over such a normal first date!

But we got into the meat of things a little. It turns out his job is fairly blue collar, that he’s been married and divorced, but he explained how they had gotten married too young before they really knew who they each were. I didn’t care. There was something about him. Something so normal. Something eloquent. Something smart. Something to which I would be proud to introduce my friends. Something confident. Something comfortable. And, ok fine, something hot. But in a cute dork with glasses kind of way.

At one point he took the opportunity one finds in silence to say, “I’ve been doing all the talking. What about you? Tell me about yourself.”

I don’t like the vagueness of that “question,” but I did my best to give a brief outline about me, hoping questions would stem from that, but few did. That’s ok. I was prepared to cover with another list of my own.

He ordered a second beer. I looked at my first and quickly chugged half of it to keep up. When the waiter came back a second time and asked if we wanted another round, I was prepared to get my second, but he said he had to leave soon. He had to be up early for work.

I’ll admit it: this threw me off my game. I am not used to men ending dates. I am used to being the one to look at my watch and come up with some excuse as to why I have to leave. I am used to letting three hours of conversation go by without noticing. It had been one hour and forty-four minutes. Plenty of time for a first date, but still, it tripped me up. The conversation lagged. For a few minutes I stopped asking questions. It wasn’t so much that I was distressed by his need to get home early, but I wasn’t sure what he meant by early, and I thought it was rude in that situation to continue asking questions and starting new conversations when he had just turned down another round and told me he had to get home. But we sat across from each other for a few more minutes, talking lamely and hesitantly. I assumed, after the check came and he waved away my offer to split it, that the date was over. Not over in a bad way, but simply over because he had to get home, right? But still we lingered at the booth, stilted conversation sputtering between us. It was a little weird. It wasn’t the best ending. But he had paid the check, and he had grown excited when I mentioned that I was planning on going to a concert that a friend of his had invited him to. To be exact, he said, “Oh, you’re going? I was thinking about going, but now I’ll definitely go.” You can’t get much better than that, right?

We walked to the door. We were parked at opposite ends of the parking lot, so we hugged. He stated questioningly that he hoped to see me again. I smiled and said, “Oh yeah, definitely!”

I walked to my car, pleased as punch. A normal guy! A normal attractive guy! A normal attractive employed guy! A normal attractive employed straight guy! A normal attractive employed straight nice guy!

I was giddy. To be honest, I thought maybe all the nervousness was for a reason. Maybe he was more than just Two in a line of fifty-two. Maybe he was, dare I say it, something for the long term?