Week Nine: Going to Dinner (!?) with Dan
Halfway through the project, five dates in, and I… enjoy a date. Not ‘well, that’s over” enjoyment, not “we hooked up so that was chill,” enjoyment, but actual “time spent with a person who was good company” enjoyment. What a novelty.
It’s become increasingly clear over the course of this project that I’m a very traditional person. (On a side note, these last two months have probably been the biggest journey of personal discovery that I’ve ever gone on, and definitely as far as figuring out what I want from my romantic life. If you thought this blog was for fun or an audience’s enjoyment, you have been fooled. Turns out it’s public therapy, surprise!!!) I think I want to be chill, casual, to go with the flow — but realistically, I don’t actually like that. I like expectations, rituals, patterns — shorthand behaviors that give me information and allow me to know what I’m walking into.
Lest this sound too much like a first-year sociology paper, let me give you an example with Dan. All my past ThursDates have been ‘let’s get a drink’ dates. ‘Let’s get a drink’ is great, because there’s no time expectations, and cost-wise no one necessarily has to drop a ton of cash. ‘Let’s get a drink’ is shorthand for non-committal. Which is all fine and well by me! I’m not trying to get married here.
However, non-committal is not really what I want from dating. Sure, it’s fine for ThursDating as a project, but in terms of my actually being happy with the situation? Nah. Like I said, I’m traditional. A bitch wants to date! To have someone say she looks nice and care about her! Damn! Jeez!
So when Dan asked me if I’d like to go to dinner after a few weeks of talking on Tinder (I KNOW! Weeks of talking! On Tinder! What!?), of course I had the millennial moment of ‘oh god am I committing to spending at least an hour with this guy from the internet,’ BUT that faded when I realized that I was more excited than concerned — because just like ‘let’s get drinks’ is shorthand for casual, ‘let’s get dinner’ is shorthand for actually giving a shit.
Surprisingly, this was my first date of ThursDating to fall on a Thursday, and we met at 7pm. When I told my friend Harper, her response was “7pm is like such a normal date time, I feel like that’s a good sign.”
…Women of the modern age. We’re not looking for much.
And at 7pm we met. Dinner, with a good conversation and very few awkward pauses, went until 8:45pm. I went for my wallet, but he insisted that he pay. Ok, I can hang with it. I asked if he’d let me pay him back in part by buying him a drink. He said yes. We had a drink, and then it was 10pm and the conversation had kind of slowed down so we said goodbye. We hugged. All good.
I feel good about ThursDating in a way that I maybe haven’t since Amar. Not even because I think Dan is my soul mate, but because I’ve been reminded that dating can be fun.
Like I said: what a novelty.
