The Bad Date

    I've put the idea of dating on hiatus for the next thirty years, which is a much longer period of time than I expect to live. When I think of dating now, it's always in retrospect. I was terrible at it and my ineptitude explains why I never had a relationship that lasted longer than a month, and even those were shaky from the start. I was like someone flying an airplane who had no idea how to fly an airplane but had seen enough depictions of people doing that faking it for a while worked. Briefly.

   One thing I got good at to an extent that it surprised me was finding the moment when the date went bad. (It surprised me because I have little empathy for others.) It would be as if a tire lost its air. Had I been realistic, I'd have said something like, "Well, let's call it a night, OK?" and not gone through the motions of chatting after we finished our meal or coffee. 

   I didn't date often. One or two a year for most of my life. In my late forties two decades ago, online dating sites became a thing and I joined one. My profile told the truth but even so for a couple of years the number of dates I went on increased to as many as five a year for a few years. 

   A date I ruminate on now, many years later, is the one that spurred this post. 

   I don't remember her name, but she was very much my type in every way, completely so physically: that well proportioned physic and right level of muscle tone that reflected an interior calm. We met at a small restaurant that served Japanese food. It was a BYOB, and I brought a small bottle of decent sake for us to share. She was about my age and worked in some capacity at the University of Pennsylvania, my home city's Ivy League school. She lived in that area too.

   Women who are smarter than I am have always attracted me. That never caused a problem in my school years, when if you were rich it was rarely because of your intelligence, but later it does. Women want men who are at least as successful as they are. I never made any real money and the pinnacle of my working life was as a store manager at a small store at a non-profit institution. I could pay the rent on my studio apartment, but that apartment was in a rundown building, albeit in a good neighborhood, in which I was the only one of the six renters over thirty. 

   The specifics of what we talked about are lost to me now. What I remember is that she talked casually about cultural things and ideas that were foreign to me. She understood higher level topics than I did and she understood them at a higher level. I admired that. It made me realize that there are entire communities of people in our classless society who are living much deeper lives than people like me, people who exist to be their bad dates.