First Date

by Jules Charlie

I like being married. I’ve done it several times, three times actually and I’m quite proud of it. Of course, I don’t like the endings. All that business of pulling apart your lives and dividing up your stuff is very dispiriting, but I find broken hearts mend in time and this opens the door to the bit I like best: beginnings. Beginnings are great, full of hope and optimism, another person to know, another world of experience to share wrapped up in the promise of intimacy and great sex. Or indeed bad sex but new sex anyway and quite a lot of it. 

I became an adolescent in the era immediately following the 60s sexual revolution, so the expectation was for quantity and variety. I’m pretty sure most people’s expectations were largely unfulfilled in this area but the idea that you only got to shag one person in your life behind the closed doors of heterosexual matrimony was properly debunked. It was never actually true of course. History is littered with evidence of the reality; scoundrels, philanderers, princes and paupers, leaving a trail of broken hearts, STDs and illegitimate children since the dawn of time. But in the 1960’s the hypocrisy was dialled back and women in particular were freed from the shackles of pretence. Virginity no longer expected, sexual experience regarded as a good thing. At least it was by me. I’m not suggesting for a moment that sex leads inevitably to marriage, but I don’t really believe in the idea of unconstrained promiscuity either. Whatever floats your boat, I don’t judge but I can’t really square the notion of a committed relationship with casual flings left and right which brings me back to the point; beginnings.

My second wife had recently decided to leave me and take the spaniel with her. I never had children, but spaniels were a feature of both my first and second marriages. They followed the pattern; marry me, get a spaniel then, after a brief period of comparison, leave me and take the spaniel. So, this was two for two. The spaniel in question was a mean bugger, very Alpha. He was under the impression that my wife was in fact his wife and it turned out he was right.  I’d been separated for six months or so and I was feeling the pull of a new beginning. I was working on a huge project at the time so there were a lot of people floating about in my social circle. A lot of single people and a lot of married people with varying degrees of detachment from their partners. From the likes of me; separated and heading for divorce to the guy who had temporarily forgotten he was married after a bottle of Beaujolais at lunchtime and would have a difficult time explaining why his pants were on back to front when he got into bed that night. I’d avoided impropriety thus far but now I was to all intents and purposes single it seemed to me all bets were off.

Dating is a minefield and the older you get, the thicker the mines are on the ground. I’d had two phases of dating in my life to this point; the first between the ages of 17 and 20, the fumbling teenage years, and the second between the ages of 27 and 30, break up misery turns into a morality free shag fest. I was now 37 and neither of these models seemed like the way to go for someone on the cusp of middle age. Dating itself doesn’t worry me, I’ve always preferred the company of women to men. It’s not just that I’m attracted to women, I actually like women so spending time in their company is something I relish but navigating the invisible boundary between the platonic and romantic is always scary. If you hang out in a gang, you’re in safe platonic territory but hanging out with the object of your desire in a gang isn’t dating. Dating is essentially a one on one situation, possibly two on two but this is only a step towards one on one unless something else is going on entirely. In a proper one on one date the boundary issue is always in play. Nora Ephron famously asserted that men and women can never be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. I disagree, I think you can be both but it’s a high wire act. Being charming and interesting while trying to find a dignified way to step over that line is stressful and the consequence of getting it wrong disastrous. 

  

A woman once told me a toe curling first date story. Come to think of it, I was on a first date with her at the time, so this was probably part of her strategy for managing my expectations, but anyway this is what she told me. A handsome young radio DJ asked her out. He took her to a fabulous, expensive restaurant, they ate fabulous, expensive food, drank fabulous, expensive wine and he paid the bill. He was witty and fascinating but kept the conversation firmly and politely platonic. He asked her back to his place for coffee. She was a woman of the world; she knew perfectly well what this implied. He made her coffee in his fabulous flat, still witty, still fascinating, still polite. I can only speculate about his state of mind but based on what happened next, I think our hero had trapped himself in the friend zone through excessive charm and didn’t know how to escape. You can imagine his frustration, time was running out, what should he do to indicate his less-worthy intentions? She made her excuses, she had to get up in the morning, he walked her to her car, still nothing and then he snapped. As she sat in her car he leaned in, shoved his hands up her jumper and grabbed her breasts. There was a frozen moment of excruciating embarrassment, then he withdrew, she thanked him for a lovely evening, drove away and never saw him again.

 

There was a particularly fabulous woman in our office. I’m drawn to self-possessed women, women who know who they are, what they want, and this was exactly her vibe. Don’t get me wrong, she also had long legs, big hair and an impressive cleavage which attracted me every bit as much, but it was her self-possession that made her worth pursuing rather than simply admiring. I’d known her for a couple of years. We had a good, if distant platonic relationship, she flirted with me around the coffee machine but then she flirted with everybody.  She’d met my wife, she invited us both to her 30^th birthday party the year before and had been appropriately alarmed when I turned up on my own, parking me with some friends whose job was to keep me from interfering with her own romantic ambitions for the evening. She knew a thing or two about pathetic break up guys. She needn’t have worried, I had no dishonourable designs on her at the time, just a compulsion to change my social circle but in the months that followed I became more fascinated by her. Sooner or later there would have to be a date.

 

Asking for a date has its own stresses. It’s a confession of sorts, a moment of vulnerability with the imminent threat of crushing rejection.  Finding the moment, the awkwardness of the conversation but I find it’s best to just come right out with it. So, I asked her, she agreed, dinner would be great. None of that half-arsed business of having a drink to test the water, dinner is a proper date for people of conviction. 

  

Our working world was West London. The office was by the green on the Chiswick High Road and we lived our very intense project life in a bubble that included the Packhorse pub immediately below it and stretched all the way to our customer’s offices in the West End. At the time I was also involved in a musical enterprise called The London Songwriter’s Showcase, a monthly gig for aspiring singer songwriters that took place in the back room at Ronnie Scots Club in Soho, so I was constantly in and around the bustling streets of the capital. I’m a country boy, born and raised in the green belt but for that moment, West London felt like home, so I chose Soho for our rendezvous and a restaurant called Soho Soho just to underline the point. We met at the restaurant. It’s long gone now but it was a French bistro kind of thing on the corner of Frith Street and Bateman Street. I seem to remember there was a piano player that we shamelessly avoided, taking a table as far away from him as possible, but these are irrelevant details. The important thing is the conversation and the chemistry. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about, but the conversation was magical. Cocktails, starters, main and desert sliding by like stations on the Piccadilly Line as words, thoughts, gestures, smiles, ideas, hopes, fears and reminiscences filled the space between us.  It felt good, really good. I’ve had my fair share of first dates and this one was by far the best. One might say perfect.

I can only speak for myself but oddly, the impulse for carnal gratification takes a back seat on a perfect first date. I find the thing that possesses me is the desire to know the person better, to get inside their head more than their pants. Eventually it was over, we emerged into the cool Soho midnight and I walked her back to her car. Can we do this again? I was eager to know. “No.” she said somewhat disappointingly. “I’m dating this other guy and I want to see how that plays out. You never know, he might be the one.” I assured her that he was not, but I was hardly the one to judge. Conscious of a toe-curling story I’d recently heard, there was no grabbing of anything. I smiled, she smiled, thanked me for a lovely evening and drove away. We’d meet again the following morning by the coffee machine, she’d flirt with me, just as she flirted with everyone in that distant, platonic way but now there would be a new sort of ache I had to live with. Waiting for her to see sense and break up with the other guy would be a testing time but we’d shared something, and I was certain there would be a second date.

 

There was.    

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