“Take me to your best local bars!” he messaged via the dating site.
I panicked.
He was a craft ale aficionado whose profile alluded to Bushwick warehouse parties. I was living in a nice New Jersey suburb, where a bangin’ night out meant two bottles of Pinot Greeg at Bonefish Grill. I had no good local bars but somehow I couldn’t tell him that.
Even worse, I was newly teetotal — not by choice but by my body’s cruel refusal to recognize that I was 22 and hangovers weren’t supposed to be two-day vomathons. Couldn’t tell him that either.
In a move I hoped might read as ironic, I took him to a bar in an old converted church. “This is…yeah. Different,” he grimaced, taking in the pink and blue disco lights illuminating the vaulted ceiling.
He was laconically charming, with a habit of using my name in every other sentence that made my palms clammy. I drank whisky and ginger when it was his round, worrying about the side effects, and straight ginger ale when it was my round, worrying that he’d somehow be able to tell.
He thought I wasn’t feeling it, when in fact I was feeling everything.
I was not charming. I was anxious, overanalyzing my every word and move and physiological twinge which, from the outside, looked like total disinterest. He thought I wasn’t feeling it, when in fact I was feeling everything. When we parted at the bus stop with no goodbye kiss, I assumed I’d blown it.
The next day, a noncommittal, oddly staccato text arrived. “Hi. Good to meet you. Might be nice to see you again. If you like. No worries if not. It’s cool.” It stopped just short of “have a nice life”.
Still, peeling my throbbing head off my desk, I replied. A chance at redemption! Or at least a chance to hear somebody say my name like a young Sean Connery again.
Against all the odds, a second date happened. Then a third, and a fourth. Gradually, we teased each other out. Gradually, my nervous system relaxed.
Now we’re nine years down the line. He still texts like a robot and I still can’t drink — but it turns out he didn’t care anyway. We enjoy telling people about our spectacularly mediocre first date, by way of reassuring them that fireworks at first sight can be overrated. Some relationships you warm up gradually, like soup. These days we go to better pubs. And I tell him everything.
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