The Accidental Date

The Brit was somebody who used to work at my company. We occasionally had to work on projects together, which is how we got to the friendly, “Hey, how are you?” passing-in-the-hall stage. But when I got promoted off the project I was working on, I moved to a different floor and I hardly ever saw him any more. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in months and months when I had to go up to my old floor and bumped into him.
“Hey, how are you?” He said in his beautiful London accent. “I haven’t seen you in forever. I wasn’t even sure you worked here any more.”
“Nope, still here,” I said, stifling the butterflies in my stomach that I always got when I was talking to him (he’s so pretty) and the disgust at how my own Northeast accent sounded next to his pretty across-the-pond one. “I’m good. How are you?”
“Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I’m leaving. My last day’s on Friday.”
Oh. No more chance encounters in the hall with the pretty British boy. My stomach sank a little. In my company, we’re in a pretty-boy drought. We couldn’t afford to lose one of our best.
But I soldiered on. “Congratulations! Where are you going?”
We spoke for a couple of minutes about his new job and then I had to get going. “Well, keep in touch,” I said, because that’s what you say to people, regardless of whether you ever really kept in touch when they worked at the desk across from yours. Social convention and whatnot.
“I will,” he said, because social convention again demands it must be satisfied. “I’ll shoot you my email address before I leave.” More social convention, I was sure.
I went downstairs, never expecting to hear from him again. So when I came in Friday morning and there was an email with a link to his personal email instructing me to keep in touch, I was surprised. When I got an email a week later asking what I was doing after work on Wednesday, I was even more surprised.
I met him after work for drinks. Drinks turned into a meal. Several hours later our waitress, who had decided almost instantaneously that she didn’t like us, (it may have been because she overheard us laughing after, instead of reciting the specials, she recited the ENTIRE f-ing menu in her very heavy Russian accent. It was 15 minutes of awkwardly trying to follow along with our own menus, the whole process made more difficult by the fact that she didn’t go in order but jumped all over the place) dropped the check. He picked it up and I turned to get my wallet out of my purse.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said with my wallet in my hand. I never know how to play this game. I feel that once you move to get your wallet out, if you don’t pay, the move looks insincere. But pushing to pay gets uncomfortable. So I wind up with wallet in hand, hovering somewhere between the table and my purse.
“Please. I’ll get this. Don’t worry about it. Please.”
And then, the wave of realization hit me. I was on a date.
It had taken me nearly 4 hours to make that realization.
With all the vagaries of the male/female relationship these days, I feel like accidental dates are all too common. Boundaries are no longer clearly defined. In our parents’ day, things were clear. If a guy was meeting you for a meal, he was taking you out on a date. He would pay and most likely pick you up and drop you off at your parents’ house, where you would be forced to live until such time as continuous dates turned into marriage and you moved from one home to another. By no means am I advocating going back to that system. At the same time, there was something nice about the clear delineation.
After all, what does our inability to commit to a single date say about our inability to commit overall? We’re a society that values the transient. Take a look at this year’s Grammy winners. How many of them will even chart next year, let alone be nominated for an award? We are a society that watches that 15-minutes-of-fame clock like trend hawks searching for the next prey. We’re fickle. We love you one minute and the next we’re burning any evidence we ever acknowledged your presence.
And we’ve taken that attitude into the dating world. When it comes to relationships, most of us are like hobos hopping boxcars. We won’t even commit to a journey long enough to buy a ticket and sit in the comfy seats. Instead, we hop on and off where we please, traveling wherever the wind will take us. And that’s fun for a while, but eventually it gets hard to jump off that moving train with all that emotional baggage.
We don’t want to commit because if we commit, and it doesn’t work out, we’ve failed. We’ve been taught that “failure is not an option” (a phrase, ironically enough, uttered most often by a man who reigns supreme as the Midas of Failure … everything he touches turns to shit). And when faced with that kind of pressure, who’s going to be able to commit? You ask, she turns you down, you’ve failed. You’ve let God and Country down. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on drinks and maybe a nosh.
So instead we hedge our bets, see how things go, never say one way or another where we stand. We question the validity of our relationships, hesitate to say that we’re committed, that we’re off the market, well past the expiration date on the dating label. We fear putting ourselves on the record for anything and then act surprised when our relationships play out like a broken record, repeating the same scenarios again and again. And we wonder how we find ourselves accidentally on dates, accidentally in relationships, accidentally with exes we never meant to be significant others in the first place.