Alone: Listening to First Dates
Reflections on overhearing a first date.
“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.” -Sally Rooney, Normal People
I was sitting at a table on the patio of a coffee shop. The trees were all yellow and orange, with a hint of green still in the leaves, and the yards were full of sagging cotton cobwebs, and pumpkins that were beginning to sink in on themselves.
A young couple took a seat on a bench that was just to my right. They radiated the energy of people on a first date: They hugged awkwardly when they walked up to the cafe. They said each other’s names uncertainly. She was wearing a dark blue navy skirt with yellow and orange flowers. The flowers were the same colors as the leaves on the street. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt, with sweat spots on the lower back. He showed her to the outside spot because, as he said, I have no inside voice. When he hugged her, he burrowed into her shoulders and said her name like they had been long friends. When she hugged him back, she turned her cheeks away.
The first topic was travel. They talked about weddings that they had been to recently. One was in Santa Cruz, on the ocean. The other was at Virginia Beach. She asked him, so have you traveled anywhere else recently? She puts her dark sunglasses on, hiding her eyes.
India, before the Pandemic, he said.
Her voice lifted an octave — as if this fact had changed her perception of him in some slight way.
How was it, she asked.
It was fine. Her shoulders slouched a little. He mentioned seeing the ‘golden triangle’ in India. Delhi, Agra, Jaipur. He listed the cities off like they were items on a shopping list. He did not talk at all about what he saw in those cities.
But the train travel. God, it was such a mess, he said. A long, meandering horror story about booking train tickets through an outside vendor, with the massive headaches that it caused to his schedule.
They just don’t know how to do train travel, he said.
As his story continued on, the tone of her voice got lower and lower, as she would murmur Oh, wow, and oh.
I did the digital nomad thing for a while, she interjected. She worked and lived in Puerto Vallarta for a year, and then in Rome. But she did it secretly. Her employers had no idea, for example, that she spent a whole year in Italy. They thought she was in New York.
So what did you do in Rome, he asked. For fun.
There was lots of gelato. She smiled. And Aperol Spritz.
Oh. That’s a drink that has apple?
Oh, no, she says, dumbfounded. It’s like an alcoholic drink.
So you travel a lot then, he said.
I mean, it is nice having friends in other countries. She says that as if she’s trying to justify it.
So what’s a country that you’d like to see, He asked.
Colombia. She perked up.
He’d been to Colombia, as a matter of fact. He rambled about how suffocating it feels there in the cities. How there’s no space. How it felt like he didn’t belong. How he didn’t exactly think that it was worth the hype.
She sunk into her body then, and took a long sip of drink. She did not take the sips quickly: she drew out the sips, as if it was a life raft keeping her afloat.
“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.” – Sally Rooney, Normal People
Overhearing first dates has always been a favorite activity of mine. I like observing the world of first dates because it is so intrinsically tied up into rhythm. Many people liken it to dance. I think of it like music. In a song, if you have an ear for music, you can tell when there’s a note that doesn’t work, and when the harmony isn’t quite fitting with the melody. On a first date, it’s the same: you can tell pretty immediately whether people on a first date will harmonize.
Oddly enough, my interest in overhearing dates always ends with a first date. If I get the sense from body language that a couple has been dating for longer, my interest pulls away. Maybe it’s because first dates are novel, strange, and low-stakes. There’s a layer of cringe to a first date that’s fun to observe. I liken a first date to watching a group of six-year-olds play soccer: it’s chaotic and messy, and there’s something endearing in watching the meandering and the tripping up because it’s innocent. The question of whether they ‘win’ is not at all the point to me. But when they do score, it’s a minor miracle.
Like Connell in Normal People, though, my relationship to life, and maybe dating too, is largely mimetic. I’ve learned how to move through the world in some way through books and copying the movements of others. But when it comes to dating, what I’ve learned has probably been largely determined by the Culture. There are the dating apps, and the repetition of instant gratification that is baked into their algorithms, and then a slew of bad rom-com mindsets about dating and relationships that persist and twist obsession and greed into ‘love’. Perhaps the only real and ‘analog’ counter that I have to that world are the first-date conversations that I overhear. But then the problem is that I’m only overhearing first dates, and not third dates, or 80th dates.
Sometimes I fear that, to use more sports analogies, when it comes to dating I’m a bit like a tennis player who only knows how to serve, with no idea of how to return a volley or maintain a rally. I think there’s a simple reason for that: first dates are fundamentally easy. There’s only so much un-fun you can have when you’re grabbing a drink or two with a well-adjusted stranger on a Friday night, unless it’s a total dud or a horror story. First dates are, essentially, made up of the stories that we always tell ourselves anyways: the where we are froms, the what-we-dos. There’s something protective about first dates and being in that mindset all the time. For as long as you’re in the world of first dates, you only have to tell the stories of yourself that you want to share. You’re in control of the narrative of your own life, so to speak
The date, at this point, had been going on for about twenty or thirty minutes. There was an uneven lull in the conversation. He asked her about her plans for the rest of the day. When he said it to her, it felt like a wrapping-up. Her shoulders lifted when he asked her this.
She’s seeing her mom today. They’re coming in from Michigan. Upper Michigan, near Canada. He tells her that he has roots in Indiana, actually. His family is back there, still. It’s a kind of conversational buoy that’s thrown between them. She grabs onto it. She launches into a monologue about the Midwest, and her parents and why they have decided to stay in Michigan when they could do anything else. Their daughter and son are grown, she mentions. They could move anywhere. The world is their oyster, so why on Earth would they hold onto Michigan, and where are so many things out there to do?
Maybe they like the nature, he says.
Uh. Nope.
But I kind of like visiting Indiana, he said. The nature, the space. The world seems wide open in Indiana. Flat and endless. There are familiar things in Indiana: places, people. The town that his parents are in probably hasn’t changed all that much since he was there last.
But I miss New York, though, when I’m away for too long, she says.
When the lull returns, she brings up the holidays. They’re talking about Christmas and Thanksgiving. She explains to him how Christmas Eve is a big part of the holiday for her, as an Italian and as a Catholic. It’s the night that everyone eats together, opens the family presents, and goes to midnight mass. His father is Jewish. He talks vaguely about the major holidays that he knows – but he doesn’t know them well. He puts up a menorah, for example. But he never celebrated the whole eight nights.
To tell you the truth, he says, I don’t have that much of a real connection to the holidays.
They sit back and maybe the longest lull in the conversation begins. They go for ten, fifteen seconds without speaking. She is rubbing her fingers together, and he is looking out onto the street. She is blinking, slowly, and the sunshine is directly now on her cheeks. They talk about the winters. She misses the snow. She remembers, in her first years here, the massive snowstorms that would force her to stay inside.
Even if you’re a hardcore climate activist, it’s hard not to enjoy a nice day, he says.
And she smiles, at that.
Here’s a line that I’ve been hearing over, and over, and over again from people on the periphery of my life: that dating is now impossible. With the apps, and the internet, everyone has endless options at the edge of their fingertips. If a first date isn’t perfect, you can swipe your way immediately into another one. This is supposed to be an empowering thing. One of the worst things that you can do, people say, is settle. We’re told to be on the lookout for red flags, so-called warning signs. At the first sign of trouble: bail. There is always somebody else to meet. Why put up with anything less than perfection? It is almost like dating has become a modular activity, where we seek out people who will temporarily fit into our lives until they no longer quite click with how we would like to be. And then we move on. And then we try to find the next person, the next thing to supplement us. This is all sold to us under the guise of ‘Self Discovery’. It’s part of the grand overarching cultural ethos of constant striving. In this worldview, the only way to self-actualize is to cast yourself as widely as possible. It’s a mindset that wants us to plow the whole earth and extract every drop of value that we can get from others, and then leave when it is no longer nourishing for us. And this is supposed to be a wonderful and beautiful thing. Or, at the very least, we are told that this is the best we can do.
The afternoon sun has risen over the block of brownstones and is peeking through the branches and leaves. The sun is on the woman’s face, and she is quiet, and they are quiet. Maybe she is thinking about Rome. She had earlier mentioned a trip she had taken while living in Italy. She had done months of research into her ancestry. There was a branch of her family still, near Naples. She had taken the train to the village, met her family there, and spoken to them in broken Google-translated Italian. They all ate together in the backyard. They had all been sitting outside, eating pasta, and drinking bottles of wine as the sun went down. It was a slow kind of life. It had been nothing like the Zoom calls for work, the endless emails, or what she knew of as her life. It had been bowls of olives, and endless carafes of cabernet, and children running around the table and laughing. It was a vacation, a trip. It couldn’t be her life. She had to work and live and do everything else. She had to come back to New York, to real life. She had said things to that effect, and he had quickly agreed that yes, this is the life we have, but it’s pretty awesome, isn’t it? They could travel the world, work from anywhere, and meet so many people. What a beautiful world.
She left suddenly then, without much warning, to go to the bathroom. He readjusted on the bench. His shoulders slackened. He was slouched, hidden like a slinky receding into itself. He crossed his arms then and looked up and down the street, at the people walking past, the couples holding hands, the cars driving slowly down the residential side street. There were hints of grey and white at the tips of his dark hair. There was a small bald spot. There were slight brown splotches and stains on his blue shirt.
A mother with a stroller came by and sat on the opposite end of the bench. He moved over, giving her room. He looked behind his shoulder, toward the bathroom, and then investigated the stroller. He smiled, made a babyish cooing sound, and waved.
How old, he asked the mother.
She’s nine months, the mother said with a thick New York accent.
Aw, look at her, he said. So young, yet already so much smarter than me!
The mother gave him a conciliatory laugh. She brought out her cellphone then, and he turned away. He looked down at his phone then. He opened up a text thread. And then an app. And there were other smiling faces and names on his phone.
His date came back from the restroom.
You’re ready to go, she asked. He nodded slowly and put his jacket on. He stood up and walked side by side with her down the sidewalk. He was maybe an inch or two taller than her. There were a few inches separating them as they walked together. There were these moments, when they were walking, when they would get closer, his shoulders getting close to hers, his hands brushing her coat, but then they would drift apart again. It was like they were testing out intimacy. Even if it was a test that only went the length of this walk back to the subway station. I looked up again. They were only an inch or so tall. And then, just like that, they were a smudge, but still somehow walking together.