There’s a couple sitting across from me and they’re driving me crazy.
The girl is explaining her work to her male companion – “You know JC Delaney, the advertisement company? They operate most billboard and bus advertisements, and I’m on the team that rotates them in South Gloucestershire”. This seems like the conversation that could only happen on a first date – something banal like what you do.
They’re both pretty overweight, BMI’s of maybe 28-30, with no significant muscle mass. The girl has bad skin and the guy has unkept facial hair, and they both dress pretty badly. They both wear glasses, and not in the good way. The clothes are loose, because there is nothing to accentuate.
The guy has been having a conversation on his phone for ten minutes. I always assumed that it was well known that this was something that was simply never done on dates, especially first dates. I mean, things that can go wrong – talk about pets, talk about kids and / or marriage, talk to someone else. Everything else is undramatically recoverable from, I think.
I wonder if he’s secretly aware of most of this, and is just so bored of the conversation he was meant to still be having that he’s just entertaining himself before enough time has passed that he an simply excuse himself with “and I really should be getting on” or something similar.
I see too many couples like this. It’s tragic. They do the first date in Starbucks, the most traditional and uninspiring of first dates, in the most homogenous-verging-on-platonic of coffee shop chains. I wonder if when they met, maybe at an office party, or a dinner party if that’s something they do, they asked each other across their Marks and Spencer china “We should go for coffee sometime.”. Maybe they both thought about how silly and American an idea that was, secretly enjoying that they were out, meeting people.
When he goes, he touches her shoulder in the most awkwardly affectionate way imaginable. Like, he’s going to follow these motions through to the bitter and uncomfortable and passably, technically sexual conclusion. Which makes me sad. Didn’t his friend on the phone have some advice to offer him about the situation that he found himself in? I mean, Jesus.
This makes me look further across the room, to a couple about as classically attractive as an American first family. They’re another, different stereotype. They’re reading the paper. It’s three o clock in the afternoon on a Sunday and she’s wearing pyjamas. She’s blond, and he has excellent facial hair. I imagine they have a puppy, that occasionally obtains modelling gigs working for Andrex. They seem…comfortable in each others presence.
Where Mr and Mrs Wrong filled silence with awkward conversation, they’re just reading. And I mean, aren’t first dates for never shutting up and throwing out the highlights of your tastes and watching sparks happen? Awkward first dates? You’re doing it wrong!
It feels a little like the difference between relationships as things that people have and relationships as things that people are seen to have. When its just motions whether they’re to the coffee shop or from dinner or in and out of each other, with no sentiment behind it… Feels empty to me, as an idea.
