What do you do when you go on a blind date – and are disappointed at first sight?
What do you say when you know from 20 paces across a dark bar that there’s no chemistry, no spark? Should you blurt out: “This isn’t going anywhere. Can’t we end it right here?”
This question hit me head-on last week as I dashed into Whiskey Park on Central Park South, late for a blind date with a man I’d been fantasizing about for days.
He’d e-mailed me asking to meet after reading a story about my struggle to find love as a 29-year-old, unmarried Brit in the Big Apple.
“I am a 32-year-old Wall Streeter, good looking, intelligent and a lot of fun. I’ve dark hair, sexy green eyes – and I’m a GREAT date,” he promised.
But as he hailed me from across the bar, my fantasy vaporized into depressing reality.
It wasn’t the turtleneck, it wasn’t his looks (Nicolas Cage with a rounder face). It wasn’t the jaded way he offered me a drink. (Was that disappointment in his tone?)
It was just . . . he seemed so bankerish. Too neat. Too stiff. He certainly didn’t look like “a lot of fun.”
I sat down opposite him into an unexpectedly deep chair. Leaning back awkwardly, I tried to relax.
There followed a deadly pause.
We stared at each other. I felt compelled to gabble – about work, being late, writing e-mails, finding an apartment, work again – anything that came into my mouth. He looked at me blankly. Was it my accent? Was I talking too fast? Bad job interviews had gone better than this.
I drained my vodka and tonic. Would it look bad to order another one so soon?
“Have you ever been on a really bad date?” I finally asked. (Perhaps with some direction, things might improve.)
“Once, a woman I met for lunch ordered a BLT, then asked for extra bacon. It kinda made me feel sick,” he said.
Horrified, I looked down at my hands. (Bacon is my favorite food.) There had to be a way out of this, but I had no idea what it was.
In England, people don’t “date.”
Sure, we go out for dinner, go to the cinema, head down the pub. But only with people we know. The idea of meeting a virtual stranger, one-on-one, with the veiled possibility of romance, is way too traumatic. In England, hooking up with a man is a much more haphazard, instinctive affair.
Target Man is almost always a friend of a friend. (Meeting a stranger implies desperation and is simply not done.) You arrange to hang out with his friends – and hope he turns up, too.
When he arrives, you feign a total lack of interest by holding wildly animated conversations with everyone else. Meanwhile, you study him from afar. Only when you’re sure he’s the man for you do you launch yourself his way.
Simple. No tortured dinners. No wasted evenings. No getting stuck with the wrong guy.
“So do you want to go for dinner?” asked Great Date (without enthusiasm).
“That would be great,” I replied. Why were we going to go through with this?
We decamped to Rue 57 on Sixth Avenue and studied our menus – hard. We talked Chappaqua (his hometown), Yale (his university), Martha’s Vineyard (his vacation spot), marriage (tricky ground, but my obsession), dating (more tricky ground), European ski resorts (at last, something in common!).
I peered over the table in search of the “sexy green eyes.” But he wasn’t making it easy, shooting glances at the door every time someone walked in.
I knocked back my Pinot Grigio; he sipped his Bud Light. I decided to launch into the safe subject of movies. Surely we couldn’t go wrong there.
“Have you seen ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Draaaaa . . . ‘” I stopped mid-sentence. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Great Date shifted in his chair, threw back his head and broke into an enormous yawn.
Excuse me? No hand up to hide it. No apology. He was oblivious.
“So why exactly are you a GREAT date?” I demanded at last. (I thought it was fair to ask, after all.)
“I’m good at conversation. I pay for dinner and I’m a good listener,” he said, throwing back his head and yawning again.
“Long day,” I asked?
“No.”
At 11 p.m., we finally called it quits.
“Thanks, that was lovely,” I lied.
“Yes,” Great Date replied, as he swiftly hailed us taxis. “We’re going in different directions aren’t we?”
Wait a minute? True, we had no chemistry – where exactly did I go wrong? Now he didn’t even want to share a cab.
I guess that’s part of blind dating. One minute, you’re stuck with a guy you don’t like. The next minute you feel like you’ve been dumped by the love of your life.