A confusing date with Сюзи

Сюзи was another redhead, with a profile that showed a strong intellect and a love of the outdoors. She was eight years younger than me, and I was wary of that, so I sent her a friendly message, but not a flirtatious one. I was surprised when she responded with an invitation to meet. We met at a cafe a few blocks from my house.

She was small and skinny, and looked exactly like her picture presented. She shook my hand instead of offering a hug, which was fine, since our bodies were far enough out of proportion that it would have been awkward. She had very freckly skin and wavy blond hair of the kind that would snare up in your hands if you tried to pet her. As she stood in the harsh lighting of the Rudy's Cafe doorway I couldn't help noticing a collection of mustache and chin hairs on her face. Did she not care to shave or cut them? I didn't mind from a physical standpoint - in fact I found them kind of cute - but I was curious what that meant about her personality. Traditional standards of feminine grooming are weird. How did she choose her own, and why?

We sat down at a booth and she immediately began to barrage me with questions, offering no commentary or elaboration of her own. Her comport was very masculine - even a bit mechanical - and I could tell she was attempting to put me on the defensive. It was so relentless I had to deliberately comment on it in order to derail her, and start my own set of questions, then gradually release control of the conversation, just so things could even out.

We talked about houses and politics and dipped into our histories. She mentioned growing up in the midwest near Illinois, then moving to Seattle to pursue a doomed relationship, then coming down to California to go to school. We eventually settled into a discussion about the Bay Area and what was worth investigating, and various ways to enjoy it. Since she was a recent arrival I made myself useful offering a list of must-see landmarks.

She was self-contained, a bit harried, and utterly lacking in a sense of humor. Only about 15 minutes in I knew there was no romantic potential between us, and at the halfway point of the meeting I knew there wasn't even any social potential between us. She wanted to study, chill with her friends, doggedly pursue her political cause, and root around in her alternative lifestyle culture, well into the future. She was a universe away from being a real partner or an in-depth lover, let alone a potential parent. I got the feeling she was the kind of person who needed to "blow off steam" by using intoxication as an end-run around her emotional defenses, and was helplessly stuck behind them otherwise.

I'm not going to say it's a pattern, but it's certainly interesting, that while dating in my 30's I keep meeting women who drop so easily into this framework. They flee their home life, dedicate themselves to a cause, glom onto an older man who is also coincidentally involved in that cause, then stumble between repetitions of that relationship for years, growing more and more emotionally isolated, and increasingly reliant on the mind-altering trappings of their lifestyle to feel vulnerable and engaged. Then they smack up against 30 - or 35 - or 40 - and have some kind of epiphany that they don't want to stay in this scene forever, so they try to transition to another lifestyle. One of real intimacy and home-building. And they are horrified to discover that it's not the cakewalk they'd always figured it was for the "normies".

That normal boring conventional existence that those other women went for - those lame domestic women back home - it's not something you relax into, like a bathtub. It's not even normal, boring, or conventional. It takes skills -- emotional, behavioral, even spiritual skills. And now you realize you are behind in those skills, by a decade or even two. How do you cohabitate with someone you're romantically linked to, without turning it into a bloodbath that forces you to cut ties and move on? How do you advocate for the things that sustain you, without alienating your partner? How do you really know what those things are? How do you maintain passion in a sex life with someone you see every day? How do you run a household larger than a tent and a couple of backpacks? How do you do these things deliberately, forging ahead even when your own instincts are hard to read, without relying on luck or leaning hard on your partner? How do you develop the instincts?

It's all too easy to denigrate that work, push it into the future, and go on another safari.

Anyway, it was a cordial waste of about two hours, and when we hugged by my bicycle as I prepared to ride off, it was every bit as physically awkward as it promised to be. And wow; her hair smelled awful. I sincerely wished her luck with her studies, like one might wish for a college friend, and as I rode home I could feel everything I’d learned about her drifting out of my mind, as though the cold night air was straining it out into mist behind my bicycle. I had no doubts that we would never go on a second date.

This is the truly annoying thing about online dating. No matter how many times you've filtered out bad matches in the past, the bad matches keep coming at you. You never stop wading through people who look great on paper but are a clear "no" after a few moments face-to-face. I was sure Сюзи would find someone to warm her bed in short order. Someone much more aggressive, less keen on intimacy, and happy to do a lot of verbal jousting. That's not me.