A date with Алексис and some internal ranting

[garote]

I rode home from work and took a shower, then settled on the futon to watch a movie. About a minute in, the computer beeped with a spontaneous message from Алексис. Her plans had fallen through and she wanted to hang out with me. I agreed to meet her at 9:00pm at the Cafe Au Coquelet.

When I walked in, Алексис had already found a table. She was quite small - barely five feet - with close-cropped red hair and a slender frame. When she looked up from the menu I saw a sharp chin and a sharp nose, and deep-set eyes with a mottled brown coloring that seemed to glow. She looked older than all her photos. Had she forgotten to update them? It reminded me that I should update my own.

She was wearing a loose sleeveless shirt with a ruffled v-neck, in a pastel color that would have complemented her skin if she hadn't acquired such a deep tan. In fact that was the source of my confusion about her photos: She was pale in all of them, but in person her skin looked mottled, like it had taken quite a while to darken and along the way had slowly burned as well. After a while of talking I got an explanation of sorts: She'd just returned from a two month worldwide trip, including a yoga retreat, and had gotten constant tropical sun exposure without bothering to wear long sleeves or a hat. I was secretly disappointed. She was still attractive to me, but less so than I'd been expecting.

Just after this information arrived, my brain did a round of gymnastics in the space of a few seconds. The routine went like this:

"You're acting like a typical man; applying strict beauty standards that you don't need to meet."

"No I'm not. I take obsessive care of my own skin. I wear a hat every single second I'm in the sun, and wear long sleeves and even gloves when I need to. I'm applying the same standard I use for myself."

"But if you got close to her and touched her she would feel the same regardless of skin tone, so how much should it matter, after the first few seconds of meeting?"

"I'm not going to see it once, I'm going to see it every day. I'm either going to like it every single day, or I'm going to find it off-putting. You're saying I should suppress my reaction and get used to it? To what end?"

"So you can stop being so shallow. She probably feels healthy for the relaxation and sun exposure, and here you are devaluing her for the way it's changed her appearance. That's misogynist. Change your ways."

"Shut up; I'm not going to make my personal physical preferences a matter of gender social justice. Is a woman who doesn't date any man shorter than her a misandrist? Or does she just know what she likes? Why can't I?"

"How dare you have physical preferences and be explicit about them!"

"Screw you; I'll do what I want!"

And there the mental gymnastics ended, and my attention was back on the moment at hand.

Алексис was lively and expressive. Pixie-like. I found myself enjoying her company, but not feeling any real sense of chemistry bubbling up between us. Perhaps this was a consequence of the bisexual nature she declared in her profile. With me it's either a complete miss, or a massive hit, depending on the details of the skew away from the norm. I was surprisingly vague on those details though, and mapping them out was an ongoing process. I really expected to be farther along with it.

Just as I had been with Аннесса three days ago, I began to feel the absence of something. A kind of playful mental aggression, or even a physical assertiveness. Алексис laughed at my occasional wordplay but made no jokes of her own. She never gushed about anything, never conveyed genuine excitement about the things she was describing. She was interested and engaged, but not actually excited. Or perhaps this was as excited as she ever got.

Perhaps she was also reflecting me. Perhaps my life needed more genuine enthusiasm. First meetings can be tricky that way.

We both ordered dinners and barely found time to eat them, since we were both constantly talking about our lives. She was good with general questions, and gamely followed my somewhat confusing attempts to explain what I did at my current and old jobs. We got into the details of her job for a while, and the trials and tribulations of information management in an entrenched bureaucracy. We compared notes about our impressions of eastern philosophy, sexism, a few plunges into politics, and the work of Richard Dawkins, whom we had both read extensively. We'd both reacted the same to his book "The God Delusion": It's good that someone wrote on the theme, but it was a too strident in execution. We talked about podcasts for a while and shared our lists -- always a good topic.

Things only trailed off at a few points - once after some confusion with a waiter, and once after paying the bill when we were both visibly tired and didn't know a tactful way to move the evening on.

Though she was worn out and needed to get home, she raised the possibility that we were biking in the same direction. We looked at a map. Yes we were! As we rode we kept close to each other, chattering the entire time about friends and way the Bay Area housing market had treated them and us. I hugged her no less than three times - once outside the restaurant, and twice in front of her house - and she accepted the gesture without actually reciprocating it. It was an odd combination of signals that I'd been getting a lot lately: My date wanted to linger and keep talking, but had no interest in physical closeness.

On the solo ride back to my house, I cast my mind back to the previous date - the one with Аннесса - and asked myself, "What is going wrong here? This is three strike-outs in a row. First that strange unreachable woman Сюзи, then Аннесса, then Алексис. Each time, something just doesn't click. I smile, I joke, I bring up topics that matter, I ask plenty of questions, I try to fit in chivalry when I can, I make attempts at physical interaction that avoid awkwardness... But something just isn't right. These women have glanced off me. And when the date is over, I feel perfectly content to just go home and never hear from them again. The only slight exception to this is Аннесса, and that's only because she's drop-dead gorgeous. There may be no actual chemistry with her at all."

Perhaps they instinctively sense that I'm not ready. Maybe it's my own attempts to keep a conversation going when it would otherwise just fizzle out that are driving them off. Maybe I need to stop trying so hard at being a good date, and just say what I feel. Would that be better?

I didn't know. At least there's a nice flipside to romance not mattering: I had no regrets.

Comments

[zeugma92]

If you ever dated a Russian, you’re gonna have to write the name in Greek or Hebrew letters! 🤣

I also like your choice of disguising them that way. I used to use Greek letters when I wanted to write about something sensitive in my notebooks back when I lived with nosy people, an idea I got from reading about how Bertrand Russell did just that. Thankfully those days are long past. I do have a passing familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet so I can easily sound out the names, so I’ve been wondering, is this more just to make these entries less searchable by anyone concerned, than anything else?

[juan_gandhi]

These days neither helps. Google translate will help decode. Code names would work.

[garote]

True fact. Yeah, modern auto-translated search makes all this more complicated.

The idea with the Cyrillic letters is to make it obvious that I intend to obfuscate names, and so I can use the same name for the same person across entries for consistency. The names are all legitimate names in Cyrillic, but who's to say they correspond to any particular name in English? I didn't want to just call people "Date Number 16"...

I understand there's always a violation of privacy issue if someone is willing to do enough detective work. But, that someone would have to come back to my journal after 10+ years, dig back to these entries, read them, go "hey I remember that date, that was X!", and then ... what, tell everyone to go read it??? Okay, have fun.

And, is the content that embarrassing? The entries have a lot of my own weird observations and weird and judgmental opinions that my perspective has evolved away from. For a lot of this time I was barely in my right mind, romantically speaking. Searching for something I didn't actually need. The embarrassment is mostly mine!

But ten years is a lot of time. It's longer than the average first marriage. (8 years, according to the current US Census.)

[juan_gandhi]

The content is sweet, but who knows how the characters prototypes would react.

[juan_gandhi]

Wow. Thank you!