A brief date with Кэндис

[garote]

I met Кэндис for a nice outdoor Thai breakfast, the morning after sleeping over at Кэролайн's place for the first (and last) time.  I was skeptical because she was over ten years younger than me, and invited me out after only a few lines of online chat, saying that she preferred to "cut to the chase" and meet in person to gauge chemistry.

She was short, with curvy black hair just past her shoulders, and a round face. She wore bluejeans and a light sweater that accentuated her curves tastefully, and I was slightly disoriented by the age difference from the start because she looked like she fit in with all the other college students at the Thai place. The idea of dating someone still in college felt a bit dangerous to me.

We started off well, agreeing to wait in separate lines and buy two of each thing to cut the time in half, setting up across from each other at a little wooden picnic bench, and crooning over the amazing food. The first topic we settled on was summer adventures, and she enthusiastically listened to my tales of Alaska and Idaho.  She told me all about Burning Man and her weird social awakening there, falling in with a crowd of older men.  I surmised that while among them she had developed a taste for older men, hence her interest in me.

Attraction isn't straightforward, and most of the time people are just working with whoever appears in their path. But a skeptical person, seeing an older man and a younger woman together, would say the age difference alone was proof the participants had crappy priorities. Why would an older man like me entertain a younger woman if not for her body, since her personality would be less formed? Why would a younger woman entertain an older man, if not for his relative experience and power, since his body would be weathered and slow? It's all fertility on one side and money on the other.

Well, I can't agree with that misanthropic view. But I have to admit, some of my own experience - especially recently - has conjured a watered-down version of it in my head:

I feel like I've gotten confirmation of something I'd always suspected while dating in college: Some younger women target older men as dating partners because they feel overqualified to date someone their own age, based on "maturity". They might declare it like, "All the guys my age are macho, sex-crazed trash. Why waste my time? Older men treat me with the respect I deserve." ... But then they can walk into a situation where an older man is putting up with their worst personality traits for the sake of their sex appeal, giving them the perfect opportunity to fall behind in maturity, just as the men in their age group are catching up.

Then they enter their 30's and are confused to find that the men their age are now the ones complaining about maturity and respect. At least, the ones not dating college girls...

It's not a huge pattern. It's not a lot of men and women. But it's an explanation, at least, for the way some of these people I'm dating are behaving. And I was getting the solid impression that Кэндис was in this group, and expected me to act the complementary part, like she was the fertility idol and I was the horny gentleman. Someone only a bit less skeptical than the usual skeptic would say I was reading this into our conversation just because it's so plausible. ... I don't know; maybe?

But Кэндис kept teeing up opportunities for me to praise her sexual adventurousness at Burning Man and beyond, and mentioning her body, lingerie, and tattoos, as though she expected the focus to be there. I kept veering away to talk about culture or ideas, and found that the only thing she really responded to were travel stories that we could compare. She asked what I did for a living, and made a weird effort to be unimpressed by it, then started an inventory of Silicon Valley companies, pointing out that she'd dated at least one man from each, and tried to make general statements about what guys from each company tended to be like. I thought she was joking at first, but she took it seriously. In the end she gave me faint praise by saying that the company I worked for had the best dating potential, though she had most recently been involved with someone outside the industry, and from another country.

I set her Silicon Valley opinions aside and asked, "Oh? How did that go?"

"Well actually it's still going on," she said.

She told me about how she'd fallen for a French exchange student, despite "not wanting to," when he almost literally swept her off her feet at a dance party. She invited him home and over the next few weeks he convinced her to let him sleep at her place long-term, somewhere between a housemate and a couch-surfer, even though she "hadn't really wanted him to." They quickly got in bed together and into a relationship, which was currently ongoing, even though she "wasn't really interested in him."

"So really, what's happening right now is, I'm looking for someone to distract me from this guy, so maybe I can end things with him," she said.

I couldn't help poking at the subtext. "Well, if he wanted to climb into your bed, you could have said no, right? I mean, it's your house, your bed, your romantic life."

"I wanted to say no, but I couldn't. He was just so charming."

"So, part of you wanted to say no ... but it was overruled by the rest of you, which said yes!"

I figured this wouldn't a controversial way of putting it. We often have mixed feelings about people we date. But she became suddenly angry.

"I wanted to say no!"

"Was he threatening you or something?"

"... He was just really charming!"

"So you said yes to this guy because he was charming."

"I never said yes! I didn't want to date him!"

"What?" I laughed. "Then how did he end up in your bed?"

"I don't know, it just happened!" she yelled.

I was taken aback, but also annoyed, so I didn't back down. "It sounds like you're describing yourself as a hapless victim in your own romantic life, when you actually made plenty of choices along the way."

"Well it sounds like you're judging me and telling me what I should think! And I don't have to deal with this. In fact I don't see you as dating material anyway so we should just end this date right now," she yelled.

Abruptly she stood up and grabbed her purse, and walked away, leaving her dishes at the table.

I watched her back as she went, my emotions shading from disorientation to a weird kind of amusement. What had just happened? After a minute or so, I went back to my meal, then moved my dishes and hers to the cleaning bins. Maybe by challenging her I overstepped my bounds as the tolerant horny older man or something.

That was obviously the last we saw of each other. Later - a year later at least - she tried to claim me as a co-worker on "LinkedIn". I rolled my eyes and deleted the request.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

This is a very interesting story and philosophy. Funny how you acted like a "father figure". She probably just needed a compassion and sympathy. She's an artistic person, is not shi? Led by emotions, not by logic. Is not it just cute?

[garote]

Oh, so many people are led by their emotions even when they say it's all logic... I'm that way a lot of the time, when I'm not at work!

Even when people are applying lots of logic and reasoning to get something, their motivation for wanting it can be nothing but emotions, so what's the difference really?

I think this person was just used to never being challenged, and took it really badly. But I don't know. Maybe I looked too much like her Dad and her Dad always criticized her romantic life. :D

[juan_gandhi]

Oh, that's true.