To be honest, I think the only difference between what could’ve been my first date and what actually turned out to be my first date was a mutual understanding that I wanted it to be a date.
Had I flirtatiously, only one-tenth joking, asked, “So, can I count this as our first date?” the night my Best Love spontaneously made me dinner that first time might have been my first date.
Had I said, “Hey, do you wanna go out on a date with me sometime, maybe lunch?” rather than just “Do you wanna get lunch some time?” having pizza with the Boy in the White Hoodie might have been a date.
Had I admitted that I actually did like my Merry-Go-Round Man when he first asked if I had a thing for him, maybe our night at the gazebo would’ve been a date.
But I never did and they never knew and the rest was history.
And then of course, the few times I did actually ask someone out, they were uninterested (like my Real Life Bad Boy who asked out three weekends ago) or unavailable (like the New Guy Next Door who I asked out two weekends ago).
And I did get stood up a few times. By the same guy. And that’s something else entirely.
And then, last weekend, I tried my luck with another guy. Remember my post from a while back, “NOT A Love Confessional”? Yeah, that guy.
And he said yes.
And Monday at 9AM, we went on our first date. Mine and his.
Coffee at the campus cafe. And he walked me to class. And we talked. And it was nice. And that was that. But less than an hour later I was telling him that it felt like I was just hanging out with a friend, not like I was on a date.
It’s like this – if I’m gonna be with someone, I need this someone to be so fucking epic that if tomorrow either one of them show up and say they want me back, I’ll be able to fight the urge to run away with them. Or better yet, I won’t feel it all. I’ll be flattered and I’ll brag about it for the rest of my life and hold it over them and every other girl in their life. But I won’t run away with them.
I don’t want to want to run away with them. Not if I’m with someone else. So that someone else and I have to be a match of magic and passion.
And me and this guy just didn’t have that. He felt it too.
In fact, he paraphrased me a lot better than I can repeat myself in a letter he wrote to me – or rather an email he sent – after the fact:
Sometimes, it’s just that simple.
I’ll admit for more than three-hundred-and-ninety-five days, I wondered why my Best Love didn’t see me that way, I really did. Only because it confused me. And when I have a question, I meed an answer.
But it’s like this: He made my heart beat a certain (as I’ve said a thousand times before) and I made his beat a different way.
Or with my First Love, the way he made my heart beat outlived the way I met his.
And that is that.
It really is that simple.
