I was yapping away in the kitchen the other night, probably stirring some pasta or something, when the subject of first dates came up. “I’ve been on so many bad ones,” I told my partner, the memory of them spinning around my brain like a View-Master. “And some good ones too,” I said, gesturing towards her with a spatula. There was the girl with the cigarette earring who invited me over to watch an entire series of Girls in silence. The girl who told me her life story over the space of 48 hours. The girl who invited three other girls, which meant our collective date turned into some sort of unhinged game show in which we were all somehow the loser.
But I also always really enjoyed first dates more generally. I liked the whole ritual of them: the getting glammed up, the selecting of the location (a dimly lit bar, where the music isn’t too loud or the tables too wide), and the getting to know a total stranger. I was never one of those people who couldn’t stand first dates, or got tired, or thought they were a failure if they didn’t result in something more. I like finding out about a person – what music they’re into, what relationship they were in before – and also being a brand new version of myself. There’s a magic to first dates that can’t be recreated later because you’re showing up completely unknown. And then, over the space of a few picantes or maybe a shared tiramisu, you slowly peel back the layers.
I don’t mean to sound annoying or smug (there can be a weird tension between single people and those in relationships, meaning that one can’t talk about the experiences of the other without feeling as though they are walking on very thin ice. The reasons for this are complicated and hard to pin down). And obviously I love being married. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the specific scenario of meeting someone for the first time and doing a sort of two-way presentation. Of course we do this to a certain degree with new friends, and when I interview people for my job some of that curiosity is quenched also – but that doesn’t mean it’s exactly the same (there’s no snogging involved).
I also wonder – and don’t come for me, I’m aware this is a sweeping statement – whether I look back on first dates so fondly because I am not heterosexual, and neither am I dating right now. The word from my straight friends is that it’s “the trenches” out there at present, with what Vogue columnist Shon Faye calls “a crisis of expectation in modern heterosexual dating”. “It seems that lots of straight men today look to women as a source of salvation – therapist, life coach and sexual partner rolled into one,” wrote James Grieg last year for Dazed, “but whether they are willing to return that effort in kind is a different question.” Obviously the same issues can, and do, exist for women dating women (see: this piece’s intro), but I don’t hear my lesbian or bi friends sounding quite so worn down.
Aside from all the above, I have found that there are plenty of ways to recreate the magic of a first date within a relationship: the thrill of getting dressed up, the sexiness of going to a restaurant tinged in red, all the things that you can find out about a person even though you’ve been with them for years (people change all the time, and I think it’s fun and important to get to know a partner’s “current version”). The other night, my wife and I went to four different date locations, one after the other, until we were probably close to, like, collapsing on the ground. Date nights aren’t the same as first dates, but they’re a different sort of enjoyable (I’d choose the former over the latter each time). Plus, of course, you already know they’re coming back to yours.
