Travelin' Light

Saturday night found me on a third date with a very handsome man whose company I find thoroughly enjoyable. So why, one might ask, did Sunday morning have me thinking that I hated dating, and never wanted to do it ever again? The reason is this: Dating makes me feel like a bull with its head down, snorting at the earth and tossing its horns about. I have no grace. I have no finesse. I am brutish; I trample the flowers and butt people with my hard, hard head. “Everyone hates dating,” my best friend assures me. But it’s hard for me to reconcile the reality of the single life with the cocktail-party-filled-with-bachelor-babes that I imagined when I wasn’t single. In truth, it’s more like going to a cocktail party where bachelor babes are rumored to be invited guests, but, upon arrival, discovering a nightmarish keg party with people fist fighting and throwing up on the lawn. Then realizing that you’re only wearing your bathrobe and a pair of swim fins. And the keg is tapped.

Since I’ve been single, I have blamed my seemingly rotten luck with dating on the guys I have dated. My tendency to hold potential suitors to a set of exacting and unrealistic standards while placing no such demands on myself is an old habit I am trying hard to break. Saturday night I turned the tables on myself in a way. Although my date was a perfect gentleman, the following morning’s frank post-date analysis with my two best friends revealed that elements of my behavior the prior evening qualified as both “douche-y” and “ghetto”. During the date I never once felt like I was being “ghetto” but in retrospect, I see that my manners could have been vastly improved. They say what goes around comes around, so if this guy never calls me again, it will just be payback for all the times I’ve quit calling perfectly nice people because they didn’t hold the door for me, or left the waiter a bad tip, or had a loose thread hanging from their collar.

The real problem is that you can never really know how you are perceived by others, and even if you could, there isn’t much you could do about it anyway. It’s a conundrum that usually just makes me say, To hell with it then- might as well be myself. But sometimes, usually in a dating situation, I find myself wondering and worrying over the mysterious version of myself that they see, the woman they think I am. I want to compose her, to make her my marionette. If I get dressed up and go to a nice restaurant, I can remember to put my napkin in my lap and avoid speaking with food in my mouth. I assume this leads other people to perceive me as well-mannered. But who is to say? Though it has been suggested that I do not pretend well, my friends’ honesty on Sunday morning was like cold water being tossed into my face. Of course it’s entirely possible that my date did not find me to be douche-y or ghetto, but chatty and pretentious instead. Or maybe he liked me.

As a kind of experiment I asked a couple of my friends to compile a list of adjectives that described me (yes, this is the kind of absurd activity my dear friends perform on my behalf). I told them to choose the first words that came to them, and not to censor themselves- I would put aside hard feelings in the interest of science. The list was interesting- some of the adjectives seemed to contradict one another; all of them were true. Not especially surprising was their omission of the following words: elegant, eloquent, charming, refined, graceful, articulate. But “douche-y” and “ghetto” didn’t make the list either.