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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
I'm dreaming of the white room
President Oprah? Godfather Trump? Noah Wyle will see you now? Starstock.com survey sez ... fans are nuts; after 33 years of throwing punches, William F. Buckley Jr. hangs it up. Plus: Jann Wenner jams, Yoko Ono swings ... it must be office-party season.
By Amy Reiter
[12/18/99]

People Feature
Bill Belew, the man who dressed the King
The creator of the glorious "Burning Flame of Love" and other sartorial extravaganzas recalls what it was like to design costumes for the messiah of Memphis.
By Mike Thomas
[12/18/99]

Nothing Personal
Rack of hams
Jann Wenner jams, Yoko Ono swings ... it must be office party season. Plus: Boy George narrowly escapes death by disco ball!
By Amy Reiter
[12/17/99]

People Feature
Megamorphosis
I now know what it feels like to be hated by every guy in a bar because the four hottest girls there are dancing intently around you. And yet, I am not all that distracted.
By David Goodman
[12/17/99]

Nothing Personal
Retiring line
After 33 years of throwing punches, William F. Buckley Jr. hangs it up.
By Amy Reiter
[12/16/99]

Complete archives for People

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I see a woman standing alone at a private function and introduce myself -- her name is Amy. (No, it isn't, but play along.) We chat. I ask her to dance -- we dance. More chat. I ask if she'd like to go for coffee sometime, or maybe even get a bite to eat. Amy is noncommittal, but gives me her phone number. A few days later I call -- she calls me back and we talk some more. During a second conversation I ask if she'd like to have coffee. She agrees. Coffee lasts two hours and the conversation ambles over numerous topics, casual and otherwise. Toward the end I ask if she wants to go to a Halloween party with me -- she says she'll have to check her work schedule and get back to me.

Later, I'm having trouble getting Amy on the phone. I leave several messages with her roommate -- I suspect she's blowing me off. But lo and behold, she phones and says she can go to the party after all. We make arrangements and, as the call is wrapping up, I mention that I've gotten almost chummy with her roommate, thanks to all the messages I've left. "Oh, you mean Tom?" she asked. "He's my husband. Is it OK if he comes to the party too?"

Well, hell -- why not? And damned if they didn't both come -- my hot date and her mild-mannered spouse. It wasn't like that, either. Amy may have been perversely naive, but naiveté it was, not some other wickedness.

An extreme example of miscommunication, but not unique. On more than one occasion I've vigorously pursued a woman, only to have some phrase like, "As my boyfriend said recently" drop from her lips on or about date No. 3, leaving me to wonder -- what philanthropic urge did she think was motivating my sudden outpouring of dinner invitations? Compassion for the clueless? Concern that anyone so dense is surely unable to boil water and must be fed?

These puzzling encounters have led me to believe the dating scene has been misrepresented in popular culture. There's an underlying assumption that runs through almost all portrayals of romance, from movies to magazines to Archie comics -- the premise that, when boys and girls get together, everyone knows the agenda. Will it be yes or no? Betty or Veronica? Embrace "The Rules" or break them, but we all know the rules are there, and we all know what's at stake.

Except for Tracy. I asked her out shortly after she told me about breaking up with her boyfriend. Or Corrine -- a small business owner who tentatively accepted my dinner invite by saying, "My only constraint is this place" (her business). Or Delia -- she not only accepted my invitation to the opera but also mentioned she was spending Valentine's Day with her parents.

According to my rulebook (oh, young and innocent notion), those statements were signals -- coded messages -- meaning, "I am romantically eligible." I was, of course, right out to lunch. Coded messages don't work when only one person is decoding. Tracy had reunited with her boyfriend before our first date (there were three in total before this news was casually mentioned.) Businesswoman Corrine turned out to be happily attached (later a female friend suggested to me that women don't like to think of boyfriends as "constraints"). As for Delia, she clearly viewed Feb. 14 as nothing more than the 12th Day of Groundhog. Her indifference to calendar-based romance didn't bother her boyfriend any -- they're married now.

The world has changed since the days when every intermingling of unmarried men and women was seen to be fraught with danger and therefore tightly controlled. Ironically, the unspoken fears represented by the presence of chaperones made the exciting potential implicitly clear. Repression soaked everything in sex.

Not so today. My friend Amanda, a very attractive photographer, recently described a first meeting with a male colleague. "He asked for my card and I gave it to him. I was in total business mode," she recalled. Soon, however, his amorous intentions became clear and the very married Amanda hastily tossed out the H-word. "It's been so long since I've been hit on like that," she told me. "I keep forgetting that when you're single, everyone you meet represents possibility."

The modern necessities of business interaction have muddied the sexual waters considerably. Admittedly, a little romantic inconvenience is a small price to pay for our more gender-egalitarian society, but goddamn it, I wish we could all get it straight for once.

For a while I even tried to do it myself -- to drain that alligator-infested swamp o' love single-handedly. To accomplish this, I wrote a little speech. The Speech was delivered, in what I hoped were sincere and unthreatening tones, at the end of the first date. It announced to my companion that, in case there was any lingering doubt, my interest was more than platonic -- besides, I already had enough buddies. Romance was what I lacked, and I hoped the same was true of her. If she was unattached, I would like to see her again.

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