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A special hell called dating | page 1, 2
Eventually the infant Speech was strangled in its crib, and for that I owe a debt of gratitude to
Marilyn. My experience with her highlighted important differences in male-female dating strategies. A
confident, outgoing graphic designer, Marilyn responded to The Speech by saying she wasn't really
looking for a relationship, but would like to be friends. Oh no, I said. I'd been in too many of those
unhappy situations -- two people pretend to be pals although one of them is merely trying to keep a
foot in the door for future romance. Forget it, I said. Too bad, Marilyn replied. Marilyn met Jim no more than a month later. She told Jim exactly what she told me. Jim said: OK, let's
be friends. Last fall Marilyn and Jim had a big wedding in Holland. But well before that happy event,
Marilyn, bless her heart (we did remain friends whether I liked it or not), had the decency to give me
a good scolding about my heavy-handed approach. Yes, she told me, of course romance between us had
been a possibility, had I possessed an ounce of subtlety. Instead, my zeal to clear up potential
misunderstandings led me to perform heart surgery with a rototiller. What was intended as honesty was
perceived as an insult -- I didn't want to be her friend? To hell with me, then. The Speech didn't work for a number of reasons, not the least of which was: Proper dating procedure
occupies a middle ground between truth and lies. Lies are to be avoided, but truth? Like Jack said to
Tom, you can't handle the truth -- at least not in the beginning. Dates are desperate attempts to gain small bits of information from which a larger picture can be
extrapolated. In the compressed dating schedule, there is not enough time to create a detailed
portrait. Therefore every gleaned factoid tends to be given undue weight. If your date finds out four
things about you, each of those four things becomes 25 percent of your perceived personality. Do you
have a pile of old Spider-Man comics under the bed? Save this biographical tidbit for your one-year
anniversary and it becomes a charming little background filigree in the rich and manly Portrait of
You. But let it slip on the first date and bingo -- you're an inbred moron. Dating is diplomacy. Code words carry extra punch, as was the case in the Nation Formerly Known as the
Soviet Union, where the most innocuous official remark -- "Beloved leader has the sniffles" --
actually meant the funeral was last week. Seen in this light, The Speech was equivalent to a magnum of
drugstore perfume exploding in an elevator. If I was being this blunt right off the bat, my dates
assumed, surely my aggressive boorishness could only escalate. Another in my rich trove of disaster tales: Carol mentioned on our third outing that her foolish
friends thought we were dating. We are, I said. We're not, Carol protested. Fittingly, the setting was
a Vietnamese restaurant -- a veritable Khe Sanh erupted over plates of Imperial rolls. Exasperated, I
threw all diplomacy aside and asked which of the last four or five days she had been born on.
Remarkably, the donnybrook actually resulted in an honest conversation -- Carol eventually admitted
that she was interested in a potential relationship. She just hated spelling it out in black and
white. Should things not work out between us, Carol wanted plausible deniability -- the ability to
tell herself and others that romance was never an option anyway. But if The Speech doesn't work and plausible deniability must be maintained, how do poor single
seekers avoid misunderstandings? Are we forever doomed to romantic evenings with our dates and their
spouses? I decided that I needed to talk to Amy again. Perhaps she could tell me what went wrong. Why
hadn't she twigged to my real intentions? "But you're a journalist," Amy pointed out later over coffee. "You were interested in me, yes, but I
thought you were just interested in people." Like Amanda the photographer, Amy, a TV reporter, had seen nothing but collegiality behind my chatter.
Why not mention the existence of hubby Tom, just in case? "I didn't give it much thought," she
confessed. "I thought, you're in media -- your interest is just related to your profession." There you have it. Like so much of what ails society today, this was the media's fault. As for Amy,
you can probably tell she's a trusting and good-hearted soul. Her husband's nice, too. Maybe we can all catch a movie next week.
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