Last night, as I was standing in Liverpool Street station on my way home from drinks with friends, I felt my purse buzz from my phone vibrating upon having received a text.
Now, if you got a text from a number you didn't recognize, saying merely, "Have you had dinner yet?" what would you do? As a sane person, I'm betting you would probably ignore it, or at least write back, "Who the hell is this?"
Instead I wrote back, "No, and I'm very hungry. I'm currently in Liverpool St station, where should I go now?"
In response I got a text came back saying to meet at the Shepherd's Bush tube station, so I realised it was the guy who had asked me out on the Tube yesterday. I seriously had thought he would flake out and never call me, so quite a surprise to get a text the very next day, asking me out to dinner.
And this is where I wonder if I like to pretend I'm braver than I really am, because I found myself getting quite nervous, asking myself, "What on earth are you doing, meeting some guy you don't know for dinner?" Yet I figured if I gave myself too much time to think about it, I'd wimp out and never do it, so I just decided to go for it, even being tired and a bit bedraggled after a full day in the office.
I arrived at Shepherd's Bush station, saw him (thank goodness I remembered what he looked like), and we went up an alleyway of restaurants, before I spotted a Mexican place that I knew I liked, and suggested we go there. (Also, as I figured he would be buying me dinner, it was cheap enough that I knew I wouldn't feel any guilt about him paying). So then he impressed me by ordering everything in Spanish (he lived in Spain for a while), and we conducted all of our interactions with our waiter in Spanish. I understood everything the waiter said, but admittedly struggled to keep up!
Turns out he is a plastic surgeon (but entirely reconstructive, not cosmetic), originally from Egypt, lived in Spain, and seems to travel a lot. He used to ride horses, he enjoys doing medical research, and he loves his job.
So what did I think of him?
If you asked me to list what I wanted in a man, I'd probably say someone who was confident (enough to ask out a random girl he met on the Tube), intelligent (being a doctor), intellectually curious (still doing research and is studying Hebrew), well-travelled (has been all over the world), good-looking (hey, I smiled at him first because he was kind of cute), who rode horses (in his youth), values family (lives with his brother), fiscally conservative (moved to SheBu recently because he thought it was silly to spend so much on rent near Covent Garden), financially secure (he's a surgeon, for cripes sake, and he paid for dinner), speaks Spanish (fluently), and was into me (called me the very next day). Okay, so this guy is doing EVERYTHING right. How well did I do for a random guy picking me up on the Tube, eh?
And yet.
What is it that makes us attracted to some people and not others? Why when we meet some people do we want to rip their clothes off and do the horizontal tango, whereas others all we can think is, "They'd make a great friend." What causes that electricity, that chemistry, that buzz that makes you draw physically closer to them, almost unconciously?
I mean, if I thought this guy had asked me out because he wanted to make new friends, this would have been a total success of a date. I mean, such a nice guy, really interesting, I honestly enjoyed having dinner with him. But at the end of the evening? I totally ducked out of getting to close or letting him go for a kiss, giving him a peck on each cheek and practically running away. Is it just that I'm out-of-practice? (Alas, it's been a while since there's even been a good make-out session going on). Is it that there was just too much pressure on this one date? Or is it that....as nice as he is....I just don't like him "that" way?
I guess if I were looking for excuses as to why I "just wasn't that into him", I could probably point to his obvious workaholism, as he claimed to have no idea what to do with himself if he had more than two days off. And yeah, a doctor? I barely survived dating my ex (another workaholic doctor, and he was still just in med school!), so why would I want to go back and turn myself into a punching bag for round two? Yeah, dating a brilliant surgeon sounds nice on paper, but what about the reality of it? So yeah, apparently I'm really into unmotivated lazy guys, can't stand those who are driven and work long hours!
At the end of the evening, he really left the ball in my court, saying, "You have my number? Text me sometime." Maybe he could sense my ambivalence.
At first I figured there was no point in seeing him again, but my sister-in-law advocates that I should give it one more date, and see if perhaps he was just nervous and needs to warm up a little. Maybe. But I think mostly I just want to dial the whole thing back a little, as a full dinner out the day after meeting him was a bit full-on. So unsurprising I was a little unsettled by the end of it all. As I said, I'd love to keep him as a friend, but how on earth do you communicate that? And I can't just NOT call him, because that's cowardly, and note what I said above about how I like to pretend that I'm brave.
Any advice or suggestions most eagerly welcomed, as you can see I'm a bit at a loss here. But poor me, eh? Too many nice, smart, successful men taking me out to dinner. What strange problems I have...
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