This evening was the Younger Member's Committee Meeting, the first where I was taking over as the new Chairman. The Secretary of the Club called me before the meeting to ask if there was anything I wanted to talk about, which startled me a bit, but I was glad that he made the effort to be so nice.
I got to the club a bit early, thinking I might meet the Wild Welshman for drinks beforehand (we'd casually discussed this possibility last Wednesday), but he was actually doing some studying in the library and I actually wanted to make some notes before the meeting to feel more prepared.
So I popped down to the Business Suite, where of all funny things, there was Joel sitting and talking to some old guy. Joel didn't see me at first, and I thought about tapping him on the shoulder, but instead I just sat down in a chair directly behind him and didn't say anything. Funny enough, it only took him about five seconds to turn around and say, "Oh my God." I guess Joel can just sense when I'm there...
I laughed, and Joel introduced me to the older guy he was talking to, somebody apparently also from Magdalene. From the bit that I'd picked up on, I gathered that it was a business conversation, so after giving Joel kisses and doing the polite introductions, I let them be and got on the way to my meeting.
The meeting was good, if a bit dull as we hammered our way through a number of issues. Just meetings being the way meetings are.
Afterwards, I figured I would join the Wild Welshman in the bar, although was surprised then when he greeted a chap that I recognised as having been introduced to very briefly last Wednesday. We hadn't chatted much at the time, and I realised that the Wild Welshman must have invited him along to meet up for drinks this evening so that they could talk about some legal issues.
The Wild Welshman fetched us both drinks, and came back from the bar to find me and the new boy already deeply in conversation. I'll call him the Conservative, because very quickly I was finding that's what he was. Our conversation started with him talking about how he admired the US for having the tough conversations they do about abortion and right-to-life, while I argued that they were too extreme. So we were on the opposite sides of that issue.
And as we continued to talk, we were on opposite sides of nearly everything else. I've never met a more dyed in the wool conservative Catholic, who was just the opposite of everything my liberal, free-love self holds dear. Our conversation was getting very intense and heated, so when we were joined by the Wild Welshman's girlfriend (I think, she was not introduced as such, but I've seen her in a lot of photos with him lately), I tried desperately to bring us back onto more mild topics like studying law and the recent ball.
I managed to do this for a while, but then at about 9:15pm, the Wild Welshman and his girlfriend decided to make a move. Funny enough, there was no part of me and the Conservative that wanted to seem to go with them.
He got me another drink, and we just continued to sit in front of the fire (what is it about a REAL fire?) and talk, getting on to religion, the issue of married and female priests, family, love and marriage. Turns out that his mother is actually Indian (a surprise, as he looked like your classic pale, pasty-white British boy), and he'd actually grown up in a Muslim family (his father converted when he met his mother), and he himself was then a convert to Catholicism. He actually spoke Arabic, and had travelled all over Asia and the Middle East. Fascinating, to say the least.
And where it got really bizarre, was even as I was finding I disagreed with this guy on nearly everything, he was so thoughtful, so intelligent in the way he argued...it was a classic case of a guy appearing sexy by being smart. And so while I hadn't taken much notice of him the first time we met, the more we talked the more I found myself imagining what it would be like to kiss him.
And then our conversation turned to love and sex, and particularly sex before marriage. And in a strange turn, as I'm always so used to guys wanting to sleep with girls at all costs, here was one who did not believe in sex before marriage. He had slept with a girl before, one he'd been in a long-term relationship with that he assumed would end up as marriage, but it didn't work out. And he said that now he regrets having slept with her, as now he knew that the woman he married would not be his first.
Yet (and here is why my opinions have changed dramatically since I was a little innocent college student brainwashed by years of growing up in the ultra-religious US), I can't imagine a relationship that heads to a life-long commitment while denying one fundamental aspect of that relationship. We talked about how an ideal relationship would be one that combines friendship love and long-term companionate love with erotic love. Yet by denying yourself the opportunity to express the third until after you are married, to me it feels like you are building your whole relationship on a lie.
And so now we found ourselves at an interesting impasse: Here was a guy I wanted to sleep with, who by his way of staying and talking to me all evening (it was now approaching midnight and the bar would be closing soon) probably wanted to sleep with me too. But the conviction with which he spoke about wanting to wait assured me that he wouldn't given into temptation. And as a good friend (who did wait until his marriage) asked me the other day: Is not having sex before marriage a deal-breaker for you? And to my surprise, I think it is.
We talked about the idea of the joy of having something be "the first" time with someone, and I agreed that on a honeymoon, I'd want anywhere we went to the the first time we'd either been to a place. Yet, I remembered reading an article by a woman who talked about how she's "saved Paris" until she could go on a romantic trip with a serious boyfriend. And she did save Paris until that point, and went there with the guy who would become her husband. But then realised that she'd missed out on Paris with her girlfriends, going out to cafes and watching the cute Frenchmen go by, and she'd missed out on Paris as a single person. And so she said her advice to all young girls is: "Don't save Paris. Go now." To which the Conservative replied, "I'm saving Dubrovnik."
My response? "But there will always be somewhere new. Just the way hearing a song will take you back to the first time you heard it, there will always be new songs. And no matter how much we travel, even if we have to honeymoon in Somalia, there will always be somewhere new. Don't let life pass you by because you're denying yourself and saying no. Live life to the fullest. Now."
Finally it was past midnight, so we needed to go if we were going to catch the Tube. He lived in Sloane Square, so he had no reason to go to Green Park station, but he insisted on walking me there. And as we walked (him staying to the outside of the kerb, like a perfect gentleman) I was laughing and just enjoying his company, and I thought about a recent "Modern Love" column I'd read in the NYTimes, bemoaning the loss of romance in today's modern relationships.
As the author wrote:
Although the romantic rituals of my generation (late-night texting, loaded e-mails, Facebook stalking) may expedite courtship, they make for exceedingly dull love stories.
Will our tales of digital courtship capture the imaginations of our daughters? Will they be impressed when we tell them about that time the text message was misinterpreted, or how the cute boy re-tweeted our Vampire Weekend reference? Will they care?
Recently I was at a dinner with my uncle and two of his business colleagues, all of them between 50 and 70 years old. Because I am enrolled at their alma mater, they asked me questions about my dating life there.
“Do young men still take girls on walks along the river?” one asked.
“Well, no, not exactly,” I said.
I wasn’t uncomfortable talking about this, just embarrassed at what he would think of my generation.
“Is the Brattle Street theater still there?”
“Yes, it’s there, but people don’t really go so much,” I said. Why was I feeling less cool than a septuagenarian?
“Well, what do people do then, on a date?”
And I realised in that moment, with this boy who going entirely out of his way to walk me to the Tube station, by refusing to offer me the prospect of sex, he was offering me the possibility of romance. Old-fashioned romance, the way it used to be.
As we parted at the top of the steps to the station however, it was awkward. I desperately wanted to kiss him. With any other guy, after that kind of evening, I would have kissed him. And yet...here we'd spent the entire night talking about how much we disagreed. And you could tell he was thinking the same thing.
So he said he was sure he would see me around at the club (I'm nearly always there, after all), and kissed me on each cheek to say goodnight. What a frustratingly wonderful evening...I can't wait to see him again.
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