Intake Form

I had a date yesterday.

He was attractive. Punctual. He pulled the chair out, which I've decided I like. He ordered wine without making it a whole thing. The first ten minutes were fine. Better than fine. I thought: okay. This might be one of the ones that works.

Then he started talking.

I'm going to be fair. He didn't open with it. He waited until the second glass, which shows restraint, or possibly just pacing. But when it came it came fully formed, complete, with structure and vocabulary and the practiced quality of something that has been told before to other women at other tables and received, presumably, with sympathy and warmth and the specific attentiveness that certain men have learned to expect when they perform their damage in public.

The mother. The ex-wife. The childhood thing, which was genuinely not good, I'm not dismissing it, but which arrived at the table before the pasta and did not leave for the rest of the evening. The anxiety, named and categorized. The attachment style, identified and explained. The therapy, current, ongoing, productive, he's doing the work, he wanted me to know he's doing the work.

I know you're doing the work. I can see the work from here. The work is sitting across from me drinking Merlot and explaining its origins.

I have things. Everyone has things. I have a past that would, under the right lighting, make excellent dinner conversation, probably better than his, frankly, but I am not going to do that to a stranger on a first date because a first date is not a confessional and I am not a priest and the intimacy that gets produced by that kind of early disclosure is not real intimacy, it's a simulation of intimacy, and the simulation feels like the real thing right up until it doesn't, which is usually around the third date when the material runs out and you realize you've been handed a file rather than a person.

I know what he was doing. I'm not being uncharitable. He was establishing himself as someone who has done the interior work, who is not one of those men, who is safe and evolved and self-aware and worth the risk. I understand the pitch. I've sat across from enough men to recognize the structure of it. And the thing is, I don't even think it was bad. I think he genuinely believed that this was the way to do it, that openness was the currency and he was spending it, that I would receive his disclosed vulnerabilities and in return feel safe enough to disclose my own and that this exchange would constitute connection.

It doesn't constitute connection. It constitutes an intake form.

Connection is not the transfer of information about damage. I know this because I spent a long time confusing the two, letting the disclosure of hard things stand in for the actual harder thing, which is being present with someone without the prepared material, without the narrative, without the version of yourself you've assembled for the purpose. The prepared version is easier. The prepared version has been refined. The prepared version knows which parts land and which parts require follow-up and how to pace the reveals for maximum effect. The prepared version is not you. It's your content.

He has good content. I'll give him that. Coherent arc. Strong central conflict. Resolution in progress. A therapist who appears to be earning her fee. If he were pitching a memoir I'd say the bones are there.

I'm not a publisher.

The wine was good. The restaurant was his choice and it was a good choice, which tells me something, and what it tells me is that there is probably a person underneath the content, someone who notices things and has taste and shows up on time and pulls out chairs, and that person might be worth knowing, in the way that most people are worth knowing if you can get to them, which requires in this case tunneling through a significant quantity of processed personal history to find out.

I'm forty-five. My tunneling days are behind me.

And yet.

I haven't decided about the second date. I'm aware that's irrational. I'm aware that I've just spent several hundred words building a case against a man for being too honest, which is a strange position for someone who prides herself on honesty, and I'm aware of the irony, I'm always aware of the irony, that's its own problem that I've written about elsewhere.

But there's a difference between honesty and inventory. Between being open and being managed. Between telling the truth and presenting the truth in a format that's been optimized for reception. He was optimized. Everything was optimized. And optimized things make me tired in a way that unoptimized things don't, even when the unoptimized things are harder, even when they require more patience, even when they go nowhere.

He texted this morning. Lovely evening. He hoped I got home safe.

I got home safe. I made tea. I sat with the question of whether I'm being unfair to a man who did nothing wrong, who was generous and present and honest about himself in ways that many men are not, and whose only real crime was showing me the filing system before I'd asked to see it.

I haven't replied yet. Should I?

The tea was good though.

-Laura