As a woman who has been single for, well, a while now, I’ve been on what one may call a dating continuum. I have dozens, okay, hundreds, of dates under my Calvin Klein belt, but I had never gone out with a man that I had met while on a date with another man. Call me provincial, but it just never occurred to me. I actually met William while on date at a fabulously cozy, upscale eatery in Los Angeles. I suppose I need to clarify that my date, Ed, and I concurrently met him at the bar and chatted with him for well over an hour over cocktails. It was all so spontaneously amiable and fun that we all exchanged business cards and made plans to get together the next time Ed was in town. Sidebar that Ed is a New Yorker who pops into town about once a month for business, which is when I would see him for his little sojourns, which were always fueled with great cuisine and ample amounts of alcohol. Good times!
Being the polite girl that I am, I emailed William the following week saying how Ed and I enjoyed meeting him and would look forward to getting together soon. This somehow (!) spiraled off into a thread discussing food, restaurants, and tequila bars. We frequented so many of the same places! How could we not have run into one another? Suffice it to say he ended up asking me to dinner that weekend and I accepted despite having my reservations. I questioned if perhaps this really was a date and not just a friendly invitation? Did he think Ed was my boyfriend? If so, what kind of a man does that? And how old was he anyway? He looked older, sixty, in fact—significantly older than me. I have something of a guideline to not date anyone who had either started puberty or begun college the year I was born. This is a loose guideline as of late—its slim pickins when you’re over thirty-five in L.A. Besides, he looked good for sixty, hell, he looked good for forty-five! Super fit having spent every morning at the ass-crack of dawn at a trendy Westside gym along with something of a stringent eating regime five days a week. On weekends though, he liked to drink some top-drawer tequila! Well, me too. Really just the tequila-drinking part is where I found the body-is-my-temple similarities.
He took me to a marvelous place in Venice where he thought I would love the architecture, communal tables, and creative fare, and he was spot on. We ate, drank, and chatted about everything and nothing all at the same time. There were so many me toos that it was impossible to keep up. He was charming, attentive, and very generous. He romantically held my hand and was every bit a gentleman. After dinner, we walked down the street to another place for dessert, an after-dinner drink, and more great conversation. We ended it with a take-your-breath-away kiss and promised to do it again very soon.
We had two more dates very similar to this. I met some of his friends, took him to my favorite neighborhood place, coincidentally, where I met Ed. This man was into me. And I was feeling very warmly toward him as well. I found him attractive and interesting, he was intelligent, enlightened, and seemed to be much evolved. He brought a lot to the proverbial table and I especially liked his views on marriage. He stated that he never saw himself being married before, that the rest of his life seemed like a long time to spend with one person, but now that he was getting older, and therefore, closer to the end of his life, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. He could commit for fifteen to twenty years. Hopefully he wouldn’t live past eighty because that might be pushing his commitment level too far. Being unmarried in midlife myself and not really looking for a husband anytime soon, I found this refreshing and amusing all at the same time. I was super attracted to him, he was an amazing curl-your-toes kind of kisser and he seemed to have come far along in his life to have figured some shit out and liked the person he was in the world. Off to a swimming start to who knows what, but it looked like fun to me!
