No bartender, cutting no end of limes, could have helped me make the call on pettiness, selfishness, pride, greed, or mean-spirited gossip. It had nothing to do with how beautiful they were. But mostly I figured things out way down the road, long after the first date, the first kiss, the first everything - long after I was too deep in to walk away. Accept it because humbleness is rare, and rarer still is it so easily earned, with this trick of the mind, driven as a simple assertion of the truth of things: There is no up or down in love.Īnd dating down? Do you really thing I would list those women upon whom I made judgment? They're still out there, living lives whole time zones away from my peculiarities. This is a form of honor, the representation that something dazzling is before you, or, better, that it's being discovered even as the date dwindles. I learned this at every date since the bar, and certainly at every not-date with the beautiful women I have had the pleasure of taking out professionally since then - Halle, Charlize, Brooklyn (although she took me out): Up. Never assume you are better possessed than the person you have nudged out into the world with you. Still, never assume the higher ground in love.
What are you, collecting pelts? Do you think it's that easy? In those cases, I was talking to women who'd never known it any other way.īut I learned: If you can't say that in some way the woman across the table from you is greater than you in some elemental fashion-smarter, sexier, more stylish, possessed of a better body, sweeter eyes, a more natural laugh-then what are you after? What are your ambitions for love? You have to give the higher ground to that which you desire. Which never really amounted to much, because I left the date that night-or the bedroom sometime later-feeling like I'd been acknowledging only a favor with all my energies. So I was wildly attentive, hyper-aware of who was watching us, and snaky with my coolness. Also, three dates with an all-American gymnast. I had several dates with a local weatherwoman, a woman who was constantly asked for her autograph although she was only on the air weekends at 11:00. Another time, I had three drinks with a Division-I cheerleader. I once went to dinner with the Miss Alabama runner-up. And when I did get up the nerve to ask a woman out to dinner, it was generally driven by a hazy enough mixture of lust and expectation that I myself couldn't tell up from down-that is, whether I was dating up or down. I tended to go home with waitresses, or charm female friends into sleeping with me. But I was young, I wore a vest to work, and I liked to think I could understand the world in a sidelong glance. So cruel, my assumption that each of us is so limited by the first impression, by what is stock about our appeal or readily apparent in our best efforts. So I liked to lean on the end of the bar, and determine how far "up" a man could go in terms of whom he'd clamped on his arm for the evening.
But for every pair, one of the two people was by necessity "dating up." Usually the man. There were, in the universe I created, no perfect matches.
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