Around March time, when the weather was in the that weird limbo of being too warm for a serious winter coat and too cold to wear a jacket with a light top, I dared venture out on a Friday evening with just a jacket and a light top - and, as my date for the evening was running late, I was sitting outside at a pub in Notting Hill (in London...obviously) having a glass of wine on my ace and enjoying some people watching, freezing my noombies off.
My date for the evening was some new potential from the highly elite dating application, otherwise known as Tinder - a Mexican Spanish Guy, henceforth known as MexicanishGuy.
We'd matched on Tinder some days before and between chatting, I'd ascertained that he was only 3 years younger than me, he was an occupational therapist, he lived with his brother in the house that his parents owned (but did not live in), he was learning Japanese and had grown up between Kuwait and the United States - no major red flags here, folks!
Despite being half an hour late to the date, it started off really well - he took me to a Japanese bar for a few Japanese pints which were very tasty and we engaged in conversation about learning languages, our respective professions and the like. He explained that he had worked in the charity sector prior to becoming a therapist and had decided that he wanted to help people more than he was doing at the time, and that it was the motivation for going back to university to study occupational therapy. We also discussed the shortfalls of the NHS and then progressed onto our families and friends.
He started telling me about a woman that he knew from his Japanese class that had been acting really weird towards him since she had found herself a boyfriend and, without going into the details, explained the story of what had happened with them - which is to say, not very much. They'd been friends and she'd, apparently, become quite attached to him and then, when she found herself a boyfriend, she'd distanced herself and started acting strange. What he said next struck me as a little odd - he said, very specifically, that she suffered from a lot of "mental issues". Now, because this is not a thing that one typically hears people say about other people, unless spoken in jest, of course, I thought he meant that she had been diagnosed as having actual mental issues, which I enquired about and to which he replied that he didn't know if she had been diagnosed. I was a little confused, but I left it at that.
Anyway, I was on the route to being drunk at this stage - after two pints, and plodded off on slightly unsteady legs to the bathroom down a thousand stairs (Why are the bathrooms always in the basement!?) and, once I had returned, he lead me off to the next venue, which was a lovely tapas restaurant just off Portobello Road.
We sat, we chatted, he ordered Sangrias - it was really turning out to be a lovely date.
After about half an hour of drinking and chatting, he suggested that we get a few tapas as it was getting late and dinner time had come and gone. I wasn't sure what I was picking up as everything was in Spanish and, being vegetarian, I was cautious about picking things that might contain sneaky meat, so I ended up with 4 plates - two of which contained variations of olives. As I sat down with my mostly olive-based dinner, he sauntered off to get his tapas and returned a few minutes later with a few extra plates for me because he knew that I hadn't known what to pick.
I was quite impressed - this had, thus far, been the best date I'd been on. This guy was thoughtful, he seemed to have his shit together, we got on well - what more could I ask for?
More importantly - what was I missing? This was definitely a "too good to be true" situation, but where was the catch?
After a few more sangrias, we headed off to another pub for a drink for the road and, all of a sudden, it was 11pm and time to go home.
I was slightly drunk, and felt a little fuzzy on the inside because the date was going so well (although I'll admit the fuzziness might have been because of the alcohol). I had already imagined our future in my head: we had become a mutually respectable power couple - him with his private therapy practice and me with me ever-evolving tech career. We had little Mexican/South African spawn running around; we had a golden retriever named Burt that Eevee (my cat) loved sometimes and we all lived in our lovely little cottage in the English countryside with our 1GB fibre internet connection and weekend trips to Cornwall and the South of France. Perfect, right?
As he walked me to Notting Hill Gate station holding my hand, he leaned over, told me I was "so cute" (errrrr....come again? Cute? I haven't been called cute since I was about 5, but sure...okay...I could deal with "cute"), and then he kissed me...
This was the "WHOMP, THERE IT IS!" moment.
It was like kissing a vacuum cleaner.
To be honest, I didn't actually do any kissing - I just stood there while he, basically, inhaled my face while making strange "hmm mmm" noises.
It was weird.
As fuck.
Towards the end of this, for lack of a better word, experience, he somehow hoovered my top and bottom lip into his mouth and I stood there making a pouting face with my lips stuck between his while he tried to kiss me...in my mind, this was reminiscent of what I would call a "Hollywood kiss" in my youth: two characters kissing each other but swaying their bodies dramatically to make it look far more passionate that it was - except that I wasnt swaying, or doing any kissing.
This lasted a good 5 to 10 seconds and all the while he continued making their weird "hmm mm" sounds - so long enough for me to feel really awkward about it. I think I even opened my eyes at one stage just to check out what actually was going on with him.
I'm pretty sure he was unaware of how awkward it was.
He, thankfully, released my face eventually and took my hand, pulling me towards the station to go home, while chatting along the way. I don't remember what we spoke about, but I remember my prevailing thought being that I didn't know if I could actually deal with someone who kissed so badly and that I hoped it was just because he was drunk and/or nervous.
We eventually reached the station and descended down into the depths of the Lundy Undy before going our separate ways and, just as we parted, he kissed me again and...well, I'd like to say it was better, but it wasn't. This time, I physically pulled my face back from his vacuum-like lip lock and could swear I heard a *smack* sound as the air lock broke.
I, then, hastily said good-bye and ran off like it was the last train home and I was about to miss it (it was, in fact, a 24 hour tube so....)
As I walked to the train platform, I felt my dreams of our perfect little family going up in flames in my Sangria-drunk brain and then berated myself for being so fickle: I told myself that I was a 33 year old woman who couldn't base the worth of a person on their ability to kiss the way I want them to because I wasn't a teenager anymore. I also kept telling myself that I cared about so much more than just their ability to coordinate their bodily movements.
I had to keep telling myself this daily until I saw him again - it even became a sort of mantra, because I really wanted to like him. I really, really did.
I also kept telling myself that I had been drunk that night and he had been drunk that night, and that it couldn't have been as bad as I remembered it being - which is why we went out a second time...and a third time....
Thats a story for another post.
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