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At the very best of times, relationships are complicated. That’s just reality. You can’t attach yourself to another person with any sort of permanence without there being some snags along the way. Those snags could be relatively simple, easy fixes, like synchronizing laundry habits, or they could be total deal breakers, like when one of my most annoying exes told me he really wanted to meet my parents and I laughed out loud, and then realized he was serious.
Whether you’re coordinating with a fuck buddy about whose place you’re meeting at later, or you’re negotiating engagement ring prices with your locked-down fiancé, there will always be some level of cooperation required in terms of being with someone else. You can fake being super easygoing and patient in the beginning, when it’s easy, but soon enough the real person you are will emerge. After a while, your significant other knows all of your vices and bad habits and you can’t fool them into thinking you’re totally okay with letting them pick the restaurant for the third weekend in a row. They used to believe that you were just super chill about it, but now they know better. That’s the hardest part of being in a relationship of longer than six months with anybody — learning who they really are, and them learning who you really are, and then both of you learning to accept it.
The only time this rule doesn’t apply is in the very beginning of a relationship, as stated above, and the epitome of the beginning is the first date. First dates are the best. I don’t know why everyone tends to hate them. The person you’re going to see knows, most likely, very little to nothing about you. You have every tool at hand to make the best impression possible — in fact, you can legitimately be whoever you want.
The person you’re meeting doesn’t know about your embarrassing habits yet, and as long as you act relatively cool on your first meeting, you’ll make a good impression. All people really want is for you to smile at them and look as though you’re interested in what they’re talking about. Even if you end the date knowing you’d rather cut off your left pinky toe than see them again, at least you know that you really don’t have to see them again. In a relationship, there’s no true escape from the things you don’t like about a person, and no matter how much you like them, there will always be something. When a first date ends, it’s over forever unless you liked them enough to decide otherwise.
First dates are all about freedom. Freedom to decide whether or not to invest more time in someone, freedom to explore possibilities and to literally display only the best side of yourself. There won’t be arguments about your habit of leaving your dirty socks in the living room or a discussion about rent payments. There’s just you and your date, two people believing for a night that they’re as perfect as they’re pretending to be.
And for that night, at least, that other person might just believe the flawless persona you’re perpetuating. If not, and you really hate whatever poor bastard you went out with, order a few drinks and you’ll be just fine. It’s still easier than a break-up. .
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Rory Gilmore
Rory Gilmore on the outside. Emily Gilmore on the inside. Email me funny shit at rory_gilmore20@yahoo.com.
@rory_gilmore20
The first few months of a relationship are the most democratic and freeing time periods of a relationship. After that, it’s pretty much passive aggressive expressions of annoyances and a lot of “I guess” moments like getting engaged and having kids since all you’ve known is the said relationship and you think those are just the things to do because there’s nothing left to do plus everyone else is doing them. The. It’s basically going to work all the time to fund the life of someone you created who’s pretty much going to live the same life that you don’t want to live currently…..oh yeah, and eat Arby’s.
Then you watch your kids slowly become the kind of people you hated back when you were in your mid to late 20’s because you instead of spending time with them and showing interest in their hobbies pawned them off to strangers in sports, arts, and studies and only made token appearances at said events to give the impression to the other parents that you care about your kids when you honestly just want to have a semblance of the freedom you had when all you had to do was worry about keeping yourself alive and how much of a chore that was but now youre in charge of a whole family unit. So as you lose your handles on your kids and they grow up to be dbags( they say “adorbs” and wear wool socks with birkenstocks) you start drinking more and more to dull the pain of failure and that your wife is sleeping with her tennis instructor but you dont say anything because your sleeping with your daughter’s cheerleading coach and the divorce would cost too much and leave a blemish on your seemingly perfect picture of the American Dream you managed to paint. Then while youre at your doctors for you yearly check up and get a new prescription for high blood pressure you doctor decides to run some extra tests, you shrug it off thinking hes probably just padding the bill. 2-4 weeks later you receive a call and turns out you have liver cancer. So now you come to terms with your mortality and all the ill decisions you’ve made that have finally started to kill your body but have since long ago killed your spirit.
Dude, you out-Neirbo’d Neirbo
Take that as high praise.
Standing O right there. We should right a joint column, no wait, an Amazon best selling book about adulthood and how it’s pretty much just years full of chores where the only coping mechanisms are drugs because they are better than reality and their vacations for poor people which is what most of us are and will remain.
I’ll take my drug split and use it to get some low level junior senator addicted and use his vices to influence us law in favor my shading burgeoning drug empire and string of franchise chuc-ee cheese restaurants that i use as a front. Eventually propelling him to the white house all the awhile secretly having MKULTRA’d him.
My counter-argument: Small talk.
Yes, I’d love to hear about what you do for a living, what sports you like, and what TV shows you enjoy. And yes, I’d love to give a humorous, hot take on a non-divisive subject so we can both pretend to be better people than we are. No, it’s great that you just keep laughing at my jokes and giving me nothing to work with other than “haha” and “too true.”
You know what, how about I just have a stand-up special where I pay for your meal at the end just so that I can have a minor panic attack on whether I’m supposed to kiss you.
your comment reminds of the constant ” i hate awkwardness” or something like that that every woman post on her random dating site bio/perfect date section. Its a first date if you dont think they’ll some mild awkwardness involved your delusional and been watching too many nicholas sparx movies. Also when they say they like honesty, the first dates are the most dishonest womans cause you just dont jump into the deep end you easy em into your crazy that way theyre already too emotionally invested to dump ya.
If you’re a guy you can pretend to be perfect until the check comes and you break out into a cold sweat because you see that the old fashions were $9 a pop.
I remember a first date where the guy was checking game scores throughout the entire meal. You know if they’re not at least trying to be put together on the first date, it’ll only get worse
Yeah, but did his team cover the spread?
*team(s)
Probably had a gambling problem and had a lot riding on the game. You might have dodged a bullet