My Charming Springtime Date

So we’re having a bit of a heat wave this week. It’s great. It’s really kicking the crap out of our record-breaking snowfall. It’s almost entirely gone now.

I went on my date in the market today, and right now I’m a little fatigued and zoned out from all the sun I got from the walk home, but in a nutshell, here’s how it went.

I got there 20 minutes early this time, which is good because I walked into the wrong place. It turns out there are two different restaurants with the address 55 York Street. One is across the street from the other. I’ve never seen this before, and I thought it was an odd way to do addresses.

Anyway, she was there ten minutes early, so we a great deal of time to chat. She told me a bit about her life story, which I thought would make a good little book. Of course, her life isn’t over yet, though that part of it is.

She almost got married to a man from California in her 20s, but they couldn’t rectify their long distance situation. He kept teasing her with the idea of marriage, mocking like he was going to propose, and then not proposing, (again, a lot like that episode of the office last night), and she wound up meeting a man in the Dominican Republic who offered her a job at a resort, which she happily took, to get a change of lifestyle. She wound up dating the manager of the resort. Finally, her past would-be fiancée called her up to say he had something to tell her. So, he made arrangements to come and see her, but she wound up having to cancel, because she found out she was pregnant, and she told him maybe this wasn’t the best time for a visit. So that was that. He did not come to see her, and it turned out that he had picked out a ring for her and everything, but because of the timing, it simply wasn’t meant to be.

So she had her daughter, and had a small wedding reception, marrying the father of her child. After the pregnancy she was quite sick, and awoke frequently in the middle of the night, only to find that her husband wasn’t around, and that his wedding band was left lying inconspicuously on the dresser.

When they needed a new place to live, her husband said he would find them a proper home. What he found was a derelict place with a swimmingly pool in which the water was a murky black from disuse. They squatted here, and at some point, a very controlling mother-in-law entered the picture, someone for whom nothing you ever do was good enough. There was a lot of yelling by his side of the family, and she decided enough was enough. This wasn’t a good life for her or her daughter, so she demanded a divorce, boarded a plane with her daughter, and moved back here to live with her parents. She said he sent over the divorce papers later, but she just ignored them, as they were “just wrong.” The papers said there were no children from the marriage, which clearly wasn’t true. It turns out the marriage isn’t legal in Canada anyway, so why bother with the paperwork just to help him lie?

We really only had about an hour and a half together, then she had to head home to get her daughter.

Now the choice of how to progress is in her hands. I haven’t told her this, but I’ve already decided I’m interested enough in her to go as far as I can. Now it’s a question of whether she feels the same way. During our date I mentioned in passing that I found different people tend to have a different approach to dating. Some look for ‘signs’ that someone is or isn’t the one. Invariably they won’t see stars or cupids or whatever, and they say “yeah, I’m not feeling it.” Then they’re gone, back to lavalife and whatever other dating services they use so they can disappoint someone else, and themselves, again. Hey, I’m not saying love at first sight doesn’t happen. I’m just saying great relationships can come about without it. Even in the great romance stories, what is that one moment that love truly begins? I mean, for Romeo, it’s right away, without even talking to the bitch, but he’s a bit of a douchebag anyway. Then you take a story like Emma, where she doesn’t even realize she’s in love with Knightly until the end where she starts to panic. Of course, by then he totally enamored with her too. Love grows.

I’ve wanted to go further with other dates too, obviously, but those didn’t pan out either. So I suppose there’s nothing to it now but to wait and see if she takes my dinner offer.