Date 2: There Was Chemistry

Lucy Amoree’s story continues…

Just two days after our first date, James invited me to his apartment, where a few of his friends had ordered pizza and were drinking beer. We’d exchanged more than a few text messages in the scant 48 hours since our first date, but still, I’d spent much of that time thinking that I had imagined the feeling of comfort I’d had with James. It had to be something hormonal, I reasoned, because it just wasn’t normal to feel like I’d known someone for so long, not so immediately after meeting him. I tried to be level-headed: excited about this new guy I’d met but trying not to place expectations on date number two.

I walked over to his place, thinking this was definitely among the strangest online dating stories I’d heard. And again, as soon as I saw James, I had that odd feeling. He had a sexy, easy confidence. I really liked him.

I hadn’t really been thinking that I’d meet someone I’d like in such a short period of time. Besides, I hadn’t planned on dating anyone seriously until I’d finished grad school. At twenty-seven, I’d had two relationships that had lasted one and two years, and the rest of the time, I dated. I was bad at one night stands and very casual dating, but really good at steering-clear-of-making-long-term-plans monogamy. I usually dated men for two, three months. Someday, I knew, I’d want kids, to get married, and I figured that the fact that I knew what I wanted in the long term meant that I’d recognize the right guy when he came along. I didn’t want to push anything.

But I’d usually gone after men who were five, ten years older than me, somewhat macho, with questionable communication skills and the same vague fear of commitment I had. Good men, all of them, just somehow not right, in the end. I’d had fun dating these men, but things usually ended the same way: a widening distance based on the fact that we wanted desperately different things, which led to arguments and always, eventually, to a painful break-up.

That night was surprisingly low-stress, just James and his friends and me, chatting and sitting around a table on his patio. He played a great album that I’d never heard before and the twinkle lights he’d strung up around the railing of his balcony cast low light. When his friends left, I stayed. He was, as I was learning, kind of the opposite of the guys I usually dated. He was a skilled conversationalist, very disclosing, and had been in two serious relationships in his twenties. He was very close with his mother, who had divorced his father when he was a kid and raised him mostly on her own, and he was an only child. That night, I spent the night at his house and we had sex for the first time.

Regardless of where it was ‘going’ with James, I had to admit that we had chemistry. That much was clear.

 

 Guest post by the talented Lucy Amoree, a writer in the Big Apple.