lots of casual get-togethers. Hooking up had been easy, and no one stood on ceremony. Now, a dozen years later, he was not only rusty, he was uncertain how to interact with a mature woman on an official date.
They chose a booth and sat across from each other, making small talk and drinking coffee. Dave added lots of sugar to his. Not only did he like his coffee sweet, it gave him something to do during the awkward pauses. He ripped open packet after packet, poured the sugar in and then stirred vigorously, his spoon clinking loudly against the cup, as he tried to think of what to say next.
He looked across the table into Liz’s brown eyes as she stared intently back at him. With a nose slightly too large for her face, she was not classically pretty, but there was something appealing about her. Her heavy-lidded eyes were sexy, and her teeth appeared perfect. Straight and almost too white, they were most likely veneers.
Their kids were about the same ages, and they each had two, a boy and a girl. That was good. They had something in common they could talk about. Dave explained his last relationship had recently ended and that he was not looking for anything serious. Liz nodded. She understood. Frankly, she was very busy with her kids and pets and her own cleaning business, “Liz’s Housekeeping,” she explained. She had way too much going on to add more commitments.
“We had four or five similar coffee dates,” Dave remembers. Liz stayed on her side of the table, and he stayed on his. He couldn’t tell if she was attracted to him or if they were destined to be nothing more than platonic friends. “She might have been giving me signals, but I wasn’t catching any of them.” Finally, on the fifth date, as they left the restaurant, he got up his nerve to kiss her for the first time.
“Why did it take you so long?” she asked him.
“’Cause I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he confessed. Whatever he had forgotten came back to him very quickly. They had sex that night, and on nearly every date after that. “I would have to credit Liz with helping me get my confidence back. I was feeling pretty low, pretty worthless, after my breakup with Amy.”
Liz obviously liked him. She was an enthusiastic lover, and they saw each other regularly over the next two weeks, but it didn’t take him long to get restless. He found her attractive, and she was easy to be with, but there was no deep connection. She was always up for sex, and that was fine with Dave, but he needed more than that. “One of the reasons I would never be with Liz is that she was not well read. I couldn’t have a conversation with her about the news.”
Though self-deprecating and the last to acknowledge his strengths, Dave is highly intelligent. If he ever were to commit again, he would need a woman who challenged him intellectually. Liz was definitely not that woman. He continued to scroll through the profiles of women on the Plenty of Fish website. “I really kind of started hitting the books, as it were, and seeing what was out there.”
Liz wanted more from Dave than he was willing to give her, and that became apparent just weeks after he had met her. “She got really clingy. She wanted all of my time.” He didn’t want to be a jerk about it, but he wished she would back off and give him room to breathe.
“What did you do last night?” she often asked with more than a casual interest when he had not spent the evening before with her. “That’s my business,” Dave replied. “I do what I want to do. I told you that when we met.”
He went on a few dates, usually meeting the women in a coffeehouse. Most of the time it was obvious within the first minute that there was absolutely no attraction. Sometimes there was a spark, and a second and third date followed. Sometimes the connections resulted in sex. Always he made it clear that he was not looking to commit. His reason for avoiding commitment changed over time. “Initially, my reason for not wanting anything serious was because I had just got out of a long relationship. And then once I got my confidence back, and I was meeting women, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not doing this whole