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FEATURED ARTICLE: The First Date
Interview
By Jillian Straus
Author of
Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We're Still Single
Those
singles who can't stand ambiguity from the very beginning develop a
more direct dating approach. Meet, for instance, Steven Kaplan -- as
several of my girlfriends did. I was on yet another blind date -- my
third in the
last two weeks. Here we go again, I thought, as I walked
out my front
door, and waved to the night doorman, Stan. Stan was my
friend, and he had
watched me return home forlorn from every date in
the last month, except for one
night when he happened to catch the
end of a good-night kiss -- albeit
from a man who never called me
again. Like most of my friends, I had a careful semiotic clothing code
that I had worked out for different kinds of dates. Tonight I was in full
date battle
mode: wearing my new fitted red V-neck sweater -- the
effort was to be
attractive but not too slutty -- paired with Diesel
jeans, to give a
"casual" impression. I had avoided my
usual uniform of black cigarette
pants, black top, and Gucci bag (on
sale, but no one needed to know),
because I did not want to convey
that I was too high-maintenance. Hey, I
am being honest here. I was
on my way to meet a friend-of-a-friend named Steven Kaplan.
I didn't
know much about him, except that he was supposedly a good-looking,
thirty-six-year-old Jewish oncologist -- with a full head of hair. In
my
mother's mind, of course, he was already fully qualified, sight
unseen, to
be my husband; in mine, he sounded like he could go any
number of ways,
but it was at least worth meeting him for dinner on a
Tuesday night in the
West Village.
I arrived at a cozy,
unpretentious restaurant, Gradisca, and looked for
someone fitting
his description: "I'll be wearing a green sweater and I
have
salt-and-pepper hair," he'd told me during our short phone
conversation.
The first person I saw was a man wearing a green shirt
-- with the largest
nose I had ever seen. As I walked toward this man
with trepidation, trying to
stay focused on the beauty of the soul,
someone tapped me on the shoulder.
"Hi, I'm Steven," this
man said. I breathed a sigh of relief. He fit the description, and was
actually
better looking than I had anticipated: 6'2", with
thick, wavy salt-and-pepper
hair and, thankfully, an entirely
ordinary nose. We sat down right away. The
restaurant was buzzing
with beautiful people. We were seated at a quiet
table in the corner,
away from all the activity. I was impressed by Steven's sophistication: he
perused the wine list and selected a full-bodied red wine; it was
delicious, and we lingered over
the bottle for about twenty minutes
before ordering dinner. By then, I had a
nice buzz, and I was
beginning to feel chemistry between us. Steven looked
particularly
handsome with the shadow of the candle flame flickering on
his face,
turning his eyes into deep reflective pools. Hmm, I thought . . . He
asked the usual first-date icebreaker questions: "Where are you
from?"
"What do you do in your free time?" Who in New
York has free time, anyway? I thought vaguely, as I admired his deep voice
and silky lips. I was wondering what it would be like to kiss
him. Before we'd had a chance to order, however, the scene shifted from
Last
Tango in Paris to Nine to Five. My date had started to put me
through a
job interview:
"Do you want to stay in the city
for the next couple of years?"
"Why did your last
relationship end?"
"How many kids do you want?"
I was floored. I was thinking what it would be like to make out
with him,
and he wanted to figure out where we were sending our kids
to school! When
the waitress came and rescued me from his relentless
battery of
suitability questions, I was thrilled. The romantic mood
had been extinguished the
moment he seemed to scan my resume for the
position of Mrs. Kaplan.
He sensed my unease, politely walked me
home, and gave me an obligatory
kiss on the cheek.
I wasn't the
only one of my circle, as it turned out, who'd had a date
that ended
up as a job interview. A few days later, I was having drinks with
some girlfriends, and we were comparing our recent dates. I told them
about
Steven Kaplan. "He was really attractive and
sophisticated, but he grilled
me about my long-term life plan ten
minutes into the date," I complained.
Rory, thirty-four, a blunt
casting agent with baby-blue saucer eyes,
explained my baffling
evening to me in her own terms. Her clinical
analysis of the
different stages in which people approach courtship helped me to
understand why so few of these dates we were all going on seemed
romantic
in the slightest: "He's just trying to figure out what
phase you are in.
There is 'Phase One' and there is 'Phase Two' for
people in the dating process,"
she said. "Phase One
involves buying some nice clothes and looking after
yourself -- for
instance, taking care of your apartment, your job -- and
having lots
of sex. I did that until I was about thirty, and I loved it."
Rory continued, "Then there is Phase Two: This is when you want to
put
your money into building something for your future, you want to
make your place
a home in preparation for a partner and eventually a
family, and most of all
you want to share the life you've built with
someone. For a woman in Phase
Two, it can be challenging: you can try
to put a Phase-One guy in a
Phase-Two situation, but it rarely
works," she explained. Of course, the
same applied to women, she
said. That was clearly part of the disconnect
between Dr. Kaplan and
myself. But Rory felt she was now too often on the
Phase-Two side of
the equation, waiting for a Phase-One man to commit, and
she was
tired of it. I knew all too well what she was talking about, since
I
had spent much of my dating years chasing non-committal men.
But the
interrogation on the first date is not particularly romantic.
Besides,
this tendency of young people to be either partying wildly or on
a
manic Google-like search for "the one and only" complicates the
hope of
simply falling in love; if we did not assign ourselves these
rigid life
categories, we would perhaps be more open to being
persuaded to move, by
the connection with another person, from Phase
One to Phase Two -- or even
better, to simply want to be close to
someone and intimate for its own
sake, rather than for the
fulfillment of an external timetable. But as long as
we continue to
approach our search for love this way, perhaps we'd be better
off if
we wore visible distinguishing signs: "NC" for non-committal
or
"R," for ready.
I never saw or spoke to
Steven Kaplan after that. I heard he got engaged
to someone six
months later. I was not surprised. The first date interview
was an
obvious, but unsubtle, way to weed out those who were not in the same
place in their lives. Many of the people I heard from talked about
the
tormenting challenge of trying to find someone with whom you
"connect" --
that central word again -- who is
"ready" for the same things you are. On
the whole, more
women than men whom I interviewed had this complaint, but
there were
plenty of men who were pining after women who were "not
ready."
The "readiness factor" was usually a sense of
one's own place in one's
life, rather than a reaction to the pull of
the relationship itself. Steven
Kaplan was ready, and he wasn't going
to waste any time trying to figure out
whether I really was -- or, for
that matter, whom I really was.
On more than a dozen occasions, I had
lent an ear to tortured friends who
had waited and waited for a
commitment, constantly hoping for clues, signs
that their potential
mate was coming around. I told the Steven Kaplan
story to one of my
ex-boyfriends, a semi-reformed non-committer who had broken
my heart
over ten years earlier. Years after the breakup, he had said,
"Jillian, it wouldn't have mattered if you were Cindy Crawford -- I
just
wasn't ready." Here we were now, friends, and he explained
my date with
the doctor this way: Most guys don't necessarily end up
with the woman they
love the most. "It's like a game of musical
chairs; you sit down in one chair,
then you sit in another, and when
the music stops, whatever chair you are
sitting in is the chair you
end up in." It was the most unromantic thing I
had ever heard
and I thought I would never be able to buy that line of
thinking.
While this approach provided a shortcut to finding a mate in an
ambiguous dating culture, I doubted that in the long run it resulted
in
many happy, permanent matches.
Gen-Xers are accustomed to
figure-it-out-as-you-go-along dating and seem
to resist any early
pressure in a relationship, no matter what phase of
dating they might
be in. The Gen-X approach gives men and women the ability to
get in
and out of their relationships as easily as they change their jobs or
apartments. The lack of formal romantic cues give this generation
freedom,
but with that freedom often comes a price: the inability to
decisively
commit.
Excerpted from Unhooked Generation:
The Truth About Why We're Still Single
by Jillian Straus. Published
by Hyperion, February 2006.
Author
Jillian Straus spent
eight years producing programs for The Oprah Winfrey
Show, where she
interviewed hundreds of men and women about their lives
and their
relationships. Prior to that, she worked for ABC News. She received
a
B.A. and an M.A. at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
University. Straus is currently a fellow of the Woodhull Institute
for
Ethical Leadership, training young women in communications. She
lives in
NewYork City.
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