NSFW Author

Friday couldn’t wait. Every day, I wondered if I should call Sue or not to talk and ended up only making a brief phone call Thursday evening to confirm our date.

It was a polite call, rather brief but warm: Sue was at a pub with her friends, “hanging out with the girls”, as she said, but she admitted looking forward to our date the next day. I announced the restaurant and Sue decided to join me there since it was so close to her apartment.

I hadn’t planned on that twist, but still hoped to see her apartment before the end of the night.

I decided to wear a nice pair of tan golf pants with my favorite red shirt, I knew it often impressed the ladies on a date but it was too clean to pick up girls in a bar.

For a second date however, or a first official one like tonight, it showed that I could also clean up nicely to impress the parents or the friends despite the girl knowing I was a tiger in the bedroom.

Well, I can’t guarantee I am indeed a tiger, but considering Sue and I only shared the bedroom so far, I took her desire to meet me again as a sign she appreciated my efforts.

I was already at the restaurant. I always make it a point to arrive first in such events. If a guy cannot be on time on the first date, the girl cannot count on him.

Women on the other hand, have the reputation of always being late, which I always found irritating. Not that they are sometimes late, that’s fine with me, but rather that they have this false reputation.

Girls liked to make boys wait, supposedly, but I’ve found that interested girls can be just as eager as their dates to get the party started.

Sue, as it turned out, arrived exactly 4 minutes late which, my mom used to say, is the polite lateness. If you arrive on time, you look like you were waiting outside for the clock to tick. If you are late 5 minutes or more, you are disrespectful. As a result, we usually ended up waiting in the car for 10 to 15 minutes until her clock showed 4 minutes past the official time and my mom decided it was time to get in.

I didn’t know if it was deliberate on Sue’s part or if it was a pure coincidence, but when we kissed on the cheek at the table, the little boy in me smiled at the clock.

Sue ordered a chicken Caesar salad, a meal I often see girls order on a first date. I never caught the significance. Perhaps it’s a way to show that they watch their weight by eating a salad, despite the actual high calorie content of a Caesar salad, while showing they are not vegetarians. Perhaps it was a safe meal in an unknown restaurant, never too expensive and always prepared roughly the same manner.

I ordered the cannelloni with an entrée of Caesar salad “to accompany her”.

The meal was pleasant and the wine was taken in moderation on both parts: I had to drive and she didn’t look like a wine lover. I do remember she wasn’t as tipsy last week as other girls I had brought home. I like that: the ability to drink in moderation.

She talked at length about her job as a marketing agent and about how she not only had to find customers for her boss but how she often had to play in their online videos.

She talked about her two best friends, her hopelessly single roommate Annie and her friend Nicole stuck with a bad boyfriend Gus. She even talked about her parents.

It’s no coincidence I ended up barely talking about myself: I engaged in active listening, something few people are good at.

Next time you are in a conversation, divide the exchanges in four categories. The first is unsolicited statements, which occur when somebody says something out of the blue which no one asked about. These either kill the old conversation and moves it toward the speaker or cause a coldness and kills all conversation. Notice the fat man in the corner who suddenly announces going to Vegas in two weeks while everyone was talking about their day in the office.

The second is automatic replies. “How are you doing?”, “Fine, and you?”. These occur a lot and cause only superficial exchanges. You would be surprised at how many conversations occur strictly at that level, especially in an office.

The third is slightly better: closed questions. “Do you like your job?”, “What is your favorite color?” and so on. You ask it, and get the answer and sometimes, a request to answer it yourself. It gets the information across, but it’s not yet a real conversation, it’s a Q and A, an Interview, almost like a game a charades.

Instead, I use open-ended questions. “What passionate you about your life?” and follow up with additional questions to get more and more information and, more importantly, show that I can listen. Each of my follow-up questions is based on her answers and designed to make her talk, and make me listen.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to talk, but I want to show her that I care so much about her that I am ready to listen instead of constantly trying to interrupt her and prove my worth.

By the time we were ready for dessert, I had Sue wrapped around my fingers and confessing her desires in a love life, excited to have someone listening to her for once.

She proposed we eat dessert at her place, obviously deciding to skip the movie for tonight. I didn’t mind, my objective seemed reached: I had convinced her I was boyfriend material.