Fairly recently I went to a social event, I met a new person and the pair of us got along pretty well. However, towards the end of the evening things took a turn for the strange and she asked me on a date. This isn’t a situation I’ve had to handle before, and it made me fairly uncomfortable. I gave, what I hope was, a polite decline and explained my reasons. I’ve not seen her since, and I can’t say that I’m bothered by that. Mainly because it would feel a bit strange after that, which is a shame because otherwise we could have been good friends.
As I’m sure you can guess, I’m no expert when it comes to the world of dating and for all I know this is pretty much the way things are done, but looking rationally at this, it doesn’t make much sense to me. In my experience, when people enter into romantic partnerships, they then put their partner before everybody else and value them as the most important person in their lives. It is also my understanding that ‘dating’ somebody is the precursor to this kind of relationship. Therefore, why would you ever ask somebody that you’ve known only for a few hours, on a date? In that space of time, you can barely build up any kind of image of someone or even accurately judge how well you get on with them. So why on Earth would you try to lay the foundations to make them the most important person in your life? It just seems so incredibly forced. I can see somebody doing that after they’ve built up a strong friendship with somebody over many years, maybe even after months, but after one day? Is that really how things are done?
I realise that this entry might sound quite bitter, and I hope it doesn’t. I was quite flattered by her offer, and she was quite nice, it’s just that this kind of thing doesn’t really make any sense to me. Perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough to ‘get’ it?
