I recently had four dates with a very nice man, and then realized the dates were going nowhere and that I wasn’t even looking forward to them. I suspect he felt the exact same way. We didn’t have much of anything to talk about on our dates; his job is dry and dull and doesn’t lend itself to conversation, and he finds computers to be magical email machines, so work was off the table as a topic of discussion. He doesn’t watch TV or go to the movies, so there was nothing there to discuss; if you were to draw a Venn diagram of our tastes in books, the circles wouldn’t come within a foot of each other. I’m a thoroughly modern girl; he’d like to hop into a time machine and go back about four centuries if he could. It took us four dates to come to the conclusion that there was nothing upon which to build. Well, that’s how things were on my end; as so often happens with men, he seemed to want to see whether he could coax a spark into a flame, as he was blissfully unaware that there was no spark in the first place!

(Why do men so often have blinders on when it comes to relationships? Do their penii get in the way and they can’t see around them?)

Sometimes, you don’t even notice these things happening until it’s too late, and then suddenly, you find you’re in a relationship you didn’t even want in the first place! The only reason I noticed was that instead of being excited about getting ready for dates with him, I found myself annoyed, as if it were a project I had to complete, something I had to endure. And it was an endurance test: with nothing to talk about, we largely sat there staring at each other, or at a table, the sky, a drink, the walls, a painting, other people. Sometimes we’d talk about whatever was on the walls or the other people, or the things we didn’t have in common, but it wasn’t interesting for me, and it couldn’t have been interesting for him.

It wasn’t a total waste of time, of course; I learned still more about what I want and don’t want from a date, from a relationship, from life, and got to practice gracefully exiting this cycle of unfulfilling dates. (“Let’s face it: we’re two very different people with little in common, and we’re not having a lot of fun. I’ll tell you what: if I meet anyone I think would be perfect for you, I’ll drop you an email; why don’t you do the same for me?”)

In another post, I’ll tackle the exact opposite of these limp-fish types of dates: the ones where your minds (and your clothes!) catch fire within minutes of meeting.