The first date night: what I actually felt, hour by hour

We had been talking about it for two and a half years before anything happened. That number embarrasses me slightly now. At the time every month of it felt necessary.

Getting ready

I did my hair twice. Not because it went wrong the first time, but because standing at the mirror was the only part of the evening I could control, and I wanted to stay in it a while longer.

Marc was in the doorway with a glass of wine he wasn’t drinking, offering opinions on earrings. He kept making small jokes that landed slightly off, and I kept laughing slightly too hard, and we both noticed and said nothing. There’s a version of this where the getting-ready hour is charged and cinematic. Ours was mostly nervous, with a thread of something else underneath.

At one point he sat on the edge of the bath and said, quietly, that we could still not do this. I said I know. He said he didn’t want me to not do it. I said I know that too. That was the entire conversation and it did more for me than any of the negotiating we’d done over two years.

The goodbye at the door

I had expected the door to be the hard part. It was, but not in the way I’d braced for.

He hugged me for slightly too long. I felt him decide not to say something. Then he stepped back and told me to have a good night in the same voice he’d use if I were meeting my sister. Either very brave or very well rehearsed, and I’ve never asked which.

Walking to the car I had a strange doubling in my head. Half of me was a woman going on a first date, checking my bag, worried about parking. The other half watched and thought, so this is what we built. Both halves were fine, which surprised me more than anything.

The evening, and the texts

I’m not going to write about the date itself. That belongs to me and to him and, partly, to the man I met, who was kind and slightly nervous and did not know any of this history.

What I will write about is my phone. We’d agreed on one message when I arrived and one when I left, and I broke that within an hour. The message wasn’t sexy. It said the restaurant was too loud and I’d forgotten how much work first dates are. He replied with a photograph of the dog asleep on my side of the bed, and something in my chest unclenched that I hadn’t known was clenched.

He told me later he’d spent the first hour unable to settle at anything, then made himself watch a film and watched none of it. He’d expected torment or fireworks. What he got was a long, ordinary evening with a low hum in it. Getting both at once turns out to be common enough to have a name, cuck angst, which neither of us knew at the time.

Coming home

I was back before one. He was awake, obviously.

The thing nobody prepared me for is how badly I wanted to be touched by him specifically, immediately, before anything else happened. Not out of guilt. It felt more like coming back into my own house. I stood in the hallway with my coat still on, holding onto him while he asked absolutely nothing.

Then we made tea, which is the least glamorous sentence in this account and also the truest one.

The debrief

We’d planned to talk in the morning. We talked until four.

He wanted the whole evening in order, from the parking to the goodbye, boring parts included. Was I nervous. Did I like him. Then one question I hadn’t expected: had I thought about Marc during it. The honest answer was yes, constantly, and I’d been worried that would disappoint him. It didn’t.

Somewhere around three he got quiet and said he felt fine, and then a minute later said he wasn’t sure that was true, and we sat with that instead of arguing about it. It turned out to be true by the weekend. It just wasn’t true yet at three in the morning, and letting it be unfinished was the right call.

That’s the part I’d tell any couple thinking about a first evening. Plan the date all you like. Then plan the two hours after it, because those are where the real thing happens. Neither of us knew then that the hours afterwards are where most of this goes right or wrong, or that the flat day tends to arrive on the Tuesday rather than on the night. Other accounts are collected in the stories, and the forum is full of people comparing first nights.