I’ve been on two real dates in my life, both of them in my freshman year of college, nearly a quarter century ago. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. We went to “Burn This” on Broadway. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and (this hurts) that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us.
For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday’s, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We’ve been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.
Nick Paumgarten, Looking for Someone (in The New Yorker)
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