The Man In The Cafe
So I'm sitting at Starbucks reading The New York Times, because honestly what else is there to do on a Sunday evening? I see this man on his phone at a table and he seems to be looking my way and smiling. I don't really think anything of it.
Next thing I know, I look up from my computer and hear him talking to the young pretty woman working on her computer behind me. I think the man is a salesman at first because he asks her if it is OK if he sits down. I worry he may come for me next. I try to pretend I'm very busy.
It turns out he is talking about nothing, just shooting the shit with her. I realize he is hitting on her. She is being extremely nice and at the end of the conversation he asks her if he can have her number. She says politely that she actually has a boyfriend and that he will be coming soon.
The man laughs a small sad laugh and gets up, goes back to his table and then leaves. I want to look at the woman and ask her how she feels after that. Does she feel flattered? Does she feel bothered? I am reminded of how this Middle Eastern man asked me to marry him after sitting down at my table at the Barnes and Noble cafe many years ago.
He had been following me through the book store. Honestly, I don't remember feeling flattered because I was too busy feeling uncomfortable. But after the man at Starbucks leaves, I want to congratulate him for being so brave.
He is an Asian man, she is a white woman. That should not matter, but you and I both know that it does. He wasn't clicking on a profile on Tinder or Match.com. He was doing the old fashioned thing of asking a woman for her number. It was kind of endearing in a way.
It was actually very much unlike the man at the book store. When he asked me to marry him, he said it very seriously and scared me. However, this dude at the cafe seemed harmless. This was how people used to meet complete strangers for dating in the recent past. This was one of the only ways of meeting a stranger.
We are resigned to our Internet introductions now, which I have found are always false and misleading. I have met quite a few men over the years over the web and I have always thought they were better in my imagination than they were in person.
Maybe my standards are too high and that's why I feel disappointed every time I meet a dude from online. However, I suspect I am not the only one who has had this kind of experience. Even talking on the telephone with a potential match is very much unreal I have found.
So where are people supposed to meet in real life anymore? I guess it's still possible to meet at a bar but that's so banal and people are usually half drunk by the time you meet them. In theory the Interwebs provides us a way to side-step all the awkwardness of a first meeting by making it digital.
But when I saw this interaction of this complete stranger walking up to another complete stranger, I felt optimistic somehow. I felt like maybe there is hope that we can be a community and get to know each other. I felt like maybe men and women can meet again in the grocery aisle or walking their dog.
Maybe romance can happen naturally again. Maybe the whole world is not just a bunch of people surfing the Internet in silence, in their lonely, cold, dark, homes. We need to get out of our houses and meet people in the real world instead of the virtual world.
But let's be real. I'm not going to go to a cafe and sit down in front of a complete stranger and introduce myself. Not because I am a woman. Not because I have no confidence. But really because it is far too nerve-wracking, it's easier to click on a profile on a dating website. It's easier to sit at home and look at a screen then look into some strangers eyes and tell them you are interested.
Have we become cowards? Is the Internet making us into different people? I feel like I am more comfortable announcing something on the Internet than I am telling someone to their face. Our web presence and web reality have created people who are less likely to communicate with new people
I feel like I have no choice but to use the Internet to find a potential mate and honestly, the people I have been meeting on the web are not what I am looking for. So what to do? Go up to total strangers on the street and introduce myself? It's not going to happen.
How did people do this for all these years before the World Wide Web? How did potential partners meet? Where is my nice man in a cafe?
I am still a romantic soul who believes I will find true love one day soon. I just have no idea where I will find him.
nina