10/02/19

A cup of Costa’s finest is on its way. Scratch that, it’s here. “Small white Americano!” “Yep that’s me!” “For the ginger.” The thirty-something barista definitely fancies me but of course I don’t act on it. With my coffee in front of me now I can set about recalling a recent delayed i-date. Let me cast my mind back.

I met Virginia on Oxford Street: German, aryan features, short-ish, dressed all in black including a beanie. She’d flown to London for the weekend for her 18th birthday, on her own, so what I pushed for should be obvious. She stopped easily and though our conversation was a little stilted she offered a strong verbal IOI on my hair and later on thrust her hand forward so that I could have a look at a bracelet she was wearing. We organised to meet later on for a drink.

We met and her mood immediately went downhill, cutting off sexualisation whenever I raised it verbally and maintaining a certain proximity – or lack of it – when I moved forwards (we were standing outside a pub). In particular she’d always say she didn’t know who her type was or what she was attracted to because she had never been in love. Later on she rejected my kiss attempt, which in and of itself was fine and I recovered well enough, she told me that she’d even “never had a kiss.”

The problem was that she just kept on following me: from the first drink to the second drink, to another pub, and even back to my place. She put some trashy German Youtube videos on but when I escalated she’d complain – actually moan like a child – that she was tired. Eventually she left and I let her get back to the train station on her own with no battery on her phone.

Woe is me. Right? Not really.

There are four observations I’m making here. First is that I don’t think I did anything wrong. The nature of the delayed i-date is sexual, she had offered solid IOIs in-set, and she confirmed beforehand that we would be meeting alone. So the cards were on the table already. And given her logistics I knew I had to keep pushing and always at least just offer the next step.

The second observation, which leads from the first, is that those steps happened because of her extreme availability, but medium-rare interest. She had absolutely nothing to do and so why not spend her time in the company of a cool Englishman? She’d confirmed her love of London on multiple occasions so it’s highly plausible that she saw an opportunity for a night of entertainment.

Third: I think that if she’d been two years and two boyfriends older then it would have been a dead cert. She would have known where it was going from the start and would have put herself immediately in a sexual mood; she’d know what was coming and would get excited. Or, of course, she might have never come and saved me money and time. Instead she hadn’t played out the seduction dance before – or perhaps is a plain liar – and so allowed herself to be lead without knowing ‘what it means.’

Last, but not least, it exposed to me a kind of person I hadn’t met before: the low-functioning introvert. Usually when you dig under the surface with introverts you find deeply explored hobbies but with Virginia this wasn’t the case. In the second pub, I just got fed up of trying to stoke her mood, crossed my arms and focused most of my attention on the TV in the corner. It was only then that she started to perk up a little and introduce something to the conversation herself.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown