Second Date with Mr. Landlord

For our second date Mr. Landlord and I went out for sushi. Bad idea. I love sushi and visit this restaurant often enough that a waiter there knows me and likes to scare me by silently coming up behind me to take my order/put food in front of me/suddenly have a spout of water falling into my glass from somewhere above me.

Mr. Landlord, on the other hand, had never had sushi. So points to him for being up for something new, but as much as I tried to be helpful in his meal selection, he took so long intently reading the menu that I ended up speaking less to him and more to the ninja waiter in his many passes by our table to try to figure out what was taking us so damn long to order. Mr. Landlord did find something to eat that didn’t scare him, and then we could settle in to conversation.

Yeah. Conversation.

Although I was laughing constantly on our first date, I soon grew weary of a conversation that focused entirely on following whims of nonsense and Simpsons references. All of my attempts to turn the conversation to some more substantial quickly fizzled, and the pauses in our conversation grew longer. I even tried to turn the conversation back to the random points that we were awarding each other, a running joke from our first date, but it seemed that tonight we couldn’t find anything to award each other points for.

After we paid the ninja waiter and determined that his car was parked along my route home, I walked him to his car. Sort of. More accurately I walked with him until he indicated his car and then I continued walking while saying, “Have a good night! Thanks for dinner!”

In my defense: it was cold, I was tired, and the last thing that I wanted was a lingering, awkward goodbye at his car after a not-so-great date. I felt it was fairly obvious that we weren’t going to contact each other again. 

The next day I got this email:

Let me know if I'm reading you wrong or not. I'm getting more of a vibe that you just want to be friends as opposed to dating. If I'm wrong all my points go to zero.

This email broke my heart, in a way that an image of a lonely puppy at a shelter breaks my heart.  It seemed like he wanted to trade the random points I had awarded him for another date with me. The adult equivalent of saying, “You can have all my marbles if you come over and play with me again.”

But as I’m not looking for points or marbles, I told him he was right, wished him luck, and moved on.