I Love Fake Dating

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

ON MY MOST RECENT, and final, fake date, we dressed as though for a wedding: suit and tie for me, little black dress for her. We danced, we drank, we whispered wisecracks. We amused each other, we showed off. We made an effort, and complimented each other for it. It was a night when I thought that she at 26 and I at 31 had grown into ourselves completely, a night when I noticed that her eyes were inky mirrors of the evening sky, petroleum pools dotted with diamonds. But it was no one's wedding, and certainly -- most absolutely -- not ours. It was an orchestra concert, and I had free tickets. When, at one point, she dropped on bended knee and said, Will you marry me? I laughed instead of cried; I may even have yawned. As midnight rolled around, she dropped me at my apartment, and after promises to talk soon, we went our separate ways, the moon finished its rounds, and no one felt the need to lasso it for anyone.

At the concert, people buzzed, Aren't you the cute couple? They said, You're a good dancer, and so is your lover. And we smiled. No one needed to know: It's fake. Not fake like one of us was fooling the other, being disingenuous, being a dick, as though halfway through the risotto, I'd change into pajamas, brandish some Cracker Jack, and whip out a GameBoy -- Sorry, you thought this was a date? Nor was it arrested development, playing at being adults. It was neither of these things, and yet, in a way, it was both. It was fake dating. It was what I did last year.

Deliberately embarking on a fake date is revolutionary. Fake dating is saying, Let's get to know each other better without even expecting that goodnight smack. It's saying, in this day and age of the three-date rule, Let's have a preseason. We should have seen it coming. Because we're crazy now. We're crazy self-conscious (thanks, ad industry), we're crazy self-absorbed (thanks, pop psychology), we're crazy obsessed with finding fault (thanks, talk radio), and we're just plain crazy crazy (thanks, bovine growth hormone). Today, the idea that we could be crazy about a person sounds, well, crazy. Without trotting out the well-known divorce statistics, let's just say we've upped the ante on romantic expectations while simultaneously expecting to be disappointed. Fake dating begins to look rational.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print