For those among you that need to hear this:
Dating is not, nor should it ever be, a ‘big thing’.
Dating should not ‘mean anything’. At least not until a significant connection has appeared. The meaning in dating is in enjoying the moment like one might enjoy country air. It’s an hour of yoga, a sauna, an ice-bath: a moment to come to one’s senses. Any stipulation of future commitment cannot be known until the trial has expired!
Instead, think of dating the way old men think of playing chess—like groups do their tai chi—in the corner of the park. What sustains the activity is not the chess, but the dozen secondary benefits: the mingling of energies, the getting out of one’s house, moving the body, communing, trimming errant nasal hair and changing one’s shirt. It does us good. Stop the old man chess, stop dating, and something in us dies. Your doctor, listening through a stethoscope to the irregular and agitated murmur in your chest, will encourage you to pick it back up.
Dating is a practice of restorative health. Nothing to do with searching for sex or a relationship—these things happen as a consequence. Football teams, at least where I’m from, no longer focus on ‘winning’. They worry about perfecting a philosophy, a system… knowing goals, victories, championships, will follow en route. The first thing is to simply visit with a woman, the act of sitting with her presently, a joyful witness to the energy she brings. The date should cost as your chess-game costs you: it’s good manners to pick up the chocolate or the coffee or the pastis or the wine. The real cost is to the demons that hate birdsong and duckponds and the blue April sky. The cost is your comfort-zone afternoon.
To set up such ‘dates’, one does not need courage as much as a system. When you’ve finished a good lunch and the waiter offers dessert, he does not take offense or excitement if you say no to him, or yes. But because he offers you desert, rather than waiting in hope that you ask for it, restaurant revenue is up twenty or twenty-five percent. This waiter has simply incorporated a system of upselling, and the man who systematically invites all around him for drinks, happy hour, green juice, tacos, the scenic route back to the metro, wraps single women, whole groups, new friends, all up in his presence. Dating is not a ‘thing’: it is a moment of casual happenstance that phases the people who were most connected in one moment to continue that connection in the next. It happens all the time—pawn to queen four; can’t today, but here’s my what’s app; the steady migration of forces up the black and white table—if you live your life with such a system.
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I am open to everything—open to the lifelong relationship, to utter transformation. I am open to a romance, an affair, that the two of us run behind those bushes right now and have it off. I am open to everything, attached to as little as I can be. Attached, as we all get, from time to time. But I have no rush. I enjoy sitting with a woman, enjoy sitting with you, as it is good for my health. Every great love I ever had unfolded from such a simple present moment.
A man doesn’t need to press anything home. Her body, her energy, is already an invitation—so often she’s said yes before you even extended your hand. One of the arts we practice here is simply reading what’s on the table—and being thankful for this daily bread.
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