Each week, our local newspaper runs a Dinner with Cupid column in their Sunday magazine insert. Folks apply online and the newspaper selects couples they think might make a good match, sets them up for a blind dinner-date, and picks up the tab. Afterward, the two are interviewed and snippets of what they say make up the column. In the last section of each column – ominously titled Post-Mortem – each person grades the other A+ to F, and comments on the possibility of a second date.
First, let me say I am so happy to be married 30+ years and to not have to worry about with whom I’ll be eating dinner or going out. That said, if I was single, I think the blind date thing would be kind of cool. Which is why I check it out each week.
This week, the couple, Meg and Alec, seemed to hit it off. She ended up giving him and “A” and hoping he’d call. He gave her a “B+” and said, “I had a fun time, for sure, but feel we would be better off as friends. She is a really friendly and engaging person; however, the romantic interest did not develop for me.”
That made me think about how, in these days of instant everything, so many young people have come to expect instant fireworks, instant heat when they meet the “right” person for them. I think they often confuse lust with love, letting their hormones rather than their heads make decisions.
It is entirely possible Alec and Mege are all wrong for each other, but how in the world can he know that after one dinner-date during which both enjoyed themselves and she impressed him as being friendly and engaging?
Alec, I hope you reconsider and give her, and yourself, a few more chances to really get to know each other. Long-lasting love isn’t about heat. Heat eventually cools. But friendly and engaging, those are qualities upon which lifetimes can be built.
