She invited me to her Halloween party after one Tinder date, and I had already reached the stage of wondering whether arriving at 7:00 or 7:30 would damage my romantic prospects. The party started at six. Apparently, that was the easy part.
We’re both 23, and the date went really well. I felt a connection, which hasn’t happened to me in a while. Then came an invitation to see her again, this time with her friends around. I want to go. My brain has simply decided that attending requires a strategy.
She said people would be arriving later, so I told her I’d get there around seven or seven-thirty. That sounds like a perfectly ordinary exchange until I put it through the part of my mind responsible for making ordinary exchanges difficult. I now have an arrival window for a party I am genuinely pleased to have been invited to.
Then there’s the question of bringing something. She was stressed about cooking, so I asked whether she needed me to pick anything up. She said no. A clear answer, kindly supplied by the person most qualified to give it. I am nevertheless wondering whether I should bring something.
I don’t want to turn up empty-handed and look thoughtless. I also don’t want to treat her answer as a puzzle whose secret solution is the opposite of what she said. Somewhere between those two concerns is a normal guest carrying either something or nothing, and I envy his confidence.
Meeting her friends introduces another complication: I sometimes talk too much. I know this about myself, so my current plan is to listen and not say much. There is a certain efficiency in noticing one possible problem and preparing to arrive with its exact opposite. I’d like them to meet me, though, rather than a man conducting a quiet observation exercise.
The friends matter because this isn’t another date with just the two of us. She’ll be hosting, cooking and seeing people she already knows. I don’t know how much time we’ll get together. I’m excited to see her in that setting, but I can’t expect the whole evening to arrange itself around the fact that I liked our first date.
That’s the part underneath all this planning. The last couple of times I met someone, I felt I’d spoiled things by saying or doing the wrong thing. That was my impression; it doesn’t give me a reliable list of mistakes to avoid now. It does explain why a promising invitation has me checking my own behavior before I’ve even arrived.
Nothing in what she’s said suggests that she’s setting me a test. We hit it off, she invited me, and I’m going. She’s busy getting a party ready. I’m still trying to work out whether to bring something, having already asked the host and received an answer.
