At the end of our coffee date, she told me I was too normal and too chill for her. Until then, I had thought things were going reasonably well. Apparently, we had attended different versions of the same date.
I'm 28, she's 30, and we'd met on a dating app. We had spent the previous week texting pretty frequently before meeting in person. This wasn't a case of two strangers sitting down with absolutely nothing to go on. She already knew about my interests and had some sense of my personality. At least, I thought that was what all the texting had accomplished.
At the coffee shop, we talked about shows we liked and video games. I told her a few short stories about concerts I'd been to and mentioned my friends. Nothing I considered especially strange, and nothing I was presenting as an audition for the world's most unpredictable man. It was a first date over coffee. I was behaving accordingly.
She was quiet at times. I noticed that, but I didn't take it as proof that anything was wrong. There were still things to talk about, and from my side the conversation seemed to be going smoothly enough. I wasn't expecting a declaration of love. I just didn't realize being relaxed was about to appear on the list of problems.
Then came her assessment. Too normal. Too chill. She looked annoyed, maybe even angry, which made it harder to understand. Someone deciding we didn't have chemistry would have made sense. Someone seeming irritated that I had turned out to be the fairly ordinary person she'd been texting was a more difficult review to process.
I still don't know what she meant by those words. Maybe the ease I thought we had was, for her, a lack of spark. Maybe my company simply wasn't what she'd imagined. The conversations beforehand couldn't guarantee attraction in person. But they also hadn't suggested that I should arrive with an entirely different personality.
She headed out quickly, well ahead of me. The workers wished us a good day, and she didn't respond. I had gone in wondering whether we'd get along. I left trying to understand how I'd managed to annoy someone by being too relaxed. She was already well ahead of me.
