I looked him up to check that going to dinner with him seemed safe. I came away trying to work out whether I might be his mother’s age. This was considerably more arithmetic than I had expected from accepting an invitation.
The night before, I’d met him at a social event. We had a great conversation, he asked me to dinner later in the week, and I said yes. I thought he was somewhere in his mid-thirties. I’m 45. That seemed like a difference I could take in without needing to sit down.
Then I found the high school and college graduation years on his Instagram. Unless I’ve got the calculation wrong, he’s about 25. Once I started looking at him with that possibility in mind, I could see it. Apparently my first estimate had been generous by an entire decade.
He hasn’t told me his age, so this is still my deduction, not a fact he’s confirmed. But even as an estimate, it changed the dinner invitation. If I’d known at the event that he might be twenty years younger than me, I wouldn’t have said yes. I’d have noticed the gap before giving the conversation a chance to make me interested.
Unfortunately for that tidy version of events, the conversation already happened. I enjoyed it. Finding a graduation year hasn’t retroactively made him less enjoyable to talk to, and I’m still looking forward to dinner. I now have two reactions that are doing a poor job of agreeing with each other.
There’s also the question of how old he thinks I am. People often guess I’m in my thirties until I tell them otherwise. I’m not offering that as a boast; right now, it’s a possible explanation for why neither of us mentioned the subject. He may have been making an estimate of his own.
I don’t know whether he realizes I’m 45, whether he would care, or whether I’m worrying about a surprise he isn’t going to have. The possibility that I could be his mother’s age is entirely my own contribution to the evening. He asked me to dinner. I’m the one who has mentally invited a parent.
What I don’t want to do is send a message announcing my age and asking whether he’s okay with it. That makes a perfectly ordinary fact about me sound like something requiring advance approval. On the other hand, I don’t want to sit through dinner wondering whether we’ve both arrived with the wrong decade in mind.
So dinner is still ahead of us. I still want to go. The invitation I accepted after a good conversation now comes with a fact I know about myself, a guess I’ve made about him, and a text I really don’t want to send.
