After our date, she told me the waiter had texted her. I had stepped away to use the bathroom during our date, and apparently that had been enough time for him to get her number. Our date now came with a restaurant playlist.
I’m 27, and she’s 22. We met at a kava bar a few weeks earlier and started hanging out as friends. When I found out she was interested in me, I decided to take her on a date. Until then, the development I was paying attention to was the one between us.
The waiter was around 40. While I was away, he spoke to her in Spanish and got her phone number. I wasn’t there for the conversation, so I don’t know how he asked or what she understood him to be offering. What I do know is that he followed up afterward.
According to her, he commented that she looked too young for me and that I looked as though I was in my 30s. I’m not, although it was interesting to receive an unsolicited age assessment along with the service. He also sent her a playlist from the restaurant. Music recommendations seem a little less neutral when they arrive with commentary on the man you’re on a date with.
She thought he was being friendly. She didn’t take it as an attempt to ask her out, and she told me about the messages herself. I read the number exchange and the comments about our ages as possible flirting. That doesn’t establish what he wanted, much less what she wanted. It does explain why I wasn’t hearing this as a simple story about a helpful waiter.
There was another incident I already found strange. When we first met, she gave a different guy her number and a fake Instagram account. Through that account, she told him to ask out her friend, who was actually her. Eventually, she brushed him off through her real number. I couldn’t follow the appeal of adding an imaginary intermediary to an interaction that already had two people in it.
That episode made the waiter’s number exchange harder for me to shrug off. It wasn’t proof that the two situations meant the same thing. But I was starting to wonder how she handled attention from other men, and whether something that felt ordinary to her would regularly leave me confused.
She had also told me her ex cheated on her and used to get on her about having male friends. I don’t know the full story of that relationship. I don’t want to borrow his suspicions, or treat her having male friends as a problem. Being uneasy about one date isn’t a reason to appoint myself supervisor of her contacts.
There are things about her I appreciate. She’s Catholic and doesn’t drink alcohol, take drugs, smoke, or use nicotine. Those qualities appealed to me. Now I’m realizing that knowing those things doesn’t tell me whether we understand dating boundaries the same way.
We’re only just moving beyond friendship, and I’m already trying to work out whether this is my insecurity or a real difference between us. She described a friendly conversation and some music. I was still stuck on the part where our waiter had her number before our date was over.
