“Totally agree on the no names part. It was...it was good...”
“I feel like I should have flashback sequence music to cue up for this moment.”
I shot them a mock glare.
“Maybe start by telling us what went well?”
“Right. Okay. I’ll... I’ll do that. So our dinner was, like, really delicious...”
DATE #1: NERDY GAMER GIRL WHO WOULDN’T TELL ME WHO SHE COSPLAYS AS
I sketched out a little bit about meeting Destiny and the acceptable level of awkward. “Then came the cosplay conversation, which was where things began to deteriorate. Or, okay, where I began to deteriorate.”
Sidney cleared their throat, bringing me back to the show. “I’ve heard a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone cite talking about cosplay as a reason for a date going wrong.”
“Not cosplaying in general! And it didn’t go wrong so much as...get briefly tense? Which I think, with the benefit of hindsight, was entirely my fault. The date itself I would categorize as pretty good.” I looked into the camera. “Seriously, Date #1, if you’re watching, I think we had a good time. Right? Uh, don’t comment. I mean, obviously do if you want to, but if you don’t, that was a rhetorical question.”
“Have you cosplayed before?” Sidney asked.
“A few times, with friends.” I batted my eyelashes at them. “I make a very fetching Princess Leia.”
They laughed. “Do you have a hairpiece of some kind for that?”
“Yes! I even bought a Princess Leia wig, with the two side buns.”
Sidney, eyes still full of mirth, said, “Declan, you have hidden depths.”
I flushed at the roughly ninety-three dirty jokes my brain popped up in response. “Umm...” Say something, make a sentence, any sentence that is NOT about your “hidden depths.” Was all of YouTube making jokes about my ass right now? Probably not, right? “Anyway, I’m all for cosplay, but after I shared my Princess Leia story—and I might have, uh, offered photographic evidence—Date #1 totally refused to reciprocate with cosplay stories. Okay, no, sorry, she did talk about cosplay, but she wouldn’t show me any pictures or tell me about her favorite characters and obviously that’s her choice but I don’t know, it made me feel weird.”
“Because you had already shown her a picture of yourself?”
“Umm.” Was it better or worse to say Umm instead of sitting there like a lump on live YouTube? “I guess I just figured we’d both be kind of sharing? And then it felt like we weren’t.”
“Ah yes. A vulnerability clash in which one person has shared more than the other and feels uncomfortably exposed.” They nodded. “That’s a familiar conflict.”
It was a little disconcerting to have my seemingly irrational weirdness about not being told someone’s favorite cosplay character so breezily diagnosed. “It wasn’t exactly a conflict.”
“An imbalance, then?”
“...maybe?”
“How did the date go on from there?”
“Well, I guess I was...more miffed than really made sense. Which I didn’t do a very good job at hiding.” I glanced toward the camera again. “Uh, I’m really sorry, Date #1. Apparently I was feeling vulnerable after showing you my sexy Leia outfit. Anyway, it didn’t end badly, at all. I don’t think there were mad sparks in either direction, but I could see us being Xbox friends and playing Overwatch together.”
Sidney nodded. “That seems like a positive outcome for meeting a stranger. I thought it might be helpful if we end each episode with the same three questions, in order to have a standard sort of metric by which to judge each date.”
“Give ’em to me.”
Another little quirk of their lips. “Question one, if you’re comfortable rating this: Did you feel you had physical chemistry?”
“Yeah. She was super cute and she didn’t seem to find me repulsive, so yes. Wait, do we have an actual scale?”
“Say, one to five.”
“Okay, I’d say four. With five being, like, I was so powerfully attracted to them that I couldn’t stop thinking about touching them.”
“And one being Find them repulsive?”
“Exactly.”
We smiled at each other.
“Question two: Was there intellectual chemistry?”
“Oooh.” I paused to think about what it meant to have intellectual chemistry with someone. “I think so? We like a lot of the same stuff, I guess.”
“I’m trying to get more at a sense of...being interested in the same aspects of things even if you’re not interested in the same actual things.” Sidney straightened their keyboard and brushed a piece of lint away from the space bar, which seemed weirdly fidgety for them. “Like, you can read the same book as someone and still not be intrigued by the same themes. But I think if you have intellectual chemistry you’re more likely to be intrigued by similar themes, even if your scope of experience with those themes is different.” They frowned. “I thought I had a whole concise explanation for this but it sounds confusing now that I’ve said it out loud.”
“No, I think that makes sense. And actually, maybe not that much?” I considered the Overwatch conversation again. “In a way I’m more into character interaction, even in first-person shooters, than I am in the actual shooting. And she’s big into killing all the creatures, which is cool, but it’s less likely to bring me back to a game than it is a lot of people.”
They mimed wiping sweat off their brow. “It seems like you somehow managed to understand what I was trying to say.”
“I get it. So on intellectual chemistry, I’d say maybe a two.”
“The last question is one I think you’ve already answered, but let’s do it officially: Would you go out on a second date?”
I shrugged. “Date, no. Game, yes.”
“Thank you, Declan, for offering your dates up as fodder for our better collective understanding of dating.” They turned to the camera. “And thanks to all of you for tuning in to our second episode of The Love Study here on Your Spinster Uncle.”
They went into a detailed description of the services offered by the company that was sponsoring the show, and I had to admit, it sounded intriguing. Being able to do therapy without leaving your house was a cool idea and there was an app and a sliding scale and everything. (Which I learned from the ad-read as they talked.) I tried to look politely interested, which I was, so at least that was pretty easy.