If you are anything like me, when you start “dating” someone, seeing them two or three times a week, texting and emailing in between, you assume that means the beginnings of some form of relationship, right? That you can count on this person not having conversations about the future and giving time and emotion to another person, right? In New York, you would be WRONG!
The term “dating” is very literal in the big apple. You are merely “going on dates.”
I give you W, a successful young investment banker my friend Sara met at a quiz night in a downtown bar. (She, of course, made the effort to meet him, see last week’s entry.) They had been on a few dates and met each other’s friends; she was starting to like him and thought he felt the same.
Now, I’m not saying he didn’t like her; in fact I am sure he did. The problem was he also ‘liked’ several other girls! He was caught at a restaurant with another lady and looked like, as Sara put it, “a puppy that had been caught chewing a shoe” when she asked him about it, i.e. aware he is in big trouble but not entirely sure why.
“He stumbled over his words and stuttered about us not being exclusive,” she reminisces. This is a term you need to be very aware of when dating in NYC, unless you are exclusively (roll your eyes accordingly) seeing each other, you can be pretty much certain the person you are dating is seeing multiple people concurrently. It is completely the norm, and that goes for men and women, so male friends have also told me.
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