Parenting Without A License

A Title With a Gratuitous Viagra Thrown In Because I Don’t Get Enough Spam As It Is

Posted by Kimberly on October 16th, 2007 — Posted in Just Like Riding A Bicycle, Facebook Guy

I still haven’t mastered this whole dating thing. If what I’m doing is, in fact, dating. Which I question, since I’m still not sure that what Facebook Guy and I have been doing actually counts as going out on dates.
What are the rules for dating when you’re a grownup, anyway? It was pretty simple when we were all teenagers. Back then, dating was a lot like pornography; we may not have been able to define it, but we sure knew it when we saw it. Now that we’re grownups, though, the rules just seem so much more complicated, while remaining unspoken.

First there’s the coffee situation. As Willow so astutely pointed out in Reptile Boy, “It’s the non-relationship drink of choice. It’s not a date, it’s a caffeinated beverage.” A very high pressure caffeinated beverage. Everybody knows that coffee isn’t a date, it’s an audition. A predate, if you will. If the coffee goes well, you move on to the actual dating; however, if you find yourself draining that mug the way a trapped fox will gnaw off its hind leg, you’ve got the perfect out. No harm, no foul. After all, it was just coffee.

And then there’s the movie, a classic date scenario. Unless, of course, you’re going dutch. Which can under some circumstances still be considered a date, but it should never be assumed. But what if you share popcorn? Or if the tickets were free? Is it still considered going dutch? Even if it’s not, is it a date?

What if there’s a movie and coffee? Do they cancel each other out? Or is there some sort of magical dating equivalent of the two negatives make a positive rule that states that two non-events create a date?

The clincher, of course, is the kissing. If there’s kissing at the end, the evening is definitely ending as a date regardless of how it began. But what if there’s no kissing? Does that automatically mean it’s merely an outing? Does there have to be kissing for it to be a date?
It’s all so complicated. Was it always this way? Is this why I didn’t date much in high school? Preferring to just get on with it over all this pussyfooting around? I’m not sure. What I do know is that managing the dating scene as a teenage babysitter was cake compared to navigating it with a teenage babysitter.

All of this is a pretty roundabout way to tell you that I went out for coffee and a movie with Facebook Guy last night, and I’m still not sure if it was a date or an outing. I do know that I had such a good time that I was shocked to look at the clock discover that we’d exceeded the Tim Horton’s time limit, not to mention my mommy curfew, by a good 2 hours.

Pelting home at midnight, hellbent for leather and racing the clock, I didn’t feel like a naughty teenager, though. I felt like Cinderella. And she was definitely on a date, right?