Muddling Through

Phew Monday already. The weekend pure flew by. Still, it was a lovely one, busy, but with enough down time thrown in to be relaxing.

On Friday night Melissa, Ash and I saw a play at the Irish Repertory Theatre on West 22nd St. It was excellent and very funny, although I didn’t have much of a clue about what we were seeing until I met the girls for dinner before the show. Ash had emailed me the details a few weeks before, but work had been so busy I'd only had time to skim read her note and had agreed to see the show primarily as a chance to catch up with Ash, who I hadn’t seen since a girls' trip to Sanibel in January can you believe. She only lives a few miles from me, but she’s totally loved up with her studly Italian boyfriend and has been a bit out of commission of late. Anyway I am glad I agreed to go because not only did I catch up with Ash, but the play was superb. It's called Tom Crean, Antartic Explorer, a one man show written and performed by Aidan Dooley.

I can’t say I'd ever heard of Tom Crean until Friday night, but he’s apparently ‘one of Ireland’s unsung heroes’ serving in the navy under Captain Robert Scott and then Sir Ernest Shackleton, and surviving not one, not two, but THREE expeditions to the Antarctic in the early 1900s. His is an amazing story and Aidan Dooley is hilarious as Tom, recounting tales of his expeditions. I was surprised by how funny the play was given the subject matter. If you get a chance to see it you really should snap up a ticket. I can’t recommend it enough.

Saturday I had a 4th date with Tel Aviv and I have to say that, despite the differences in our interests he's kind of growing on me a bit. I was also surprised to hear him refer to me as the woman he’s ‘dating’. Dating!! Hmm, now there’s a turn up for the books, to hear a man in New York refer to a woman he’s had only 4 dates with as the woman he is ‘dating’, seeing each other perhaps, but dating? Not so much. There are distinct phases of dating in New York you see and coming, as I do, from a country where our dating habits are more simplistic and include a tendency to get trollied in a bar, end up snogging the guy next to you and bingo…Bob’s your boyfriend, New York style dating can seem perplexing and over complicated. There are rules, and I am thinking that maybe Tel Aviv didn’t get his copy.

My Brooklyn born friend, Melissa once told me there are essentially three phases of dating in New York. “There’s seeing each other, then dating, then…no, wait, there’s going out, then seeing each other and then dating. Is that right? No, no I don’t think that’s it, it’s…. umm, hmmm, oh I’m not sure.”

Okay, so that’s clear then? Yes…as mud. If the natives don’t know how do they expect the rest of us to manage? Truth is that most New Yorkers, native or not, seem fuzzy on the details, but generally speaking, when you first start seeing someone in New York you can’t assume that he - or she - is not seeing other people too. Not everyone does this, quite frankly who has the energy, and most New Yorkers I’ve come across don’t like the idea that this multi-dating business happens at all, but it’s generally accepted that it does and whether you subscribe to the practice or not, you live with assumption that the person you’re seeing, and possibly sleeping with, is likely seeing and sleeping with other people too. In England this is referred to as ‘two-timing’, regardless of the casual nature of the relationship. At least that’s how it worked in my day. Perhaps things have changed.

In New York, before you can progress to the phase where you and your beloved are seeing only each other, you need to have “the conversation” where you both agree not to see other people. It sounds a straight forward enough, if not necessarily appealing, process except for the fact that the rules in New York do not necessarily apply to the rest of the country - oh no, God forbid it should be so simple – and when you consider the number of New Yorkers who didn’t grow up in the city and are living here and dating by their own rules, then it’s no surprise we’re all confused. A work colleague informs me there’s no such multi-dating nonsense going on in her home state of Florida, where it would be most definitely frowned upon, and when I was dating Gobshite he assured me that in the Midwest, where he’s from, they wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, however it happens here all the time and the fact is that many adopted New Yorkers have embraced the practice for their own convenience. Often you don’t have the faintest idea of what’s really going on. When it comes down to it we are all just muddling through and time will tell as to whether Tel Aviv's definition of dating does in fact mesh with my own.