Dating

We are back from another first date. I thought we’d be done with these some time ago, as we’ve been, er, married for 15 years. But it turns out that after you meet your life partner, you have to continue this dating thing, only with a trickier set of matches to make. First there’s the couple date, where you as a couple go out with another couple and see whether everyone can be friends. It’s extraordinarily hard to find a good couple match. There are couple matches where really both of you like one of them, or (worse) one of you likes one of them. It’s passable if each of you likes a different one of them. It’s only in the glory days that both of you like both of them (and ah, I hope some of our dear matches from the US are reading now—you know who you are and we adore you).

But magnitudes of difficulty harder still is the family date. Everyone has to minimally get along (e.g., not hit, scratch, bite, or be enemies with) everyone, and as many people as possible have to like one another. This means kids’ ages, genders, and other tangible and intangibles have to be added to the complexity of the couple date before you find a really good match. In DC, we had some nice partial matches (where 3 in our family worked at a time), and really, that’s good enough. We’re in a new land, though, and we’re starting fresh.

Michael says I’m a dinner slut, which means I invite everyone to dinner, almost without judgment at all. I’m game to give any combination a try. And that means that we’ve had some really lovely dinners and met some people we like enormously. And when they get up and we finally pry our kids away from one another (in the best instance because they’re playing), and they shut the door, the debrief begins. Now it’s been a really long time since I’ve had a first date with an actual boy (Michael and I celebrated the 19th anniversary of our first date last week), so I don’t exactly remember the rush of the after-you-say-goodnight feelings. But here, there’s the door closing, and the talking talking talking about how it went. In the worst cases, there’s a mismatch between various members of the family where some of us want to invite them over again—and soon—and others of us would just as soon wait a long while.

Tonight was an excellent first family date. We’ll wait to talk about it, because we don’t know what their judgments were about us (“won’t that obnoxious American family ever leave??”). But it’s got me thinking about how hard it is to make deep friendships, and how good they are for our souls. When you’re young, you believe that finding the perfect mate is the only task before you. And for a little while, maybe you’re right. But the world is a big place, and people are complex and multifaceted, and they need a constellation of connections, not just a single star (and speaking of stars, M has just come in from the back porch, after looking at the enormous sky with these different stars and is breathless with the beauty). But what is it that makes a family friend work? And here, now that we’re cutting across history and geography and culture and (in a small extent) language—here in this tiny village across the world from all we’ve known before, it would seem so much harder.

So far, though, it hasn’t been so much harder. Like the family dates we took in DC, there are ones that feel better than others. But these are lovely people in this little village, in this little country. And because I don’t know any of them well yet, there is a wellspring of possibility. On the way to the train this morning, we stopped and had a chat to one friend candidate (here you “have a chat to” rather than chatting “with”). At the train station, we had a lovely conversation with someone else.. On the way home, we sat behind a third friend possibility. They seem to grow potential friends on the trees here in this village, along with the lemons and grapefruits, which are ripe and falling on the ground in some yards just now. How many of these little blossoms will turn into fruit, though? How many first dates do you have to have before you have a second. And with those who have come for several dinners (and a breakfast), when does it get to be the easy effortless friendship of the glorious Melissa Glen Haber (who, in addition to being a spectacular friend, is also a brilliant author: check her out)? Does it every get effortless here in this new context? This is the planting season. It’s not quite clear when or how the harvest comes. Sometimes it feels like hard hard work. But on a night with billions of stars, after having a yummy vegetarian barbeque looking at the sea on a very good first family date, the planting is all part of the fun.

ps The picture is from the bungy jumping in Taupo because of the vague thematic possible connections (of ups and downs, of risks taken, etc.). Mostly, I'm showing this to avoid another-magnificent-sunset-on-the-beach picture and because I haven't shown you this yet. This isn't us bungy jumping--it was painful for us to even watch. Can you find the tiny person in this picture, the crazy one who has just paid $NZ 100 for the chance to feel like she's about to die? Don't try this at home...