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Tara checked her phone one last time in her lap before putting it in a pocket and getting out of the car. She'd arrived a little early because she'd wanted to avoid being late, and, as it always did when she was trying to be early, traffic and the lights had been with her the entire time. That had given her an extra fifteen minutes to sit in the car and think about what she was about to get into.
It had been an ad she'd seen on a dating app. Really more of a hookup app, based on the profiles present and the speed at which some guys wanted to show themselves off.
Tired of swiping left and ready to meet Mr. Right?
It was a cheesy ad, sure, but she'd looked up the company afterward and found out it was a matchmaking service. After she'd gotten over the initial shock that something like that could continue to exist and compete against all of the dating and hookup apps, she'd looked at their website more closely. It didn't look like a disguised escort service, it didn't ask her to download an app, and, as best as she could tell, it wasn't trying to cater to a specific group of people. It had the matchmaking questionnaire available for anyone to look at before deciding on whether to fill it out and pay for the service. Well, almost all of the questionnaire - there had been one more question asking about what kinds of sex she liked and what kind of people she liked to have sex with, even though she was nearly certain she wouldn't be doing any of that on a first date. The matchmakers had set up a dinner with someone in a place where they both would have something on the menu they could eat and enjoy, and they'd sent along a frankly bare-bones profile about her possible match, with a picture, a name, and his age. She had hoped for more, but the matchmakers had said that the first date was to have a "spontaneous conversation" with the confidence that the person in front of you was a match and you would have plenty to talk about with each other. Well she could at least go inside and start looking at the menu, so she wouldn't need to have an awkward pause about what to eat.
Entering the restaurant, Tara smiled at the host. "Hi, I'm Tara. I'm supposed to meet George here."
The host nodded. "I'll show you to the table," he said. "This way, please."
It was a nice table, in a secluded part of the restaurant so there would be less of the sound coming through while she decided whether George was worth another date. George was also already there. He rose to meet her.
"Hello, I'm George," he said. He looked a little frozen about what to do, now that he was standing and introducing himself.
"Tara," she said, smiling at him. At first look, there wasn't anything about him that said anything positive or negative about him. He didn't look like someone who was extremely concerned about his appearance, nor did he look like someone who was hiding some kind of serious vice, so that was good.
George stepped around and pulled the other chair out for her, and then waited until she had seated herself before taking his own chair again.
"I wanted to be sure that I wasn't late," George said. "It's easier now, but I still want to give myself enough time to get anywhere new, just in case."
"Same," Tara said, laughing. "I tend to catch all the red lights on the way to anywhere where I'm worried I'll be late. If I leave with enough time to account for all the red lights, they're all green."
George nodded. "Have you eaten here before?" he asked.
"No," Tara said. "I came in so I could look at the menu and not have any awkward pauses when they came for the order."
George passed her a menu and they both proceeded to look at it for some time, figuring out what they wanted to eat and drink while they talked. Tara settled on a good-looking pasta dish. George ordered fish and chips with coleslaw.
"If they offer it, it's what I try to get," he said. "You can learn a lot about a place by how well…or poorly…they do fish and chips."
"Why fish and chips?"
"It's usually simple to make, but a lot of places want to fancy it up in some way, and sometimes it works, but a lot of the time, it doesn't."
Tara shrugged. She didn't usually have that strong of opinions about food, or a system in place to evaluate new restaurants in such a way. George seemed like someone who might have set ways of doing things. That wasn't a deal-breaker, but Tara didn't like guys who weren't able to adapt themselves to what worked best for her in keeping relationships running smithly.
"Your pasta dish looked interesting, as well. Would you like to trade bites of each?" George asked. "Unless you're allergic."
"I'm not allergic, but I've never had fried food that I enjoyed." Tara replied.
"Interesting." George thought for a moment. "If you don't mind answering, is it taste? Texture? Something else?"
"It's…heavy a lot of the time." Tara said. "It sits for me and it's unpleasant."
George nodded. "Say no more. Have a bite if you want, but I won't force you."
"Thank you." It was a small and basic courtesy, but Tara had met enough men who believed their tastes were universal and had scoffed at her objections or the preferences same had expressed. So far, George was doing better than most of the men she had been through other means.
"You know," George said, "these matching profiles are really incomplete. There's not even a list of shared interests on them. How am I supposed to know what to talk about when there's no prompts?"
"I asked," Tara said, "and they told me it was so we would have an 'organic' conversation."
"I suppose that works for people whose first dates are checklists," George said. " 'How's the weather?' " he said, miming ticking a box. " 'What about that local sports team?' 'What do you do for work?' "
Tara smiled. "Weather's terrible, I don't follow that many sports, and you'd laugh at me if I told you what I actually did for work," she replied.
"Okay, now I'm intrigued," George said. "Laugh-embarrassed or laugh-funny?"
"Laugh-embarrassed," Tara said. "It's not something I talk about on a first date."
"Okay," George said. "Same about sports, and like so many people who were led astray about their choices in life, I was a corporate accountant until I couldn't stand it any more and now I'm trying to figure out how to make ends meet working for the library foundation. It's similar work, but it's nice to be calling people to ask them to support their library, rather than trying to chase down and reconcile a five-cent difference between projected and actual expenses."
"How long did that take?" Tara asked.
"Three weeks," George said, putting his head in his hands. "Someone had misinterpreted a three as an eight when they input the information into the spreadsheet, and it still took three weeks to trace everything back to the original and verify that it was, in fact, a miskey."
"Wow," Tara said, grimacing. "That's some serious detail work."
"Yeah," George said. "I was good at it, of course, but I don't think I made all that many friends at work. Very few people who I talked to liked having me there. Have you got any checklist questions for me?"
Tara thought about it. "Not really. I assumed that if we were going to click, we wouldn't have to grasp at conversation topics. We'd find some obscure topic, like ancient Greek amphorae, and then we'd spend all of the time talking about that and making decisions about whether we wanted another date from that."
"That sounds like an easy way to talk yourself out of a second date," George said. "People with similar niche interests often have very strong opinions about them. I might turn out to ship Reylo and you're fully engaged with Finn/Poe/Rey instead."
"But it's obvious that Rey has the hots for Finn and Poe has the hots for Finn, too," Tara said. "They only made Reylo happen so they could hint mysteriously at the fact that she had strong familial ties to the Dark Side that meant she could connect with that whiny boy," Tara said.
"So we both agree that the sequel series didn't go well?" George said, a smile curling on his face.
Tara nodded. "And they did Kelly Marie Tran dirty. I liked Rose."
George nodded. "Me, too." He grinned. "I suppose that's what they mean by 'organic,' isn't it?"
"Fandom's always a topic you can talk about," Tara said. At that moment, the server brought their dishes out. Tara took a small part of the fish and chips, chewed it thoughtfully, swallowed, and shook her head. "Still tastes like fried food," she said.
"You tried it, and I appreciate that you're willing to say what it is to you, instead of trying to figure out what I wanted to hear and saying that," George said. He took a forkful of her pasta and did the same thoughtful chewing routine. "Not my favorite decision in the saucing. The alfredo tastes a little bitter to me."
Tara hadn't detected anything like that. For a few minutes, they both ate their meals and drank. Tara wondered if their separate tastes in food would be a deal-breaker or something they could learn to work around, if they went on another date.
"Okay," Tara said setting her fork down for the moment. "Why should I reject you as a date?"
George finished chewing his fish piece and set his own fork down. "You mean, other than the severe ADHD that makes me unreliable, even though I've been on meds for years at this point?"
"Yep," Tara said. "It's no fun if we have the same reason, so you'll have to come up with another one."
"I'm surprised you got diagnosed," George said.
"It's very recent. As in, I had to change providers because my last one kept trying to gaslight me into 'trying harder,' as if I hadn't been for my whole life."
"Dick," George said, accurately guessing what gender of doctor would engage in making things more difficult for Tara.
"And it wasn't just his name," Tara said, in the same way she'd said it to her girlfriends after every session where she hadn't made any progress on getting something that would actually work for her.
"Oof, I'm sorry," George said and it sounded like he meant it, even though it had likely been much easier for George to get diagnosed and get his medication. "Ah. I've got an answer for you," he said.
"What is it?"
"You want to reject me because I'm not attractive enough for you. You're paying them to match you with people who are eye candy and can hold a real conversation, rather than a dad bod schlub like me who thinks he's clever and witty."
Tara thought about that. George wasn't unattractive, but neither was he someone she'd expect to see on a shirtless calendar. He had been able to keep up a conversation, which was a big plus compared to other men she'd tried to date. And while having something nice to look at was a big plus, she'd found that the men who could keep the conversation going were much better at being asked out in a second date.
"That assumes you aren't the best-looking person they could find for me," Tara said.
"If that's the case, then I'd better hope that all the people who signed up for this service are looking for people with great personalities," George said, giving Tara an over-exaggerated grin while darting his eyes back and forth like he was looking for an escape. "What about you?" he asked, settling back into his normal expression. "Why should I reject you, other than your shocking admission that you're not a neurotypical going through the world blissfully unaware that others might experience it differently than you? And no saying 'I'm unattractive,' because it's not true. And because I already took that one."
Tara laughed and blushed a little. She recognized a lot of the self-deprecating humor in George's delivery. They were both used to making fun of themselves before anyone else got the opportunity to do so, because if they did it first, then they could usually control how mean things got and keep the really cruel things off the table or in the realm of "dude, not cool." The earnestness that George had said that it wasn't true, though, felt like the mask slipping enough to let her see the sincerity, before hurriedly snapping it back into place, ready to declare that he was just kidding if it looked like she wasn't interested in him. Even with the matchmaking service proclaiming that they could do better than their competition, George wasn't ready to trust that they might have made a connection. Tara wasn't fully sure about it herself, even though things had gone better than most of her dates to this point. She definitely had an answer as to why George would reject her, though.
"That's easy," she said. "You'll reject me because nobody actually wants to put in the effort to get to know a demi girl, space intentionally present, when they could just move on to someone who they might have a chance of sleeping with on the first date."
"Hm?" George said. "Which demi are you talking about?"
"Demisexual."
"Ah." George took a drink, long enough that Tara knew he was stalling to try and get his thoughts in order and figure out what he wanted to say next. "I'm embarrassed to say this, but you're the first demisexual person I've met, so I…kind of don't have a script for this."
Tara raised her eyebrows at that.
"I don't have someone whispering in my ear secretly or anything like that," George said quickly. "But I've learned some…shortcuts and some recoveries for when I'm floundering, but they all sort of assume that someone is going to respond positively to being complimented on their sexiness."
"You can still try those," Tara said. "I'll let you know if they work."
George continued to look confused, but after a little bit, he nodded. "Sorry. As you can see, I don't do well with the unexpected. I don't think you being demi is a problem. Did they ask about that on your form?"
Tara nodded. "They asked a lot of things on my form. I assumed they had let you know at least a little bit about it, but I guess they expected us to talk about all of that ourselves."
"I guess." George said. "They asked a lot of things on those forms. A lot more than I would have talked about on a first date, honestly. I'm a little suspicious, now, that more of that wasn't included on what was sent to us."
Tara's phone buzzed in her pocket. George looked interested, and then pulled his own phone out of his pocket.
"Did you just get a text asking how you'd like to rate our date?" he asked, grinning. Tara pulled out her phone and checked the notification.
"Yep," she said. "I guess they didn't expect us to talk this long?"
"Or to have made some shallow decisions about whether we wanted to talk to each other again and said good night after the meal was done," George said. "Joke's on them for matching us up and not realizing we could probably talk all night."
"I think they might have expected something else to be happening all night," Tara said.
George laughed. "They're not very good at this, are they?"
Tara shrugged. "I think their matching algorithm isn't too bad, but they clearly haven't thought through all the implications. I'm kind of used to that."
"Well," George said, smiling broadly, "I guess we can save picking apart the matching service for our second date? Assuming I'm reading the signals correctly."
Tara nodded. "Yes, I'd like to meet you again, George. Although, if we're going to pick this algorithm apart, we're probably going to need more data on how it operates."
"Oh, that's okay," George said. "I'm not expecting exclusivity from you, and we might turn out better as friends and debuggers than as dates or partners."
Tara nodded. "I don't expect exclusivity from you, either. Because, well," Tara indicated herself. George nodded.
"When should we meet again?" George asked. "Two weeks? It would give the matchmakers time to try and find another pairing for each of us."
"Sounds fair," Tara said. "Bring all the details."
"I'll do my best." George smiled. "I think this might be the beginning of a profoundly interesting relationship."
Tara hoped so. Even if she never developed any intimate feelings for George, it was really nice to have someone who understood her and offered her interesting and weird things to do. She'd tried to make relationships work on less than that, so having someone who she enjoyed the company of would be a nice change.
They paid their checks, set reminders in their calendars for the next time they would meet, and went their separate ways, each scheming a way to try and get the matching service to give up more information about how it worked and what it believed the relevant criteria were. Tara was looking forward to that part, even if it meant having to go on a couple more dates with profoundly incompatible people. The data would make it worthwhile.