After Ten Years Without Dating, I Finally Went on a Date

I practiced saying my own name in the car. Not a joke. I sat in the parking lot of a wine bar in Silver Lake, twenty minutes early because apparently ten years out of practice also means forgetting that arriving exactly on time is a skill and I said, out loud, to my empty car, “Hi, I’m Amara,” three separate times, adjusting the tone each time like I was auditioning for the role of a person capable of normal human interaction.

I had been married for most of my thirties. Divorced for two years before I let myself even consider dating again. And somewhere in that decade of not doing this, my entire social operating system had apparently gone through several outdated updates nobody told me about.

I didn’t know what “we should hang out sometime” meant anymore versus an actual date. I didn’t know you were supposed to confirm the day before now. I had forgotten, entirely, how to small talk with a stranger who wasn’t trying to sell me insurance.

Felix was already inside when I walked in, eleven minutes late because I had circled the block twice trying to work up the nerve to actually go in and the first thing I said to him, after ten years of silence on this particular topic, was not hello.

“Sorry, I am late. I was having a small crisis about whether this counts as a date or a hangout.”

He blinked at me. “It’s, um, a date. I asked you out specifically.”

“Right. Yes. I knew that.” I did not know that, apparently. Until he confirmed it out loud like I was a confused tourist asking for directions to a country I was already standing in.

It went somewhat downhill, or uphill, depending on your appetite for secondhand embarrassment, from there.

We ordered wine and when the waiter asked if we wanted to see the food menu, I said, with full confidence, “We are still deciding,” as though Felix and I had some kind of established rapport that required mutual deliberation, when really I just didn’t know the etiquette anymore and panicked.

You used to know how to do this. What happened to you?

I found out, over the next hour, that apparently what happened to me was ten years of only ever needing to communicate with one specific person who already knew my entire backstory. Which meant I had lost the specific skill of explaining myself to someone starting from zero.

Felix asked what I did for work, a completely normal opening question. And I answered with roughly four more minutes of detail than the question required, including an unprompted tangent about my ex-husband’s opinion of my career choices that nobody, least of all Felix, had asked for.

“Sorry,” I said, catching myself mid-sentence. “I don’t know why I brought up my ex-husband on a first date. That’s apparently a thing I’m doing tonight.”

“It’s okay,” Felix said, visibly trying to decide whether to be amused or concerned. “You can keep going if you want.”

I did not keep going, mercifully, choosing instead to drink my wine a little too quickly to cover the silence which led directly to the next incident, approximately forty minutes later, when I gestured too enthusiastically describing a hiking trip and knocked my glass directly into Felix’s lap.

This is it. This is the night I remember forever as the night I ruined a man’s pants and any chance of a second date.

He was genuinely gracious about it, blotting his jeans with a napkin while I apologized roughly nine separate times, each apology somehow longer and more detailed than the last, like I was trying to set some kind of record for how thoroughly one woman could express regret over a glass of pinot noir.

At one point I actually said, “I promise I am normally much more composed than this,” which is, I have since learned, the exact sentence a person says right before doing something even less composed.

That something was the goodbye. We walked out together, both of us slightly damp and stood on the sidewalk in that specific limbo where neither person knows if this is a hug situation, a handshake situation, or something else entirely, and I, having apparently decided that my previous mistakes hadn’t been embarrassing enough for one evening, went in for a hug at the exact moment Felix leaned in for what I can only assume was intended to be a cheek kiss.

We collided somewhere in the middle, my forehead connecting solidly with his nose, an actual audible thump and he made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a wince.

“I am so sorry,” I said, for what felt like the fortieth time that night. “I used to be good at this. I promise there was a version of me that knew how doors and hugs and human interaction worked.”

Felix, rubbing his nose, laughing now, actually laughing and said, “Honestly, this might be the most memorable first date I have ever been on.”

Memorable is one word for it.

I drove home that night fully convinced I would never hear from him again, replaying the wine spill and the forehead collision on a loop, already composing the self-deprecating story I would tell my sister the next morning about how spectacularly I had botched my long-awaited return to dating.

He texted two hours later. “Made it home okay. Ice pack is helping. Dinner again next week, if you are brave enough to risk my safety a second time?”

I stared at that text for a full minute before responding, genuinely startled that the man I had injured, verbally rambled at and doused in red wine wanted a second round. I said yes immediately before my newly rusty dating instincts could talk me into overthinking it the way they had overthought basically everything else that night.

We went out again the following Thursday. I didn’t spill anything. I only brought up my ex-husband once, briefly and caught myself fast enough to redirect before the four-minute tangent could rebuild itself.

I still don’t fully trust my own instincts around doors and hugs, honestly, approaching every goodbye now with the extreme caution of someone defusing something explosive.

Ten years is a long time to be out of practice at anything. I used to think the rust would show up as awkward silences, nervous laughter, maybe some forgettable small talk. I did not expect it to show up as a full contact sport.

But Felix and I have been seeing each other for three months now and somewhere between the wine stain and the forehead bruise, I apparently managed to accidentally charm a man by being catastrophically bad at something I used to be fine at.

Maybe that’s its own kind of luck. Or maybe Felix just has unusually low standards for what counts as a good first impression. Either way, I am back out here now, slightly more careful with my wine glass, still not entirely sure I understand modern hug etiquette, but back out here nonetheless