Holding Hands in the Coffee Shop

He tried to hold my hand in the coffee shop but I pulled away.

It was too soon! I told him, the words coming out far more harshly than I’d intended. He drew back, abashed, then apologized for getting ahead of himself.

We’d met online a few weeks before and he’d slowly managed to thaw my icy heart to the extent that I was willing to meet him. I hadn’t realized how frigid my poor heart had gotten, until I found myself making excuses for why I wasn’t yet ready to meet.

Truth be told, the past few bad dating experiences have taken their toll on me. Confronted with another nice guy–after a string of nice guys have failed miserably to impress me upon further acquaintance–my heart locked up and refused to budge.

This is the part of the entry where I could enumerate his many lovely qualities. I could tell you about his pleasing appearance (it’s very nice), his polite manners (check), his upstanding position in the community (positions don’t come much more upstanding than his!), his devotion to his family (very devoted) or even his sexily deep voice (rrrrawr).

But really, there’s little point in trying to convince you. If I wrote in detail about his good qualities, I’d be trying to convince myself of the veracity of those claims.

That’s what we do when we write–we make the truth.

Eventually I found my fingers playing with his fingers as we sat at the coffee shop. I traced over a couple of interesting scars. I asked about their geneses.

Our fingers stayed close as we continued to talk, my heart thawing incrementally. The topic turned to sex (as it so frequently does when I’m involved) and he demonstrated his g-spot massage technique on my palm. My body reacted; I spent the rest of the visit sitting in a puddle. This is a good sign, no?

Do you think it’s a problem then that he didn’t know what the word “monogamy” meant? I mean that literally. He did not know the literal meaning of the word. “One partner,” I told him. “It means that you have one partner at a time.”

“Oh, right. Yes, I want us to be exclusive!” he told me.

He wants exclusivity but had no idea what the word “monogamy” meant.

I know what it means but have utterly no interest in it right now.

What do we think about this? Weigh in, please.

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