The first date with the first great love of my life was austere but rich with innuendo. Timothy Joseph Patrick Bourke. I met him at an ice skating rink wearing my new black wool pencil skirt, and every time I fell down like a dizzy bowling pin onto the ice, he’d dust the snow off my breasts and hipbones with a flat efficient hand. We walked to the Hopetoun Tea Rooms, a Melbourne café so old there was dust on the velvet wallpaper, and we downed three silver pots of strong black Prince of Wales. Afternoon bled into night, there was a great deal of staring. There was nothing we wanted to eat or to see but each other. Maybe the cost of the entire encounter came to twenty dollars. All we had in our pockets. That was twenty-four years ago and two marriages, one divorce, and three children later. My tastes haven’t changed. Romance thrives on simplicity, if only because luxury gets in the way of curiosity, affection, and delicious apprehension.
To put this in perspective, I cast my mind to the more extravagant rendezvous of our times and imagine myself on a date with someone horrifyingly rich: I could think of nothing worse than stepping onto Howard Hughes’s seaplane and being pounced midair. Ghastly! No escape hatch. Or dining at some stiflingly flashy Italian restaurant with the likes of Eric Clapton/Bryan Ferry/Mick Jagger, etc. Nosy waiters and no autonomy. Famous seducers use famous techniques, but true love can never smack of routine. There has to be that element of adventure.
“Meet me at Leura train station and bring a sun hat.” That’s what Alex James said, and he pulled up in a 1960s pale blue Valiant with rust round the wheels. When I slid into the front seat, I noticed that he had pierced the sagging nylon roof of the car with about fifty plastic roses, and they bobbed overhead like a hanging garden. He drove me to a field to eat barbecue chicken and ripped up bits of French bread, and to drink cheap claret on an old cotton tablecloth. What happened next shocked the cows. I wore my sun hat. Pretty unforgettable.
Now, yes, of course there are moments for fancy restaurants, but usually these come when love needs repair after some use; the neutral territory of a white tablecloth, the forgiving glow of soft light, and the protection of subtle waiters to prod habitual civility back into something warmer. But in the early days, the really heady ones, the real test of attraction, the true glue of complicity, is economy. Not cheapness (pizza on a paper plate), but the boldness of letting the players rather than the set take center stage.
And as life scuttles you along, the contexts for dates shift radically. Single and twenty-seven feels different to divorced and forty-seven. I always blush a little bit for the couples who meet at a bar or a café and are looking at each other’s entire bodies for the first time, and not just the severed heads glimpsed on a dating website. I note the stiffness of two people looking at art together for the first time. Or the agitation on a woman’s face when dessert seems too far away. If a date is kept very simple, the embarrassment of its failure to ignite is more bearable; and if there is that odd touch of the unusual, then it will become a moment like that blazing afternoon in an open field, and will prove priceless.
Cheap Dates with Charm
WHO PAYS AND WHY
It’s lovely to be taken for dinner without feeling … taken. Choosing a moderate restaurant lessens the feelings of entrapment or obligation or waste on a first date. Unless you are a woman who flatly refuses to pay her way (good luck and God bless you, Miss Thing), the most elegant thing for a lady to do is to order champagne for two to begin a meal and to pay for it herself very discreetly. It gives you something of an upper hand and sets the tone in so many subtle ways. For someone you absolutely do not know, going Dutch makes sense as both people have risked the same amount of time, money, and trepidation without striking an imbalance. And for someone you know and rather love—yes, they can pick up the tab, but even billionaires think it’s sporting of a girl to occasionally chip in for the tip.
COFFEE SOMETIME
The trouble with meeting for coffee is that a cup of coffee is a very finite event, taking perhaps all of three minutes to consume from the froth to the grains. If you meet instead for afternoon tea, there is more ritual and the flirtation of pouring a steaming cup for each other. If you meet for brunch there is the chance for bellinis and mimosas to loosen the mood. Coffee. That’s what ex-lovers or workmates have. Spend the extra three to ten dollars on tea for two; you are still way within budget.
EXOTIC WEIRDNESS
When my zoologist-love Daniel Zevin took me for Ethiopian food, I don’t know what was more striking—the hand-carved wooden plates or eating with our hands. The tension of a first date can be well deflected into the intense comedy of eating a very foreign cuisine, sitting on Moroccan cushions, or talking over sitars. Ethnic restaurants are romantic in a quirky fashion and very often cheaper.
ENTER THE DARKNESS
Common wisdom argues against movies as a date destination, but there is nothing more erotic than darkness, popcorn, proximity, and a swooning soundtrack. Tuesdays are often the half-price night for movies, but of course this varies state to state, city to city. Use the dollars saved for a softly lit sushi bar or café after the show.
STAR GAZE
Planetariums are majestic and strange, especially in a world where hardly anyone seems to look up. To be less befuddled, take a sky map with you and attempt to locate constellations together. Men who know the names of stars are worth their weight in blazing comets.
HAVE IMPRESSIONIST COCKTAILS
Many large museums and art galleries offer drinks and (free) music on a Friday night. I think there is nothing funnier than looking at masterpieces when rosy and half tanked. That’s probably how half of them were created anyway.
SKIP DINNER COMPLETELY
Go to a play or a movie then share dessert at a pretty and intimate restaurant. That way you get that dash of elegance without the quaking bill. And you can cut to the chase.
PICNIC IN A PICKUP TRUCK
God bless the sculptor Dexter Buell. He opened the flatbed of his pickup truck and served me pastrami sandwiches, pickles, and bottles of beer as we looked out onto the Hudson River on a hot summer’s night. He later went up the Amazon with a raven-haired nurse but that date stood out. Basically anywhere is a picnic ground if you have two glasses, a basket, and a view.
SAIL AWAY
Begin an evening with a ferry ride. Meet at a jetty and crack a small bottle of bubbles, which you can sip from paper cups as the water slides by. That initial movement mitigates against the stasis of going straight to a restaurant and facing each other job-interview-style.
GET A ROOM
Married couples have date night, the weekly convention invented to keep us human. Parents on a date night are on an even tighter budget by virtue of having to pay a sitter, and that’s a serious strain on spontaneity. So, I say, why not go el cheapo three nights out of the month and lash out on the fourth? You can have a movie night at home, a lingerie fashion parade in a darkened kitchen, or a quick skinny dip at a nearby beach—but come date four, splurge on a motel room. Select somewhere without the faintest trace of domestic drudgery or wholesome fun.
