So I met this girl on Sunday in Wimbledon. She’d got in contact with me through an advert I placed on gumtree.com in the single’s section. Said she’d searched for ‘jazz’ and my ad came up.
She showed a lot of personality in her emails and we seemed to have a lot in common – interest in travel and music, for example – so I went ahead and organised meeting up. Besides I didn’t have much choice as she was the only person who did respond to the ad.
I’d read somewhere that it’s best to get on with the meet up rather than arse around sending email correspondences for months. I agree with that and she went along with it, so all was good. I was a bit worried after calling her that it would go badly because she sounded bored or tired on the phone and we barely made any small talk – I just went straight in and made arrangements.
Anyhow, we met in Wimbledon shopping centre. In the moments leading up to the meet up I was anxious, but surprisingly manageably so. This was only the second time I’d formally met someone off the net for ‘a drink’ (don’t like the word “date” – it wasn’t one anyway), so I guess I felt less anxious because of this.
We went upstairs to the café and talked for a while. The conversation went okay. There were a few silences but I managed to fill these with statements or questions. Mostly I asked her a lot of questions about travel, Australia and her experience of London. She usually gave good long answers, although her voice was very quiet, so I just listened and either followed up with a statement to relate or asking another question. Interestingly I found myself making quite a lot of statements, which is not something I thought I would have done. Also I teased her a little bit about her bad memory and her email address.
After an hour or so I felt a change of scene was good. We went for a beer down the road at a Walkabout which was funny as she was Australian. God, the weather was horrible. Grey skies, wind, rain. We spent another hour or so chatting. I was looking for IOIs but didn’t seem to be getting any. I didn’t find her attractive initially, but by now, I don’t know if it was the beer or not, I wanted her to like me at least. I asked her some bigger questions as I recall, I didn’t want to leave but I sensed she did, so I finished my beer and looked at my watch. She asked, ‘time to go?’ I took this to mean she wanted to go. I had told her I was meeting someone at 3:30 so it might have been genuine. I’m not sure. Anyhow, I said yes and we headed for the station.
As I didn’t get any IOIs from her and wasn’t really attracted to her I just said, ‘right, well it was nice meeting you’ and was half expecting her to say the same, but she replied, ‘yeah, you too, we’ll have to meet again, maybe over Easter weekend’. Pleasantly surprised I thought, ‘oh I must have done something right’ and so I said, ‘yeah I’ve got your number, I’m busy this week but I’ll give you a call’. Then I touched her back, a little harder than I had hoped! (it seemed more like a slap) and said ‘take care’.
All in all, it seemed to go okay. I DHVed by talking about playing in bands, doing recordings, auditions, having job interviews for media companies, designing websites, travelling around on the cruise ships as a musician, driving out of town to see friends etc. It must have sounded like a led a really interesting life with lots going, in fact she commented that her week ahead sounded incredibly boring next to mine. I felt the conversation was a bit negative though, we both seemed to be moaning and groaning a lot about London, sharing disaster stories and negative experiences. I could feel the conversation gravitating towards this all the time and my tonality and hers was flat.
Oh well, I guess we were either on the same negative wavelength or I led the conversation in that direction and she was impressionable enough to follow. Evidently it didn’t matter though as she wanted to meet again, so maybe she was a slightly negative type herself. I think I’ll have to work on it in future though, as I am sure a lot of women would not find this kind of talk particularly stimulating or attractive.
