Dating exponentially

What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul.

What does a gay man bring on a second date? What second date?

Every stereotype-driven joke has a cruel nugget of truth to it—which makes the following announcement all the more amazing: I had three dates last night. With the same man.

While you all catch your breath and recover from the shock of falling off your seductively firm buttocks at that news, let me back up a bit: One of the benefits (if you’re one of those cheery simpletons who can see the silver lining in every painful cloud) of getting tendonitis during marathon training season is that you suddenly have a week or so of evenings free. Which means you can finally do something about the backlog of invitations for drinks you’ve put off so you could instead run and sweat all alone every night of the summer.

You see, I’d been chatting up this fella on Friendster for quite a while. He had an interesting profile, a sunny disposition, a cultured worldview … and a devastatingly handsome mug. As an added bonus, he scored high in the willing-to-write-long-and-interesting-emails compulsory events in the Dating Jake Olympics.

So we decided to meet for drinks last night after work. And WOW. He was more handsome in person than in his pictures. And he made great arm candy conversation at our first stop on our Night of Endless Dates: Bandera, a great little restaurant/bar that overlooks Michigan Avenue and offers a fabulous dark-oak-and-stone ambience and a jazzy piano-bass-and-drums soundtrack.

Our conversation was so effortless and so frequently punctuated with laughter, in fact, that our first two hours totally flew by. (And I chugged more Pepsis in those two hours than I’d consumed the entire summer. Urp.)

Early revelations in the first date:
• We’d both gone to the University of Iowa at the same time.
• We’d traveled in some of the same circles while there.
• He’d dated my roommate. (You’d think I’d remember a man this fun and interesting and freakin’ hot hanging around with my dorky college roommate. But then again you’d think (or I’d hope, at least) he’d remember me back. So I guess we’re even on that one.)

After two hours, we decided we were pretty hungry, so we headed down the street to Big Bowl for some Asian cookin’ and a lot more spirited conversation, and then we meandered up to the Oak Street neighborhood because he unexpectedly had to have a short meeting with a client. (No, not a drug client. He has a legitimate job related to the industry I’m in, so I can vouch for his story.) And ever since he’d found out he had to meet up with this client in a bar at 9 pm he’d been dropping hints that maybe I could hang around and we could continue our date afterward. Which I was all for.

So I happily plopped myself down in a nearby Barnes & Noble with a New Yorker and a cup of bland cocoa and entertained myself while he raked in some cash for his company at the bar across the street. And when he and his disarmingly cute grin showed up at my table an hour later, I declared enough time had passed that we were officially on our second date.

But it was 10 pm and we didn’t know where we should go. A bar would be too loud for more conversation. A restaurant wouldn’t satisfy the particular hungers we were both feeling. And a romantic trip to the windy, chilly lakefront would no doubt draw our well-shaved nuts (not that I knew that about him for sure, but c’mon—we’re both gay) deep inside our well-toned abdomens. But I knew I had an evening of Must-See TV queued up on my TiVo, so I suggested we go to my place to (ahem) watch TV.

Which is exactly what we did, sitting side-by-side on my couch without even the remotest of unseemly physical interaction between us. And before I knew it, he’d fallen asleep and missed half of Joey. (Which made him the luckiest person in the room.)

And when he jolted himself awake, I decided that since he’d just enjoyed a refreshing nap we were now on our THIRD date of the night. Even though it was almost midnight.

The relentless cuteness between us never let up, so I’ll spare you the saccharine details of the rest of our (completely chaste though thoroughly enjoyable) evening, which lasted much longer than prudence would normally allow on a school night. (That prudence is a pushy bitch.)

But I will leave you with a few high-pointers he scored on his Boyfriend Aptitude Test:

• Extremely close to his family
• Well-traveled
• Animated conversationalist
• Not above scouring sale racks and resale shops for fun clothes
• Impish grin matching an impish personality
• Ready laugh, used often
• Interesting career
• Slavish attention to me, frequently involving the word "hot"
• Killer smile
• Killer other physical attributes
• Ass tattoo of Rush Limbaugh clubbing a baby seal*

And this morning, after a trip to the doctor for some fresh tendonitis drugs and my final hep-A vaccine, I actually ran into him on the bus. Which—if we adhere to the extremely random date parameters from the evening before—means we’ve already had four dates and we’re now planning our FIFTH. Which may just happen tonight. :)

*I made that one up. (I never even saw his ass, remember?) But I wanted something scandalous to report here. So you’d all talk about us and stuff.