A clash of personality?

I was dreading my date with The Personality Partner, absolutely dreading it. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that he was going to be a more actively obnoxious version of The Word Smith, and had it not been for a bit of a wine drinking slip up at lunch, there is a high chance I would have made my excuses and managed to avoid being stood on the steps of St Martins at 6:15.

            However, wine was drunk at lunch, and opting out of the date just felt like delaying the inevitable, so I braved the buzz of Thursday night in Covent Garden, and was at the agreed meeting place bang on time.

            Fortunately I was actually pleasantly surprised by the guy that arrived to meet me. Where with The Word Smith I had taken social incompetency for banter, with The Personality Partner I had learnt from my mistake and had been reading into comments and jokes way too much, inevitable dreading the worst. It turns out, he was utterly hilarious, and everything I had started flagging warning signs at were actually perfectly normal conversations / jokes in the making.

            I think that the test of a date in the world of online is the number of drinks you get through before you call it a night. One drink was a complete and utter failure (The Word Smith), two drinks was nice enough, but having got a round each, you’ve definitely seen enough (The Biking Engineer) and three drinks or more means that you’re both fairly keen to carry on chatting, and the fact that the person sat opposite you is a complete and utter strange doesn’t really worry you too much. This was a three drink date, and I think that we can thank The Personality Partner’s sense of humour and comedy story telling for that one.  

            Conversation started with the safe (work, home, family), branched into the slightly wider spanning (recent trips with friends, holidays, most embarrassing moments) and even reached a slightly uncomfortable low which found us discussing the website that we had met on, and our reasons for being there – yes, I told him about Slutty-Suppers (although not the blog, obviously) and I think it worried him slightly. In fact, his exact words were “Oh good, so you’re going to be discussing this whole evening in minute detail with your friends? Yeah, that’s not intimidating in the slightest.” Imagine the reaction disclosing details of the blog would have inspired…maybe next time.

            I suppose that’s the crux of the matter – whether there will be a next time, and having been asked, I think that, in the spirit of making the most of the situation and celebrating the fact that I didn’t want to kill him or myself within the first few hours of our acquaintance, I think there just might be!