“One recent winter night, I was having a bad evening with a date. We were trying to make-up. She was late and I’d picked a terrible bar. It was too loud and the weather had destroyed my flowers. Instead, we made for a nearby restaurant just off of Grand Central Terminal—ostensibly neutral territory for us both.”
She went forward with her list of demands and I countered with mine. It was tense iteration back and forth in an awkward dance of pretending to listen to the other while anxiously awaiting to make your own point. The restaurant was busy, but it wasn’t so busy that the couple next to us didn’t take notice. Rather than ignore us in a likely fashion, after they paid the check and passed us to leave the woman, in her late 60s, leaned in and said ever so lightly, ‘You two seem like such nice kids. You shouldn’t try so hard.’ “
