Just friends

The beauty of a silver medal is in the eyes of the holder

Christy - Sydney Sweeney, not a blind date

The Guardian—which I read because it’s free—runs a column called Blind Date. By some means or another—I assume you have to write in to volunteer yourself—you, as a participant, get an evening out at dinner with another person of the sex of your choice in a restaurant. The idea is to see whether you click. Or not. What starts to become interesting as you read these reports is the coordination or otherwise between what the two people think about each other, about the dinner itself and how it fits into their life in that moment. “What did you talk about?” should, in fairness, garner the same response from both parties. But the order can differ. Blind Date is an insight from the safe distance of the touch line into how people relate, when it’s not your relationship that’s on the line.

I read a couple of its articles this morning to while away some time, and found myself whiling away more time than had been planned, because now I’m writing this. The first of the two articles was about the heterosexual persons (I can think of no other word) Alex (31) and Rachel (28), which I was only really attracted to because I was unfamiliar with the expression in the headline: friend-zoning. Having read the article, I still didn’t know what it meant and needed to look it up. Like a lot of things these days, it actually means the opposite of what it says, because you’d think that being counted as someone’s friend would be a feather in your cap, whereas it’s more a sign of rejection at the romantic level. It all depends on how you would view a silver medal in the Olympics.

The second article was in the you may also be interested in this section at the foot of the page. It involved Alexi (34) and Oisín (30). The article doesn’t say so, but I think they’re two gay men. That can turn out to be presumptuous, or could until last January, but they look like guys to me. Oh, the innocent angel in the back my head uttered as I caught the link: They also do gay. Heavens, it’s The Guardian, Graham …! And a more important thought flitted in and out of my mind: Will there come a day when The Guardian baulks at reporting blind dates with gay men? We live in times where we entertain thoughts of the unthinkable.

That latter thought was provoked by the almighty flop that the first weekend of the Hollywood movie Christy had been for none other than actor Sydney Sweeney, on which Jason Okundaye had mused in reflection of the celebrations in January at which the conservative right’s bright young things had contemplated cultural domination. And Okundaye’s observation was that you can make as much Hollywood glitz with right-leaning actresses as you want, but if folk won’t pitch up to see it, then contemplation is about as far as it goes, short of frog-marching bums into seats.

When Alexi and Oisín got together, they took it upon themselves to order the priciest bottle of plonk on the menu and, so they report, the restaurant refused to serve it to them. I presume that was because it was The Guardian that was going to be footing the bill. It made me wonder: was the chap from the newspaper there as well, as some sort of chaperone? Or had the restaurant been prepped on spending limits and exercised its discretion—maybe even because it knew just how overpriced the wine was in the first place.

It’s not going to be a great romance between Alexi and Oisín. They survived the meal okay but, in the taxi when they were afterwards going on to another venue, Oisín said he didn’t feel great and made his excuses. That could mean he copped out. Or that he needed keyhole surgery. We’ll never know. Well, yes, we know. It’s code, isn’t it? It’s code for I don’t fancy you. And that’s the problem with Blind Date. One of the questions the paper asks is Did you kiss? A kiss is the token moment which manifests a desire, an offer and acceptance, a milestone achievement in the attraction game. In a way, the manner in which Blind Date differs from Sinatra’s Strangers In The Night is the fact that Sinatra sings of a chance encounter in which mutual attraction is the key, and the occurrence of which is by tradition ascribed to Cupid. But Blind Date is a contrived occurrence, through the offices of a third party. Its very purpose is to test whether or not the attraction is even there. It is a cart being pushed by a horse. That said, just like the natural attraction method, the blind date can prove a resounding success: in two years my brother and his wife celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, and they also met on a blind date.

What, then, of the silver medal? The two guys concluded that they could see each other as friends (Alexi adding in a “this is the guy I went on a Guardian blind date with” context—a trophy bride, if not quite a bride). They talk of the absence of vibe, or spark. An early online partnership website on which I at one time had a presence was Gaydar. Gaydar as a portmanteau word implies the ability to know at a glance whether another man is gay or not (gay + radar), and just like with conventional radar, you have an idea of whether what you see is coming in to land, or about to fire off a destructive missile. It makes the casual enquiry Are you by any chance a friend of Dorothy’s? look quaint in the extreme.

Alex and Rachel also had a run-in with the restaurant staff, who asked, when Alex was invited to taste the wine, whether he was going to down it all in one. They wondered whether it was a joke, but I can assure them it wasn’t. Apparently, it was classy joint, and Alex wasn’t over-dressed. Still, if the newspaper picks up the tab at these rencontres, the staff’s response to the couple’s announcement of being with The Guardian reveals them as quite a bunch of smart-alecks: you’re with your legal guardian? (It was The Parlour, Great Scotland Yard Hotel, if you’re curious to know where you can dine with a bad joke.) In the end they concluded they would like to remain just friends. Which tells us nothing. The mutual evaluations out of ten were seven-and-a-half and eight. What makes someone give a blind date an evaluation of seven-and-a-half? Where did the half come from? Is that a half up from seven, or a half down from eight? We all know what the relationship is from silver to gold in the Olympics, but what is its relationship to the medal winner?

Google has a tradition of recruiting staff on the basis of silly questions. One that they ask is how the candidate would escape from a blender into which they had been placed in miniaturised form, with their height reduced to that of an American nickel (2 cm). There’s a video here that looks at the question, and even talks to a Google recruiter about what the answer is. I won’t spoil what the answer is or could be, or isn’t. But what the question does is force you to consider a physical situation that is, always has been and always will be outside your own experience. While the outcome of your contemplations won’t actually mean you escape or get minced up by the blender, there is a fairly serious consequence nonetheless: getting, or not getting, as the case may be, hired by Google. And I’m not sure that we regard friendship in the same light.

In the Civil Code are laid down a number of rights and duties that flow from the consent to marry spoken before a registrar. But, search as you might, the duty of loyalty, of devotion, of trust, of reliability, of accountability in relation to friendship is nowhere enumerated. Friendship is a cement that holds together our societies. And it has no definition, which has allowed its meaning to be diluted. Perhaps it is by diluting it that, just like a gin and tonic that is diluted, we know to add some pep to it.