Are We Dating Yet?

A San Francisco appellate court recently did something the rest of us have been unable to do since the dawn of time -- it defined dating. In a ruling on a case late last year, the court said a dating relationship "is a social relationship between two individuals who have a reciprocally amorous and increasingly exclusive interest in one another, and shared expectation of the growth of that mutual interest, that has endured for such a length of time and stimulated such frequent interactions that the relationship cannot be deemed to have been casual."

A dating relationship?

To me, dating is what you do before the relationship: the try before you buy. It's the wobbling lap around Nordstrom in a stiff pair of pumps, stopping every few paces to check for feeling in your toes and to peer at your feet in those little tilted mirrors on the floor, before slapping down your Visa card; the spin around the block in a shiny red Miata while inhaling the scent of new leather and jerking and jolting as you try to maneuver the clutch, before signing up for the payment plan; the smooth, cool taste of peppermint ice cream on a miniature pink spoon before buying a cone. I thought that dating was, by its very essence, casual.

This isn't the first time, though, that someone else's definition of dating has warred with mine.

Take Steve, the guy I dated, or thought I was dating, briefly last summer. Our first date, a set-up by a mutual friend, started as an afternoon at the Magritte exhibit at SFMOMA and morphed into drinks, dinner and jazz.

"Uh," he said, glancing at his brown wingtip shoes as we, having been shooed out by museum security at closing, hovered outside on the deserted sidewalk. "Would you like to head over to the Metreon for a beer or something?" After he'd reached the bottom of his beer, a trace of foam clinging stubbornly to his mustache, he looked down at his shoes again and asked, "Are you by any chance hungry? I know this great Mexican place." And, as we lingered over coffee, "Do you like jazz? I just remembered I had tickets for tonight .... "

With his salt-and-pepper beard, tweedy coat and ugly brown shoes, Steve reminded me of my sophomore English teacher. I was charmed by Steve's soft-spoken awkwardness, his labored efforts to appear casual, the way his blue eyes twinkled behind the round lenses of his glasses.

When he walked me to my Toyota, a saxophone melody playing faintly in my head, I disengaged the alarm, took a breath of the warm night air, and turned to face him. We stood in silence. I wondered if he would kiss me. He shifted his weight slightly and cleared his throat, "Well --" I sprang to life, as if on cue, "I should go!" hopped in my car, and waved goodbye with a jangle of my keys.

The first date led to a second and then a third, each commencing with Steve appearing at my door with a handful of flowers he'd picked from his yard. "Salvia, it's a drought-resistant native," he would say as I smiled and cooed, "Oh, how lovely!" No man would stand on the sidewalk picking flowers unless he really liked a woman.

Over Fourth of July weekend, when I was wracked with the flu and had to cancel our plans to go out, my doorbell rang, a jolting bleat, at 7:30pm. Who would come to my door on a Friday evening -- Jehovah's Witnesses? I, wearing a heavy terrycloth robe and frog-patterned flannel pajamas, peered through the peephole; it was Steve, in his tweed coat and those damn brown shoes, with a bag of groceries. So touched by his thoughtfulness, I forgot to be self-conscious about my flu-flattened hair and chapped lips as I opened the door.

"I brought you chicken soup," he said, thrusting the bag into my arms, "and some orange juice." He then wrapped his arm around me and gently escorted me to the sofa in my living room where the fireplace was blazing, and sat stroking my hair and quietly telling me about his day until I fell asleep with my head in his lap.