Life and death during dating
A friend of mine swears she knows within ten minutes of a date whether she wants to see a guy again
Ten minutes.
Not an hour. Not after dessert. Not after a drunken kiss outside a taxi. Ten minutes.
She’s got a system. Before every date she’ll text a friend: “Call me at 7:30.”
If the date is going well, she answers with a cheerful, “Hey, I’m out. Can I call you back later?”
If it’s a disaster, the performance begins.
“What? When? Who? Are they/you okay? Which hospital?”
A few seconds later she hangs up, apologises profusely, and disappears into the night to attend to some conveniently injured friend, sibling, parent, or goldfish.
I’ve always wondered how I’d react if that happened to me.
Blind dates are fun. If it goes well, I’ll see her again. If it’s going really well, maybe we end up making some questionable but memorable decisions.
If it’s going badly, I’ll just get drunk enough that the story becomes worth telling later.
I actually enjoy dating. You meet interesting people. You drink. Sometimes there’s chemistry. Sometimes there’s catastrophe. Either way, you usually get a story.
So when I agreed to meet Larissa, I approached it with my usual sense of adventure.
I’d never met her before. Never even spoken to her.
When she walked into the bar, I was pleasantly surprised.
She was tall — almost my height in boots, and I’m six foot. Long legs. Effortlessly cool. The kind of woman who looked like she’d thrown on whatever was closest to the bed and somehow ended up looking better than everyone else in the room.
Dark bob haircut. Sharp fringe. A bit like Katie Holmes if Katie Holmes had decided to become a rock star with killer curves.
And yes, she was gorgeous.
We grabbed drinks.
Then another round.
Then food.
Then more drinks.
Conversation flowed effortlessly. We discovered we had a ridiculous amount in common. The laughter came naturally. So did the flirting.
Every time I looked up, she’d shifted a little closer.
A touch on the arm.
A playful shove.
A lingering smile.
The sort of body language that makes a man quietly optimistic about how the evening might end.
At one point she disappeared to the bathroom and returned smelling incredible, makeup refreshed, eyes sparkling.
I remember thinking:
This is going very, very well.
Then her phone rang.
Mine had already gone off twice that evening. I’d ignored it. One of my biggest pet hates is people treating a date like an interruption between phone calls.
She answered.
I headed to the bar to grab another round.
When I came back, she looked puzzled.
Apparently her father had called.
That alone was strange. They weren’t close. He rarely contacted her.
Even stranger, he’d been looking for her mother.
There’d apparently been some sort of accident, but he was vague and in a hurry.
Immediately my friend’s escape-plan story flashed into my head.
Here we go.
In five minutes I will be hearing about a mysterious hospital visit and watching the best date I’d had in months disappear into a taxi.
Instead, she put her phone away.
And stayed.
We finished our drinks and moved to another bar.
The chemistry picked up where it had left off.
We found a couch.
We sat close enough that there was barely any space left between us.
The flirting turned shameless.
Her hand touched my leg.
Mine brushed hers.
Neither of us moved away.
Our legs became entwined.
Then the phone rang again.
This time it was her mother.
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I gave her some privacy and wandered off to the bar.
When I returned, everything had changed.
The colour had drained from her face. The playful energy was gone.
She looked shocked.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I need to leave.”
There it was.
That dreaded line.
I felt disappointment immediately followed by irritation.
Not because she wanted to leave — but because I was already preparing myself for whatever ridiculous excuse was about to follow.
“Okay,” I sighed. “Let’s go.”
We walked toward the taxi rank.
“Sorry,” she said quietly. “There’s been an accident.”
I almost rolled my eyes.
Please. Anything but the fake emergency routine.
Just tell me you’re not interested. I’m a grown man.
Better have told me worse. I can survive rejection.
We stopped beside a waiting cab.
I leaned in to hug her goodbye.
And, if I’m being completely honest, I angled slightly to see if I could steal a kiss.
After all, what did I have to lose?
She pulled back immediately.
“Are you trying to kiss me?”
“Well… I was.”
Her expression wasn’t disgust.
It was disbelief. Then she hugged me again.
As we stood there, our mouths beside each other’s ears, I heard a strange sound.
A deep breath.
And then I realised.
She wasn’t sighing.
She was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
Her voice cracked.
“That last phone call…my dad’s best friend…my godfather”
A pause.
“Him and his wife are on holiday in Samoa and there’s been an accident.”
The irritation vanished instantly.
Replaced by a sick feeling in my stomach.
Because there are only two possibilities when someone delivers news like that.
Either she’s the greatest actress who has ever lived and should win every oscar ever … or someone’s life has just changed forever.
We stood there for several minutes.
Eventually she pulled away.
Embarrassed and trying to laugh through tears.
Apologising for crying on the shoulder of a guy she only just met.
I kissed her gently on the cheek, helped her into the cab and watched it disappear.
Then I walked home alone.
The next morning my alarm clock radio woke me at 7:30.
Half asleep, I listened as the newsreader spoke about a tsunami in the South Pacific.
A local woman — living less than ten kilometres from me — had been confirmed dead.
Her husband survived.
Suddenly I was wide awake.
And I thought about Larissa.
About our flirting.
Our chemistry.
About almost kissing a girl whose world was collapsing around her.
The strangest thing about dating is that you never really know who is sitting across from you.
Sometimes they’re about to become part of your future.
Sometimes they’re about to disappear from it.
And sometimes, in the space of a single phone call, life can turn into something deadly.
