Second First Dates

The waiter brought two glasses of wine and asked if we were celebrating anything. My date laughed and said, "Just meeting." I laughed too, because the honest answer — we are both quietly grieving different marriages and hoping this glass of pinot will interrupt it — is not the kind of thing you say out loud on a Tuesday.

First dates in your forties are archaeology. You are excavating each other for evidence of the last life. Who left whom, and why, and whether they got the house. You are trying to figure out, without asking, whether this person will be gentle with the parts of you that are still raw.

A partial list of things I did not do on first dates in my twenties

• Ask about custody arrangements before the appetizers.
• Google someone's ex-wife in the bathroom.
• Mentally calculate whether their alimony would affect a hypothetical shared vacation.
• Feel relief when a man cried a little, describing his father.

What I like about this age

Everyone has been broken at least once. There is a shared, unspoken vocabulary of ah, yes, that too. Nobody expects you to be a blank page. They expect you to be a book with some pages folded down — a memoir in progress — and they are trying to see, over the salt-rimmed glass, whether the ending might still surprise you.