1. ASK FOR A SECOND DATE

You live on a different continent and you’ll be heading home in about 30 hours. You normally don’t ask someone out for another date during the first date, and you definitely don’t usually ask someone out for the next evening, but there’s no time to be coy! Today you had a lot of fun meeting a erudite, beautiful, and charming British woman and her friend of equal erudition, beauty, and charm.

They should correct you and tell you they’d never call themselves “British.” They’re English.

Nod.

Soon it is the end of the night. Navigate between the dangerous twin shoals of overeager romantic ambition and missed opportunity. Evade eddies of self-doubt, etc. Propose dinner tomorrow. She should say yes. Part ways. Even though this is vacation for you, it’s just another night before work for her.

Ride the tube back to your hotel.

Note: “Tewwww-b.”

Change your mind and go the opposite direction on the line headed away from your hotel. Find the way out of a faraway station, grab a bike share bike, and ride home. Do so without the benefit of Google Maps because international data roaming is more expensive than the pens at Harrods. Receive a text while biking. Feel rage when you drop your phone right here, relief when it’s not broken, and cheer when it’s a message from her. She had fun tonight and looks forward to meeting again tomorrow.

• INSTANT EXERCISE: Could God make a pen so needlessly expensive that He Himself could not afford it? Discuss.

2. HOW NOT TO BE ON THE SECOND DATE YET

Arrive outside the Chancery Lane station the next day a little early. Collect yourself! You walked here quickly and your heart rate is up. An elevated heart rate is a deadly game-killer. Once collected, you should stand there for a while. Begin to doubt that you’ve arrived at the right place at all.

Consider who to ask for assistance. Choose a man in a suit smoking a cigarette.

Though this instruction is syntactically ambiguous, in real life when you actually approach this man it will be clear to you that the man is smoking the cigarette – not the suit.

The man should be pleasant and voluble. He will tell you: “yes, if someone says ‘meet me at Chancery Lane,’ they mean right outside the station,” though there is also a road named Chancery Lane a bit down thataway and to your left.

Together you two should rule out the possibility that you were meant to meet your date on the street itself.

Wait a bit more. She will emerge. Smile.

3. GO ON THE SECOND DATE

Drinks at a suitably English-y pub and dinner at a swanky vegetarian restaurant should last about three or four hours, which objectively is a substantial period of time. Subjectively the encounter should feel very brief indeed. The conversation will be effortless. It should cover many subjects and touch upon but never quite reach many others. She will hate (HATE!) the Daily Mail. There should be too much to talk about, too little time. Remember: the etymological root of “converse” is “to turn with.” Meander.

If conversation did not playfully meander and your date expressed no more than tepid distaste for the Daily Mail, you may have gone on a date with someone, but you did not go on a second date in London with Stephanie.

At one point she should want to read you a poem, but reconsider, and then re-reconsider. She will read the poem.

You will feel several different emotions. Be a bit too affected by her accent. You provincial American, you. Be afraid you won’t really “get” the poem when she begins to recite it to you. “Get” it more than you thought you would. She should stress a particular line in the poem that she loves. Try to figure out whether she stressed that one line because she loves it, or if she meant it as an invitation, or both.

Note: You won’t really ever know.

The phone she reads from should light her face in a truly spectacular way. It should move you. Ponder the Buddhist concept of impermanence while being moved. Sadden. Get over it. Finally – experience an emotion so rare you’ve never felt it before: something like gratitude toward your exes for dumping you so you could be here tonight.

The restaurant tab should be ruinously expensive. You will offer to pay and she will offer to pay. The politics/significance of who pays for dates is such a trite subject. Don’t think too much about it one way or the other.

Leave the restaurant. Walk the dark narrow lanes together. Strategize as to how you can extend the evening now that its inevitable end is appearing over the horizon. Practically invite yourself over.

Fail.

She’ll agree to let you walk her most of the way home. Go. The streets should be damp and cold and evocative, like they are in all the Romcoms you’ve seen that’ve shaped your prior conceptions of what a date in London would be like.

Note: Specifically you’re thinking of Notting Hill. You sap.

Think back to every single other time you’ve made that initial romantic physical contact. Be aware once again that the figurative term “leap of faith,” no matter how overused and cliché, is goddamn apt at moments like these.

Always remember that different bodies fit together in different ways and no two first moves will ever turn out the same. As a younger man you would have overthought this shit, but tonight you will not. Settle on putting your arm around her waist. Feel for a jacket pocket, or maybe just like a belt loop to anchor your hand. Find nothing. Even though this first move is too noncommittal to work well, she should not draw away. Be thankful.

Share. Talk. She will tell you – why not, right? – that she’s sort of seeing someone, but they’re also kind of on a break, and that the whys and hows of the break seem silly to her. They should seem silly to you too. She’ll be glad you agree.

Keep walking, with an awkward gait, waist-to-waist. She should unpack her sort-of relationship with you. While doing so, she’ll sigh. A lot. She will apologize for seeming self-centered. Agree solipsism is a trap that’s hard to escape from. Resolve to try harder in the future to break free of it. Ponder the Buddhist concept of the oneness of all beings. Intuit (or: hope) that her sighs signal more than just melancholy over her sort-of lover; that you and your pending departure have affected her. Too.

Know first hand that heartache can be multivalent.

Soon she will take your arm off from around her waist and hold your hand. That’s better. Try to calibrate how much you squeeze her hand to how much she squeezes yours.

Note: Dude you’re overthinking it.

Stop on a corner. Ask for her email address. Kiss. She should say: “Bye, [your name].” Wince imperceptibly. Say: “Bye.”

Go back to America.

• INSTANT EXERCISE: Yeah, yeah, Buddhist precepts, or whatever. But isn’t the hard part actually internalizing and like, truly accepting the difficult realities of life rather than patting yourself on the back for being able to name drop chunks of pseudospiritual/philosophical wisdom? Why or why not?

4. HOW TO NOT TO HAVE A SECOND DATE IN LONDON ANYMORE

People should ask: “how was the trip?” You should tell them. People should be mildly impressed that you went on dates with a British English woman. People should ask: “how did you set that up?” Tell them: “OkCupid.” People should wonder aloud: “I didn’t know they had that over there.”

Note: It’s basically just the US with better accents. Yes: they have OkCupid.

Tell the people you had an enchanting time with her.

After some trial and error, recognize the limits of how much you can talk about Stephanie before your friends begin to smirk at you warmly with the same expression you yourself would give a five year-old who said he knows who he’s going to marry when he grows up. Feel a bit silly. Feel precious.

Struggle to construct meaning from experience. Go back to work. Welcome home.