First Date Experience: Bobby

Time: 18:23 the next day

Situation: He's a math professor visiting the City for a conference

Feeling: Good

What happened?: We spend about two days texting back and forth. Through text messages, we learn about each other and our situations. I tell him things that I normally wouldn't. I am more honest and vulnerable with this stranger than I am with most people in my life. The key here is that I am vulnerable. I'm not hiding between lies or half-truths. Here is someone who I'm not afraid of. He cannot hurt me.

He's staying at a hostel close by. I go over after a hot yoga class. By the time I get there, I realize how long my day has already been. I had work at 5:15am. I had an important doctor's appointment, and I went to a hot yoga class. My body didn't feel like it could be held upright anymore. Yet I am standing at his door.

We both comment immediately on how strange the situation is. It's a weird first date, if it can be called that because both of us have already expressed our own precarious positions. We both know that there's no future or any kind of relationship to develop. It is seeking company and companionship for the night. We spend the next maybe two hours sharing life facts and sex stories. We don't have sex. We lay on the bottom bunk bed, and as I'm laying there, it feels like I'm in first year again. It feels like I'm back in my room in Kingston and I'm listening to my guy friends describe their last date or the girl they're seeing. We share fun sex stories. He tells me about his life back home. He's a 32-year old math professor with a 3-year old child and a soon-to-be ex-wife. He had been with his wife since they were both 18. I listen to this stranger's life experiences, and I wonder how typical or abnormal my own is. I wonder how different lives can be, and how similar they can be as well. Understanding people is a strange experience.

We go out and get ramen at my favourite ramen place, Kinton, around 10pm. We talk about the current American political situation. I ask him whether it is Joe or Justin Trudeau. I tell him that I would want to date someone like him - who will make pillow forts to have sex in. But also talking to him, it is like talking to an old friend, sharing stories like we haven't seen each other in a while. It is not anything more than that, not really. There is intimacy found in sharing vulnerability with strangers.

After eating, we walk back to his hostel. He buys two Kinder Eggs for his son, tells me they're not available in the US.

It was a strange breed of intimacy. I wonder how to learn vulnerability, how to practice vulnerability. At some point, we are in his hostel room and I am crying. I hate that I am crying, because I am me and I do not cry in front of people. Something he says triggers the fear that has been a part of me. I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid of being unloved. I am afraid of being abandoned. I am afraid I do not know how to be honest, or truthful.

Is there salvation in crying to strangers? Is there freedom in being vulnerable and intimate with strangers? I don't know. Yesterday night was a good night. It was interesting to give myself away like that. So often, we give little parts of ourselves away. Our names, our verbal resume, our excuses, our delays. It is different to give someone our truths, our fears and insecurities, our history - unfiltered and without shame or guilt. I would consider doing it again. Bobby was nice and he was not unkind. It was strange to see or hear or share somethng beyond the initial outer layer.