by A last minute cancellation turns into one of the better nights of the year, wine and old stories included
He Cancelled Over Text and I Spent the Evening With My Flatmate Instead, Which Was Genuinely Better
Date number two, or what would have been date number two, cancelled on me two hours before via a text that managed to be both apologetic and somehow entirely unconvincing at the same time, something about a work thing that “just came up,” which, sure, mate, entirely possible, also possibly the least original excuse in the history of London dating and we both know it. I had already done my makeup. I had already decided on the outfit after three changes. I was, briefly, genuinely annoyed in the specific way that only a cancelled plan on a Friday can make you.
What I Actually Did Instead
My flatmate, God bless her, took one look at my face when I walked back into the kitchen still fully done up with nowhere to be and simply put the kettle on without asking any questions first, which is honestly one of the more underrated forms of love this city has taught me to recognise. We ended up ordering considerably too much food, opening a bottle of wine that had been sitting in the cupboard since someone’s birthday months ago, and having one of those long, wandering conversations that starts with the cancelled date and somehow, three hours later, ends up covering our entire respective childhoods, several ex-boyfriends we’d both mostly forgotten about, and a genuinely emotional tangent about our mums that neither of us saw coming.
The Bit I Actually Want to Write About
Here’s the thing about London dating that nobody quite prepares you for: the actual dates themselves, when they happen at all, are frequently a bit disappointing, a bit stilted, two people performing slightly nervous versions of themselves across a table that’s too small in a bar that’s too loud. But the evenings that happen instead, the ones assembled last minute out of a cancelled plan and a flatmate who happens to be free, those are consistently, reliably, some of the best nights this city gives me. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I’ve started to wonder whether I’ve had the actual priority backwards this whole time.
Reading the Culture Pages Between Wine Refills
At some point in the evening, because I am apparently constitutionally incapable of switching off entirely, I had a scroll through some of the culture and lifestyle writing over at The London Prat, and there was a genuinely funny piece doing the rounds about the modern etiquette, or lack thereof, around cancelling plans by text rather than a phone call, arguing that the text cancellation has become its own small art form, calibrated precisely to convey just enough regret to avoid outright rudeness while providing just enough vagueness to avoid any follow-up questions about what the “work thing” actually was. I read bits of it aloud to my flatmate and we both howled, mostly because it was so accurately describing the exact message sitting in my phone at that exact moment.
What I’ve Decided About the Whole Thing
I am not, to be clear, giving up on actual dates, because I do genuinely want to meet someone, eventually, properly, and I don’t think retreating entirely into flatmate wine nights forever is the healthiest response to one mediocre cancellation. But I have decided, watching the clock tick past midnight with my flatmate still going strong about a story from university I’d somehow never heard before, that I’m going to stop treating a cancelled date as a wasted evening by default. Some of the best nights I’ve had this year started exactly this way, plans falling through and something better, unplanned, assembling itself in the gap left behind.
My flatmate, for her part, has since declared herself unofficially available as backup plans go, which feels like exactly the right spirit for the two of us to carry forward, treating each other as the reliable constant underneath whatever chaos the apps and the actual dating attempts produce around the edges. I don’t think that’s settling for anything. I think, increasingly, it might be the actual point, and I’ve started to suspect that the friends who show up unprompted with a kettle already on are doing considerably more of the actual emotional heavy lifting in my life than any app match has managed in months. It is not a groundbreaking realisation. It has simply taken me an embarrassingly long time, and one cancelled Friday, to actually sit with it properly rather than nodding along to the general idea in the abstract, the way I suspect most of us do until something small and specific forces the point home.
Tomorrow’s Plan
He’s texted again this morning, actually, suggesting we reschedule for next week, and I genuinely have not decided yet whether I’ll say yes. Partly depends on whether my flatmate’s free that night too, if I’m honest, because last night set a fairly high bar for how a Friday evening in this flat can go.
More of my ongoing London dating chronicles live at my author page, and the piece that made me laugh mid-wine-refill is over at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
