by Bin area small talk becomes the unexpected foundation of a first date neither of us saw coming
I Matched With Someone Whose Flat Turned Out to Be Two Doors Down From Mine and Now Everything Is Deeply Awkward
There is a specific, very London kind of horror in swiping through a dating app, matching with someone whose photos and bio genuinely intrigued you, arranging to meet, and discovering, upon actually arriving at the agreed pub, that you recognise him instantly because he lives two doors down from your own flat and you have, in fact, nodded at each other in the hallway of the shared bin area on at least three separate occasions over the past year without either of us apparently clocking the other as anything beyond “neighbour I vaguely recognise.”
The Moment of Recognition, Which Was Mutual and Immediate
We both just sort of stopped, mid-greeting, and stared at each other for a genuinely uncomfortable few seconds before one of us, I genuinely cannot remember which, said something along the lines of “wait, do I put my bins out near you,” which is possibly the least romantic opening line in the recorded history of London dating and yet somehow completely broke the ice better than anything either of us had typed in the app’s message thread over the preceding week.
What Followed, Which I Did Not Expect
Rather than the crushing awkwardness I braced for, the whole date shifted almost immediately into something considerably more relaxed than my usual first dates with total strangers, because there was suddenly this enormous shared context neither of us had to build from scratch, jokes about the recycling bin that never gets collected on schedule, a shared, slightly conspiratorial complaint about the upstairs neighbour whose washing machine runs at genuinely antisocial hours, the sort of easy, specific local knowledge that normally takes months of dating someone to accumulate, and we simply already had it, for entirely unromantic bin-related reasons.
The Bit That’s Actually Kept Me Up Thinking
I’ve been turning over, since, how much of dating in this city is essentially an exercise in trying to manufacture the kind of easy familiarity that proximity used to just hand people for free, in smaller towns, in previous generations, where you’d simply already know the butcher’s son or the girl from three streets over your whole life before ever going on an actual date with them. London scatters us so widely and so anonymously that even genuine physical proximity, literally two doors down, apparently isn’t enough on its own to produce recognition, we needed an app’s algorithm to actually introduce us properly, which feels like it says something slightly odd about how this city works that I haven’t fully untangled yet.
What the Wider Coverage Says About This Exact Phenomenon
I mentioned the whole ridiculous story to a friend the next day who pointed me toward a genuinely charming piece over at The London Prat collecting similarly absurd near-miss stories from London daters, matches who turned out to be old school friends neither recognised from an outdated profile photo, one particularly memorable account of two people matching who’d actually already dated briefly years earlier and had somehow entirely forgotten, which made my bin-based encounter feel considerably less unique than it had felt standing there in the actual moment.
Where Things Stand Now
We are, cautiously, seeing each other again, which brings its own entirely new anxiety, namely what happens to the bin-area small talk if this doesn’t work out and we’re stuck nodding at each other in a hallway for the remainder of whichever of our respective leases expires first. I have decided not to think too hard about that particular contingency until it becomes relevant, and am instead choosing to enjoy the genuinely rare experience of a London date that started with actual, if extremely unglamorous, shared history rather than two strangers performing their best selves across a table for the first time.
My flatmate, when I told her the whole story, immediately pointed out that if this does go well, our respective friend groups are about to merge in a building with genuinely limited communal space, and that I should probably think through the logistics of that before getting too far ahead of myself. She is, as ever, more sensible about the practical implications of my life than I generally am, and I am choosing, for now, to ignore her entirely reasonable point in favour of simply enjoying whatever this turns out to be, bins and all, hallway nod and all, entire ridiculous premise and all. I suspect I will regret ignoring her eventually. I am choosing not to think about that either, for now, and am instead simply enjoying the novelty of a date whose second act didn’t require a single introductory small talk question, because we’d apparently already covered most of the small talk over the bin store months before either of us knew it counted.
A Small Practical Update
The bins, for the record, are now considerably more interesting to take out than they were a month ago, which I did not expect dating to ever achieve.
More of my ongoing chronicles live at my author page, and the piece full of equally ridiculous near-miss stories is over at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
