This whole "dating" thing lends itself to weird feelings. The process I'm more used to from college, and for some time after college, is encountering someone (typically female) in a context, like a class, or doing a play, or working on some event, discovering I like her, ideally she discovers she likes me, and proceeding from there. There's a whole natural sorting process that goes on, as you have weeks and months of discovering that you like each other, and when you finally get around to it, the liking has some depth to it: you know this person reasonably well. Let's call this the Context Method of meeting boyfriends/girlfriends/partners/significant others/affectionate lovemonkeys.

By contrast, dating specifically involves that initial sorting process. With the Context Method, you're meeting people in the course of doing stuff you were going to do anyway: working on a play to acquire a girlfriend is dumb. So there's no particular investment in talking to the hot costume designer, since you had to talk to her to get the show up. If y'all hit it off, that's a bonus, but no one's worse off if you don't. With dating, you're there just to talk to each other, to move past that initial impression. The complicating factor: you both want things to work out. Don't be daft, of course you do. You're dating, for some personal reason that involves wanting to connect with another human being, on some level not entirely covered by having coffee and going to museums together. So you've introduced the desire to make things work, that most dangerous of feelings, cause of so much relationship suffering. And right at the beginning, too. You're all primed to do anything ranging from silly to severely stupid.

I stuck to silly this time, but phew. Close call, there, with the ignoring the intuition and all.

Best bomb shelter ever. Though I'd still hate to live there.