Episode 3: An Intriguing Date in Philadelphia
See Episode 2: Nature Does Not Equip Man to Swipe Left on That
January 2026
My beloved daughter,
A few months before we attended the wedding of your mother’s best friend, on Christmas Day of 2022, I had reported in my journal:
I’m thinking to go to Philly and pursue this folly that is Leah, [age], the most absurdly positive person I have ever met. Unbelievably curvy, beautiful eyes, constantly smiling. It’s ridiculous.
Two days later, I recorded that I had just made dinner reservations, in Philadelphia, with optimist Leah. The restaurant, if posterity wishes to know, was Volvér. It is now closed, through no fault of our own.
And in those moments of the evening of December 27, 2022, as a much, much older man was driving up to Philadelphia for his first date with the much, much younger woman who would become your mother, we can look at these two people, this mature man and a woman not so long out of college, and we can say it is absurd. I certainly was saying it, though my curiosity propelled me on. I was nervous about what others might think, which is another way of saying I was nervous about what I might think, or already thought. Your mother did not believe it was absurd, and in one way of looking at it we can say that difference is where the suffering began.
* * *
I got to Volvér first.
When she arrived she was smiling that warm, open smile. Her eyes were lit up. I’ve never seen anyone smile so much, I wrote later that night. She wore a beautiful black coat with a faux-fur collar over a black dress. I don’t remember events well, never have, so as I write about our first meeting in the flesh I will look at the notes of the impressions I put in my journal. They’re relatively bare, because I still didn’t imagine I was recording the encounter for posterity, let alone for a daughter.
I can still picture her across the table. This is easier because I took two pictures, and I’ve seen them in my Apple Photos now and then ever since. She
looks at the camera openly, and she is smiling that big smile sweetly. She was almost always looking straight at me. Most people you talk to look away, now and then, especially if you’ve just met. They feel awkward to be seen, or their eyes might cast about a bit for help, or they don’t want to convey too much intimacy, or they’re just a little shy.
But your mother spoke with the same poise I’d seen on our video call. The same self-possession I’d seen in her Instagram videos about her thoughts on emotions and relationships, each of them 20 minutes long and in which she spoke without a single ah, uh, or um. She gave no hint of nervousness or self-consciousness.
She took her time ordering. “That’s the downside of seeing the best in everything,” she explained. “It’s hard to make decisions.” In the end she ordered the salmon.
She had no interest in small talk. She wanted to talk about values, philosophies, relationships, and feelings, and she did, with insight and originality. Of course I was struck by how different we were. I was goal-oriented and often tried to force things. She did things when she felt “invited to”, whether by her intuition or another person. She believed she had better results when she was receptive, responsive, than when she was goal-seeking. She said it’s men who especially need to create things out in the world, because the creation of children and perhaps other forms of expansion are beyond the abilities of men’s bodies, and maybe their minds. She said when people say women are too emotional, they can really be denying themselves a great deal of wisdom.
So she didn’t see herself in terms of a hero’s journey, which means overcoming obstacles to build resilience and achieving a summit or result. That paradigm, which is mine, did not resonate with her. Instead of a journey, she identified with the idea of expansion, of outgrowing.
Even in college, she hadn’t partied, or drunk alcohol, or dated just to date. She watched her girlfriends jump in and out of bed with boys and in and out of love with unserious men and she shook her head. Somehow she avoided all the drama and pointless heartbreak. She realized early on there was no point dating someone she didn’t think she could marry. She lived by advice her father had given her: Don’t ever twist yourself into a pretzel for a man. Because you’ll just resent him for it, and it won’t be fair to him, and you’ll both be miserable.
She often awoke by 5am, put on makeup, a pretty dress, and heels, and walked around the gated campus of Spelman College before dawn. She took herself on dates, to Atlanta museums or to tea in fancy hotels. She got to know all of her professors, sat in the front row, raised her hand, went to their office hours, became friends with some of them. She would love it if her daughter went to Spelman, which, I would learn, every year was the top-ranked HBCU out of over one hundred historically black colleges or universities. I couldn’t reconcile her chronological age with how much older she presented. I’d been around women her age and even older and they felt young. I couldn’t have imagined a connection with them.
There were roses on the table. She reached out and stroked the petals of one with her thumb and first finger. She loved to get lost, she told me, by closing her eyes and stroking the inside of a rose petal, silky as the inside of a dog’s ear. “It makes me softer,” she said.
She had had ineffable encounters with God. She was a Christian but, I would find, she didn’t talk to me about Jesus, and she did not proselytize. I gathered she had had a sort of spiritual awakening in college. She had tried on, lived in, a harder self, a thicker shell. She’d emerged from childhood angry, antagonistic, a striver with comebacks quick. Like many Spelman women, she’d been ambitious, an overachiever in high school, summa cum laude. She’d also been anxious, sad, often combative. In classroom debates she was known to hand her classmates and even teachers their heads. And then, after a series of worsening panic attacks, she had had the kind of epiphany I’d spent my whole life searching for, the kind that ends a certain kind of struggle and stops the pain, and she realized she had a choice about being happy.
And somehow that was enough, I wrote afterward, still necessarily vague on the details. She changed, permanently, into the being I saw before me. She’s one of those gifted people. You can see it. She’s very much in the moment.
Now she was gentle, and she moved slowly through the world, whether in the way she spoke or walked or got ready in the morning. Now, she said, she knew she could be happy anywhere. Here came another refrain that would plague me for some time: why would someone so happy, so contented, want to be with someone like me? I was restless, still ambitious, and not so sure of myself and what I wanted. My sense of not being confident I belonged anywhere was hidden in plain sight, you could say, in my biography. Wouldn’t she tire of my negativity, the cynicism? There is no way to match her smile, I would write. I felt self-conscious, tried to smile more. Where she was sunny, I wrestled with a flat affect. Where she had faith things would always work out, I felt buffeted by years of dashed hopes and expectations, of failure and loss. She had thrived under the pandemic’s isolation, while it had been one of the hardest periods of my life, and was still with me. There was no disparity in evolution and maturity: I wanted what she had.
Her happiness wasn’t the only trait that gave me pause. There was also her softness, her sensitivity. I wouldn’t say I had dated masculine women by any stretch, but never someone so openly soft. So feminine. Would she be less resilient? Would she be more work? Easier to hurt, even inadvertently? I did have a history. I had a quick tongue, and my mouth sometimes produced sharp, spiky words.
Her last boyfriend, she said, was my age. He was a good man, and they had a serious, marriage-minded relationship. But she seemed to have outgrown him, found off-putting his efforts at control and inability to think for himself. What she wanted most of all, she told me, was “sovereignty.” She wanted her partner to have his own life and sense of self and direction. And she adored competence.
She’s too damn young. I would write.
But I was entranced by her, I would add. I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms. I could easily overdose on her.
She spoke with such thoughtfulness and wisdom, clearly having thought and felt a great deal about people and relationships and matters of the heart.
She’s intoxicating.
Sentences, paragraphs, of wisdom unspooling. I wish I had written more of it down.
It was absurd, wasn’t it? Wasn’t an older man being with a younger woman like trying to go back to his high school and play another year of football, or resurrect any of the failed companies and abandoned writings?
I could see the cliff and I could see that it beckoned for a leap, and I saw that I did not want to leap, people get hurt that way. But it looked like I could get a bit closer to the edge without falling, so I took a few more steps.
After dinner, we walked into the connected atrium of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Had I had some wine? I did sing. She remembers that. My memory tried to spare me. Then we went outside to walk around. I remember it was very cold. I also remember her telling me what she wanted in life. What she wanted, in a word, was you. “I know I’m meant to be a mom,” she said. She knew it was her calling to be a wife, the most supportive wife in the world. “I have piercing clarity,” she said. “Piercing.”
She didn’t say it like she was trying to impress me. She said it with some resignation: just a statement of fact. She knew her strong sense of self meant she wasn’t for everybody, and she knew there would be people she kept in her life and those she wouldn’t. I could imagine she would be the unusual woman of her age who might not bore me. She is highly evolved in matters of the heart and soul, and that’s really what makes us possible. It’s the love she embodies that made you possible.
I thought of her former boyfriend. Luckiest man alive to bask in that glow, I would write that night.
The surprise was that she kissed me. During the dinner, though she was utterly incandescent, she didn’t seem to need to please me, and I couldn’t tell if she was attracted to me. She seemed to have no attachments to outcomes, as if she would have been just as happy talking to me if neither of us were interested in a relationship.
But we had kissed, not just once, in the street, but twice, and again when I sat in her Uber with her to escape the cold while I had waited for my own Uber before saying goodbye.
Next up: How I Met Your Mother: Episode 4: A Look on Lookout Mountain
