The 5-8pm life

Recently I went on a date with a management consultant. He suggested we meet on a Thursday, a day he usually gets off early. Apparently, we have very different definitions of early. To me, early means 5pm. 5:30pm if I'm generous. He meant 8pm.

Which made me realize that I basically live an entire life between 5 and 8pm. On this particular Thursday, I rode my bike home from work, installed my new iPhone, called my mum, texted my sister, did my Korean Duolingo, went for a run, showered and changed for said date.

By the time I met him, I had already had a full evening.

I met him closer to where he works because obviously I have more time. It made me wonder though: why do we automatically assign more value to someone's time when they have less of it?

Let's just say the date "went" - neither good or bad, just "went". I should write another post on energies of people, but for this story it comes down to: it felt like I was a sloth and was meeting an energetic bird of some sort. When I recounted the date to some of my friends, they couldn't believe it. I'm usually considered an energetic person, but apparently there are levels further up.

I'll spare the details of how the date came about and who texted whom and with what frequency — pieces of information that have since been thoroughly analyzed by my personal advisory board — and skip to: I haven't texted him since and he neither has he.

What got me thinking was the comment that more than one person made, when I said I didn't feel like he was interested at all: "He did spend his only early evening off on you. So there must have been some interest."
This sentence - it bothers me. Because to me it implies that his time is more valuable than mine. On first impulse that would seem true - he only has one evening off early. All other evenings he's burning the midnight oil at work. Some might say: "Poor guy. You should be grateful that he took his time to meet you."

Uhm, excuse me? Shouldn't it be mutual? We both live in a society where, to a certain extent, we get to choose how we spend our lives. He chooses to work in an industry with those hours, but also with the paycheck that comes with them. I chose to work in the food industry, accepting the paycheck that comes with that. So to me that argument has some value, but not really. If you want to date, some amount of time has to be invested in meeting people and getting to know them. Otherwise, what exactly are we doing?

Time is one of the rare resources that is distributed equally among all of us (if we factor out sickness and circumstances that would influence it). What really differs is how we spend our time. Perhaps I am particularly conscious of this because I genuinely love my 5–8pm life. Those three hours are not just time between work and dinner. They're when I get to do all the little things that make my life feel like mine. I'm a big believer that, within the constraints life gives us, we have a lot more agency over how we spend our time than we sometimes admit.

Maybe spending time with someone isn't evidence that they are interested in you. Maybe it's simply evidence that, at that moment, they were interested enough to find out.

Isn't that what a date really is: two people deciding that, for a couple of hours, they would rather spend their time finding out who the other person is than doing something else? Sometimes it leads somewhere. Sometimes it doesn't. Neither person owes the other a second date simply because they showed up.

It would seem like in my story neither one of us felt an urge to text or meet again.

That doesn't mean it was a bad date. I would meet him again — just out of pure curiosity to see such a high-energy person in broad daylight, as a bar is not exactly a reference for how someone interacts with others in their natural habitat.

But if nothing else, the date reminded me how much I like my 5–8pm life. Those three hours between work and dinner are mine. I get to fill them with running, calling my mum, texting my sister, learning Korean on Duolingo, installing a new phone — or sometimes doing absolutely nothing.

I'm glad I have my 5–8pm life.