My office is in the process of being re-painted and re-carpeted, and yesterday I discovered that one of the carpet guys had left a note on my office door asking me out to dinner.

Which was... sweet, if kind of 7th-grade cheeseball. So I found it enormously funny, but I'm not remotely tempted, and wouldn't be even if I were single.

Still, it was flattering. I don't think I've ever been asked out on a date before, actually. Not seriously, not with someone I wasn't already in a relationship with.

I went on a "date" in high school with a friend, once, when his girlfriend was escorting one of her friends to his prom. And there was that time my freshman year at W&M that I thought I'd been asked out, but it turned out that what he'd meant was, "There's this movie I want to see; do you want to tag along?" and not, "I'd like to go out with you; how about a movie?"

Karen wanted to know, last night, how you could get into a relationship with someone without dating them. But Matt and I were watching Firefly episodes, and I was too distracted to try to explain.

But I really haven't. All my relationships have been based on friendships that turned into something more. So instead of, "Hey, let's go out and get to know each other and maybe we'll discover that we're romantically compatible," it was, "Hey, we already know each other pretty well and I think we're romantically compatible."

(In subtext, of course. I don't think I could be romantically compatible with someone who asked me out that... drily.)

So we would skip the whole dating/getting to know you phase and move right into the liplock portion of things, and then we would go on dates.

Maybe it's because all my relationships started in school. High school and college. So the only people I ever really came in contact with were people I already knew, at least a little. In a school situation, there are lots less intimidating ways to get to know someone you might be interested in than just up and asking them out.

So anyway. That was my adventure, yesterday.

--Liz