Back in 2006, I had a date in Washington, D.C. with a beautiful
Puerto Rican girl, who just exuded
sensuality.
I'd met her riding the metro one day, I no longer remember to where.
Regardless, I was still getting my feet under me, and was pretty clumsy
in how I ran my dates at that point - and this date ended up being no
exception.
We went to get brunch first, and I decided to try out asking a girl
to pay for me for the first time. I was a little nervous doing it...
and she was furious. She got
really upset. She was clearly insulted. She scolded me on how women in
Puerto Rico never pay
for dates.
But then she calmed down... and then she paid for us both.

After that, I figured I'd take her to the Barnes & Noble nearby,
and we grabbed some books and sat down together. Her anger had
transformed into raw, heaving lust...
as will tend to happen when women overcome some staunchly held rule of
theirs and cut you an exception, then continue spending time on you
(complete surprise to me at the time, though). In the bookstore, she
was soon leaning up against me on the ground beneath the book stacks,
breathing heavy, the sexiest smile
in the world on her face, and seemed for all the world to be puffing
out plumes of pheromones into the air around us. Both of us were very
turned on.
But Barnes & Noble turned out to be a bad call - and another
sign I didn't really know what I was doing. Yet, rather than take her
home then and there, I'd already decided earlier that I should buy her
ice cream to even out the spending (since she'd paid for lunch) - yet
another bad call. Things went from hot to lukewarm while we at ice
cream... and then I finally invited her home to talk
and relax some more.
I decided to have us walk
from there back to my apartment - a 20-minute walk. Half way there, any
last vestiges of desire had faded away completely and been replaced by
complaining
about how far we were walking and where we were going, and it didn't
stop for the rest of the walk. I took her up to the roof of my
building, which I hadn't scoped out carefully enough before, and we
ended up sitting there in uncomfortable seats positioned too far away
from one another. After about 10 minutes of rather platonic chatting, I
tried to move her back down to my apartment, but she decided she'd
rather just go home.
The magic was gone.
And I learned an important lesson: make
sure you're prepared for anything that happens.