The Application Form

The coffee had not arrived when she asked how much I earned.

I thought I had misheard her. There are questions that belong naturally to a first conversation: what do you do, where do you live, what kind of music do you like? Salary felt as if someone had accidentally opened the second page of a bank form.

I answered anyway. She nodded with the calm expression of someone checking a box.

A few years earlier, another question had been popular.

“Do you have a car?”

At the time, I did not. This seemed to place me in a difficult category, so eventually I bought one. I was pleased with this progress until I discovered that the examination had been updated.

Now the question was whether I owned a house.

I began to suspect there was a document somewhere that I had not received.

Requirements for a Suitable Adult Male

1. Job.
2. Acceptable salary.
3. Car.
4. House.
5. Further requirements to be announced.

The problem was not that these things were meaningless. Money matters. A stable life matters. If two people begin thinking seriously about a future together, practical questions eventually become unavoidable.

But there is a difference between eventually and before the coffee arrives.

I looked around the café and wondered what would happen if I passed every test. Suppose I bought the house. Would the next woman ask about the neighborhood? If the neighborhood was acceptable, would the size matter? After that, perhaps a summer house.

The finish line seemed to move every time I approached it.

Then I remembered that men had their own lists. We simply used different columns and pretended they were more reasonable. Appearance, age, style, whatever happened to matter at the time. Everyone complained about being evaluated while quietly evaluating the person across the table.

That made the situation less tragic and more ridiculous.

The coffee finally arrived. I took a sip and decided that perhaps the first date was not an examination after all. Maybe it was two people arriving with private forms in their heads and slowly discovering that neither form could describe the person sitting opposite.

I never found the official list of requirements.

That was probably fortunate. I would have tried to complete it.