The Gimlet Waiter Is Flirting With You

Reservations, part one.

Joan Didion writes that life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. This, taken from The Year of Magical Thinking, is Didion’s response to the death of her husband who had a heart attack at their dining table. Naturally, your life partner and collaborator dying before your eyes is a little different to being broken up with but Didion’s words still resonate. Life changes in the instant, she says, the ordinary instant.  

My life changed on a Friday afternoon in early November. My fiancé, who I had reasonably come to view as my life partner, came home from the office and told me he was leaving me. I’ve left out a few compelling details but nothing that you need to know right now—our wedding was booked (and paid for); the invitations were out. The weekend prior, I’d gone to a wedding dress fitting and told him that I’d found ‘the one’. Now here he was, in one ordinary instant, sitting across from me in our bedroom and telling me he couldn’t do “it” any more. He left on a one-way flight to his hometown that weekend. One day he was there and then he wasn’t; the future I dreamed of I no longer had. 

Grief like that is unfathomable. I spent long summer afternoons crying on the beach, crying on the Pilates reformer, crying in the cafe. There was one day where I was so broken that I crawled up the stairs. Christmas—my favourite holiday—took on a burdensome quality. Sleep became a stranger; I forgot to eat. Anyone that has lost somebody—to death or otherwise—will know grief is potent, exhausting and all-consuming; it takes a toll on the physical body and the mind. But abandonment grief has a uniquely wicked quality—it tells you that you’re undesirable. You haven’t been chosen. You have been left, discarded, unwanted. It’s natural to feel unworthy, unattractive. If you were anything but, why would they have left?

At the same time, you’re on a very strange and accidental trajectory of getting better looking. This is something I observed with bemusement. You’re trying to look after yourself—you’re going on long walks, you’re meditating, you’re swimming. You start to lose weight without meaning to. You have more time to get a haircut, a facial, a massage. Then there’s the inner work; you’ve been thrust into being a more empathetic person by your abandonment. Growth is happening by osmosis and it’s making you a more expansive thinker, more understanding, more vigilant to others who are hurting and the many bruises people quietly carry. It’s a strange and soupy amalgamation of feeling awful at the same time as starting to feel good but you’re also holding onto this sense that while it’s nice to be feeling on the up, you’re ultimately unlovable. It’s not something you even care that much about—it’s so pervasive it simply feels true. The connection you had was something you relied on to give context and meaning to your life; the relationship was your identity. Without that, what do you have?

This is exactly the place I was in when I joined a friend for dinner at Gimlet, a relatively fancy restaurant in Melbourne’s CBD. We had ordered a gimlet cocktail (of course) and the steak to share when Nicola leaned over and said: I think the waiter is flirting with you. I was so sure she wasn’t speaking to me that I turned around to see who she was conversing with—which was, in retrospect, utter nonsense given we were seated at the bar. 

No, I told her, that can’t be true.

Really, he is, she said.

That someone would flirt with me—let alone a hot section waiter—didn’t occur to me to be in the range of outcomes for the evening. But she insisted.

He can’t even look at you, she said.

Had I been flirting with him? I didn’t think I had. I have a dry sense of humour that maybe he mistook for flirting, I told Nicola. But when I went to the toilet, his eyes followed me around the quadrangle of the bar. When I returned, he cleared our plates, then later came over to the table, looked at me, and drummed his fingers on the bar before walking away. They were signs that Nicola was able to read loud and clear—ones that I hadn’t even noticed.

Two wines in, Nicola and I became uncharacteristically giggly. We were both aware it was the first time that I’d had a flirtatious encounter since the break up and we leaned right the hell into it. Her and I had a lovely meal, it was fun, and over the course of the night I let myself believe he was into me. It was innocent and I felt good; I was happy to go back to my hotel to reflect on a new reality where maybe, just maybe, I was desirable and attractive. Or I could be. One day.

Nicola was convinced the meal would end with him asking for my number (do people even do that? Yet another question I didn’t know the answer to) but since I wasn’t yet comfortable confronting my new reality, I shrugged it off and continued eating the chocolate cake we’d ordered for dessert. 

I could end this first column here and say that, while we didn’t exchange numbers, it was exactly what I needed to reframe how I thought about myself and my desirability as a woman. But that wouldn’t do justice to the utter fiasco that actually played out. Because as I tapped my card to pay, and as he lightly brushed my hand while reaching back for the card machine, and as he said, maybe see you in Sydney sometime, and as Nicola grabbed her bag and took a few steps backwards, towards the exit, to give him the space to ask for my number, he looked over at Nicola and said: are you going to take that with you?

I turned and there was Nicola, her bag discarded on the bar stool and instead holding her used linen napkin, completely prepared to leave the restaurant with it. There was silence as she looked down and realised her mistake. It was like someone had splashed iced water over all three of us. The spell was broken. Nicola panicked, grabbed her bag, and she and I swiftly walked out (we ran).

Once again, I could end this here and say that, while we hadn’t exchanged numbers, it was exactly what I needed to blah blah blah. But that’s not what happened. Instead, I watched as Nicola—so mortified at the gaffe which had potentially distracted the hot waiter and I from connecting—marched back into the restaurant and gave him my number. 

And that’s where this story actually comes to an end. He never did text and at times I’ve wondered if the whole thing was made up by Nicola to make me feel good. But in the months since, I’ve realised it doesn’t matter. I think we all fondly remember our first post-break up dalliance and even though nothing happened between me and the Gimlet waiter, his earnest flirting kick-started a new phase of the break up for me. Hot Gimlet Waiter is kind of the reason I’ve launched Reservations. It awoke something in me—a sense that I still have something to offer someone—intimately, visually, conversationally; a sense that they’d be better off for having met me. That even though the person who I loved so deeply decided that I wasn’t enough for them, that doesn’t mean I’m not enough. And in the process of the retelling of this story to friends, acquaintances, colleagues and my therapist, I’ve realised that people deeply relate to these feelings. 

So that is how Reservations came to be: a personal dating column about love, loss and the reservations we all have about finding and shaping connections. As you will come to realise in these essays, I was deeply moved by my own personal experience of loss and heartbreak and at times I thought that was the end of the story. Instead, it truly was the beginning. Throughout this process, there have been so many times when I have wished for a place I could go to talk about relationships, heartbreak, what it means to feel sexy again, what a Hinge prompt is (you should never mention spicy margs—more on that later) and what to do when you actually like someone. So much of dating is difficult and exhausting—and it can be painful—but it’s also hilarious and hot and so much fun. I hope Reservations can be a place where we can compile our stories, learn from each other, laugh from the deepest part of ourselves and absolutely cry equally as hard.

Join me at the table. 

With love,
Dani

TABLE TALK:
Items of interest and fodder for your next date.

WATCH: Shrinking on Apple TV+
SHOP:  Esse Classico Midi Skirt from My Chameleon
READ: The Journey From Abandonment To Healing by Susan Anderson
DO: Fluidform Pilates