When Forty-Five Minutes Starts Looking Like Fine Dining

Dating a married man can do peculiar things to your understanding of portion size.

At the beginning, you may not notice. There is chemistry, excitement, whispered conversations, longing, complicated circumstances and enough emotional seasoning to make almost anything taste interesting. He tells you he misses you terribly, wishes things were different, thinks about you constantly.

Then he gives you forty-five minutes on Thursday.

And somehow, because you have been waiting all week, forty-five minutes feels enormous.

Look at this.

An entire forty-five minutes.

Uninterrupted.

He even turned his phone face down.

Michelin star.

This is one of the stranger tricks of a relationship built around someone else’s marriage: ordinary attention starts being served in such tiny portions that eventually you admire the presentation.

Welcome to the Tasting Menu

A normal evening with an available man can be several hours long and nobody thinks to commemorate it. You have dinner, you talk, maybe you walk somewhere afterward, and at some point one of you becomes tired (or bored) and says goodnight like a civilian.

With a married man, two hours can develop the emotional importance of a state banquet.

He managed to get away, found an excuse and has until nine, which somehow makes the evening feel enormous before it has even begun. You are squeezing a whole relationship into the space between somebody else’s dinner and somebody else’s bedtime, so naturally everything becomes more intense.

There is no time to be mildly bored. Nobody spends twenty minutes discussing whether the dishwasher is making an odd noise, and you do not have the luxury of discovering that he occasionally tells stories that could have ended six minutes earlier.

You get the concentrated version: romance, longing, kisses, declarations and then, almost before you have settled in, goodbye. And voilà — your tasting menu: beautifully presented, emotionally intense, and somehow never quite enough to call dinner.

And because the portions are small, every little extra begins to look generous. He calls unexpectedly? Compliments of the chef. He manages an entire Saturday afternoon? We may need to photograph this. He remembers something you told him three weeks ago?

Another Michelin star.

At some point, you can become genuinely impressed by a man doing things that would barely qualify as events in an ordinary relationship.

“He called me from the airport.”

Well.

Bring out the silverware.

The Less You Get, the Fancier It Looks

The restaurant becomes especially impressive when something is difficult to get.

Weekends are complicated. Holidays are nearly impossible. Evenings require planning. Spontaneity has somehow become an advanced procedure.

But the less you receive, the more precious each little serving starts to look.

A message sent from a bathroom during a family gathering can suddenly carry the emotional importance of a handwritten love letter because getting it involved risk, timing and probably somebody wondering why he has been gone so long.

He was thinking about me. He probably was — although, to be fair, he also had approximately ninety seconds.

And this is where the whole thing gets cheeky. Instead of looking at the portion, you start admiring the effort involved in producing it.

He is under pressure.

Things are complicated.

He cannot just leave.

Of course not. The chef is very busy. Before long, you are the most grateful customer in town.

One evening together after three canceled plans feels magical. A phone call after several days of silence feels almost luxurious. He says, “I wish I could give you more,” and after a while even the wish starts looking like something you should appreciate.

It is a remarkable restaurant.

You can leave hungry and still give it five stars.

Then You Notice the Plate

The shift is not always some enormous betrayal or dramatic scene. Sometimes you simply get tired of admiring tiny portions.

You look at what is actually in front of you: forty-five minutes, a hidden phone call, a few hours borrowed from another life, and a future discussed regularly and somehow never served.

Once you really see the plate, the presentation loses some of its magic.

The same two hours that once felt precious now look rather small sitting there. The late-night message that used to make your heart jump now makes you think, Is this really dinner?

And that question is terrible news for the restaurant.

Because now you remember that relationships can include Saturdays without negotiations, birthdays without elaborate explanations and phone calls made from perfectly ordinary rooms. Dinner can start at seven and end when everyone has finished talking, rather than when somebody receives a message saying, “Where are you?”

Nothing rare, nothing borrowed, nothing presented as a special event simply because it happened at all. Just enough.

And once “just enough” starts looking more appealing than “almost never,” difficult-to-get loses quite a bit of its glamour.

You stop admiring the scarcity. You stop mistaking effort for abundance. You look at the tiny beautiful portion, so carefully presented and praised for being difficult to obtain, and realize something almost embarrassingly simple.

You are still hungry.

And for once, instead of complimenting the chef, you get up from the table.