When Early Attraction Arrives With a Marching Band

There is nothing wrong with enthusiasm. The trouble begins when enthusiasm brings a marching band to a relationship that has barely found parking.

You meet someone, have one wonderful evening, laugh more than expected, discover that you both hate raisins in otherwise respectable desserts, and go home thinking, *Well, that was lovely.* A perfectly reasonable beginning.

Except sometimes one person experiences “lovely” as the opening ceremony.

By breakfast, emotionally speaking, there are trumpets.

The messages become warmer, longer, and more frequent. Plans for another date expand into references to restaurants you could try, places you could visit, concerts coming up in October, and a charming little town three hours away that apparently deserves consideration despite the fact that nobody yet knows the other person’s middle name.

To the enthusiastic person, this feels wonderfully sincere. Why pretend not to be excited? They like someone and are simply allowing that fact to flourish.

From the other side, however, it can feel as though you attended coffee and accidentally became grand marshal of a parade.

That is the strange thing about early attraction: the same gesture can feel romantic or overwhelming depending entirely on the size of the relationship underneath it. Affection that feels delightful after six months can feel oddly oversized after six days, rather like receiving a grand piano as a hostess gift. Beautiful object, generous thought, a few practical questions.

Early connections are still assembling themselves from tiny pieces: a joke that landed, a look across a table, the discovery that someone is unexpectedly funny when tired. Attraction may be growing beautifully, but it is still learning where the bathrooms are.

Enthusiasm, meanwhile, is several streets ahead.

This does not necessarily mean the excited person is needy, manipulative, or secretly planning matching bathrobes. Sometimes they are simply delighted. Perhaps they have been disappointed for a long time and suddenly somebody feels different; perhaps they are naturally expressive, or restraint has never been their strongest department.

The feeling itself can be completely genuine. The problem is scale.

One person is thinking, *I really want to see where this goes,* while the other is hearing drums in the distance and wondering whether roads will be closed.

Human beings are surprisingly sensitive to emotional acceleration. We generally like affection, attention, admiration, and being wanted; in theory, receiving more of these things should simply make everyone happier. Yet abundance has its own peculiar effect when it arrives before intimacy has caught up.

A compliment is lovely. Twelve compliments before lunch begin to resemble a campaign. One affectionate message feels warm; a cascade of them can make a perfectly normal afternoon feel as though someone has released balloons into the office.

Even future talk changes meaning according to timing. “We should go there sometime” can be charming when two people already have a shared history. After one date, a detailed discussion of next spring can make the calendar itself look nervous.

The enthusiastic person often senses none of this because, from inside the parade, everything looks festive. They are not thinking, *How can I overwhelm this person today?* They are thinking, *Finally! Something exciting!* Nobody has yet mentioned that the person being celebrated is quietly wondering how such a small beginning acquired its own route map.

That retreat can then create its own confusion. The excited person notices a cooler response and becomes more attentive, assuming perhaps that the connection needs reassurance; the other person, already feeling crowded, takes another step back.

And suddenly two perfectly ordinary people are performing one of dating’s oldest misunderstandings: one moves forward because the other is retreating, while the other retreats because one keeps moving forward.

Nobody is evil. The parade has simply become larger than the street.

There is something wonderfully ironic about trying so hard to make a connection happen that the effort itself becomes more noticeable than the connection. The actual person can start disappearing underneath all the anticipation and possibility, while the relationship itself is still trying to become something real.

Attraction becomes far more interesting when it has time to get specific—not merely *I adore you,* but *I adore this strange thing you do when you are trying not to laugh.* Not a grand imagined future, but the slow accumulation of ordinary details that eventually makes somebody irreplaceably themselves.

That takes time, which is terribly inconvenient for a marching band.

Marching bands prefer entrances.

Real intimacy is less theatrical. It appears gradually, almost rudely uninterested in spectacle, until one day two people realize that what began as a pleasant evening has quietly become important.

No floats were required. No municipal permit was filed. And nobody had to block traffic.