Anakalian Whims

Coffee Dating and Honey Shacks

January 22, 2012 at 9:31 pm (In So Many Words) (A.C.'s Bees, Bob's Local Honey, coffee, comedians, dating, honey, Netflix, tea)

The Coffee Date

Love Coffee by Ahmed Rabea

I’ve been watching a lot of comedians on Netflix lately, and inevitably each one will have a few minutes devoted to dogging the Coffee Date.  Women will comically lament: Shouldn’t a man spend money on dinner? What’s with only shelling out a few bucks for coffee? Men talk about how it’s the worst idea ever because you’ll both have bad breath and diarrhea.  And so on.  I always laugh, because I see their point – kind of, and of course, they say it in a way that forces one to laugh – which is why they get paid to do what they do.  But when all is said and done, I think: I love coffee dates.  I loved them when I was dating, and I love them now that I’m married.

See, the coffee date is the perfect date.  You just met someone; you don’t know them well enough to know whether you’d like to suffer through dinner.  You can dodge out of a coffee date 10 minutes in, and its no big deal, you only met for coffee after all. Not so with a dinner date, where you have to at least wait for the bill to be dropped off, or you’d be considered an absolute jerk.  Or, if things are going well, you can sit for hours and no one cares, you can have intimate conversations in typically comfy chairs in a very cozy environment.  And with most coffee shops, if you get hungry while you’re there, its easy to order something to snack on for a bit without gorging yourself on food.  It also offers the easiest chance to turn coffee into something more than coffee: We’ve enjoyed this coffee, let’s take a walk.  After dinner walks tend to be a bit awkward and anticlimactic.  You’ve already eaten too much,  your outfit doesn’t fit the way it did when you got in, and you’re more likely to have to pee halfway through the walk, because you already sat through dinner and now you’re digesting.

I find coffee dates exceptionally more interesting and better for ‘dating’ than even the movie date.  The movie date, to me, is the worst kind of date.  This date is the date that says, ‘I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to know you, I just want to put in two hours of time so I don’t look like a slut when I make out with you.’  It says: I don’t put much time into thinking, and just want to sit with you in a dark room, where I can cop a feel.  It says: my thoughts on dating haven’t progressed passed high school.  Movie dates are for married people, who don’t need to talk, and just want to get out of the house for a change of pace, not for people just starting out.

But if you’re truly trying to get to know someone, which is what ‘dating’ is supposed to be, getting together for coffee is awesome.  It’s possible that it’s just the book nerd in me, and we tend to be coffee/tea folk, but I just really feel like half ofAmericalooks for the wrong thing when they date. ‘How much money is he spending on me?’ is just not a suitable date night criteria.

Side Note for My Tea People

I was contemplating this blog rant on my way home from church today when I stopped at my local honey stand.  As a huge coffee and tea drinker, I go through a lot of honey.  What’s tea without honey?  And in doing so, I’ve chosen to “support my local bees” as Bob’s sign proudly announces at the bee shack on Kuykendahl and Spring Cypress.

The bees are from A.C. Bees, here in Spring, and the stand is Bob’s Local Honey.  The honey is the best you can buy, and when you bring his glass jars back, he’ll give you a $1/ jar cash or towards a purchase.  My family goes through tons of this stuff, so I wanted to share.  He’s there at the stand Tuesday through Sunday and his phone number is 713-628-4774, call if you have any questions.