Bim Adewunmi: ‘I end up revealing stuff I have not directly shared with some of my closest friends’
No two ways about it, the premise is somewhat wacky. You ask a stranger a series of 36 questions in three sets, and then you conclude your encounter with a four-minute session of looking silently into one another’s eyes. The process of asking and answering accelerates intimacy – which is, after all, knowledge coalesced, usually over a long period – and makes the two people feel more kindly about one another and, in the fullness of time, foster the emotion that we humans call “love”. I said yes, because why the hell not?
My stranger for the evening is not technically a stranger: Archie and I have been working in the same office for the past three or so months, separated by a bank of desks and a walkway. We have nodded at one another, and possibly accidentally eavesdropped on each other’s conversations. So already we have flouted the most basic element of the study. On the phone, my editor tells me Archie has already agreed to it, and so encouraged, I agree as well. We later realise she played us both. Nefarious.
We begin the evening with photos. At first, we keep our distance as the photographer sets up and do faux-relaxed chat (well, I’m faux-relaxed), but we both know what’s coming. We have to stand incredibly close to one another and stare into the other’s eyes. The result is awkward. Have you ever done it? Even with a long-term friend or lover? It’s just weird. I find myself wondering if my breath is fine (I know it is, because I was chewing fruity gum beforehand; his is fine too, phew) and repeating “this is FINE” over and over in my head. The staring becomes a looming presence over the course of the evening: not exactly a dark cloud, but always there, nonetheless. It is the thing we keep coming back to – all that staring we are going to do later – a million times more awkward than a goodnight kiss could ever be if this were a traditional date.
Over dinner, we begin. The questions start off fairly innocuously: dream dinner guest (he says George Eliot or David Foster Wallace, both good answers); do you rehearse phone calls (me: yes; him: not really); when did you last sing to yourself (both of us: like, earlier today). They ramp up in significance as they go on: what in your life do you feel grateful for? What would you change about how you were raised? Then, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. Written down, it doesn’t seem like much, but once required to think about these things – and so quickly – it becomes intense.
The usual route to intimacy is, among other things, winding and often accidental. This thing we are doing, in a largely empty restaurant, is deliberate and accelerated. But as the evening goes on, what was originally discomfiting becomes almost euphoric release. There is no way I would tell someone on a normal first date about my relationship with my mother. But in light of the unusual circumstances, and what we have already shared of ourselves this evening, why not? The questions are probing – your most embarrassing moment, your favourite memory etc – and the great thing about them is how they force reflection. Not looking at the questions beforehand was a good idea, because I think I would have cooked my answers a bit. This is incredibly open; I end up revealing stuff that I have not directly shared with some of my closest friends (we have talked around them, they have fragments and half-told stories). It is also funny and fun, and remarkably relaxed. We both note that, relieved.
Archie is amusing and complimentary, which makes me like him (obviously). And we discover that we have a lot more in common than it appears on paper. A quick truncated list: we both like dogs; we both attended single-sex schools; we both would like to write books one day; we like football (him: Southampton, me: West Ham); we value kindness, we realise how lucky we are to be doing jobs we love, we both grasp the crushing and all-encompassing love our mothers feel for us and understand we are unworthy of it. And so on. The questions give structure to the evening, without awkward pauses. Each answer brings more questions. It’s pretty great.
The most difficult questions to answer are the ones where we have to say something we feel about the other person. “Tell your partner something you like about them already” is a squirm-inducing No 31, and No 26 isn’t much better: “Complete the sentence: ‘I wish I had someone with whom I could share …’” I am surprised by how open I am, but then I really shouldn’t be, I suppose. Clearly, this is for work, and I imagine we are both squirrelling away quotes for our respective pieces. But I also made the effort to wear contacts – not my spectacles – and applied shaky eyeliner. I put on lipstick, dammit. At the very least, I was open to meeting someone romantically. Acknowledging that gives me a jolt.
Eventually, three hours later, we have to look. Archie sets the timer on his phone, and in a deserted square, with the icy wind whipping about us, we sit on metal chairs and stare across a wet table. I begin to chatter, out of nervous habit. Archie shushes me. Our lips quirk constantly, suppressing awkward smiles. A few people walk past, chatting loudly. Occasionally, the cold makes us gasp. We keep on staring. Archie laughs out loud. “Nope, lean in to the awkwardness,” I say, like a wanker. Then I laugh. And then, finally, we are silent. The timer rings.
I love technology, and I think it has the potential to be far more intimate than the essayists and columnists would have us believe. But there is something far more arresting in the physical. It is why hysterical film actors bellow “look into my eyes and tell me!” as tests of sincerity. There is a common human frequency that we all tune into, and a mutual gaze is how we access it. In the end, I am not staring into Archie’s eyes so much as into my own state of mind. The clarity is startling. Also, Archie has very kind eyes. So there’s that.
Archie Bland: ‘It’s not that I want to go out with Bim; it’s that I feel I already have and it’s definitely over’
I don’t know what’s going wrong, but we are 22 questions in and I don’t think Bim is in love with me yet. I don’t know what’s giving it away. Maybe it is her body language, and the way she is sitting about as far back in her chair as it is possible to go without tipping it over. Or maybe it is something in her look of total bemusement at my suggestion that it might be quite exciting to score a last-minute winner at Wembley. If there was any doubt, though, it is dispelled by her response to No 22: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner.”
We have to come up with five each. This is not simple. We barely know each other, and I have very little to recommend me. Poor Bim. We have done three, and on the last she basically just repeated what I had said about her, which I consider to be cheating. I am trying to drag out the fourth to give her as long as possible to come up with something, but as I wind it up I can see the panic in her eyes. She puffs out her cheeks and grimaces a bit, and in the ensuing silence we both laugh laughs of quiet desperation. We have got the “tension” covered, but not the “sexual”; at this point, I don’t think the Guardian’s own malevolent Cilla Black impersonator needs to worry about buying a new hat.
It is not like any first date I have been on. For a start, it is so organised. The questions start simply enough, with a string of those feeble conversation substitutes that people resort to when they haven’t got anything to say to each other. Who is your dream dinner guest? What is your perfect day? This, I think, is going to be a breeze, and we’re both going to go home, alone, entirely undiscombobulated by the evening’s events. As it turns out, though, this is just a warm-up, designed to jolly you along before you delve into the heavy stuff. Is there something you have dreamed of doing for a long time, and why haven’t you done it? Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing, and why? What’s your most revolting sexual practice, and why does it involve that rooster? No, I’m just kidding with that last one. But only just.
If it all seems distinctly unpromising for romance, there is something going on. Bim is really, really interesting – and, of course, the exercise relies on the fact that anyone is, really, once you get past your superficial differences. And yet I feel like we have taken the express lift in a skyscraper. You are, briefly, on the floor marked “early flirtation”, and the one marked “endearing second-date revelation”; the trouble is, there’s no way of getting off. Nor does it seem to stop at “totally into each other” or “madly in love”, either, nor even “watching boxsets and only communicating in grunts”. Without really noticing it, we finally come to rest at “old friends with a slightly complicated history that they avoid talking about”. It’s not that I suddenly want to go out with Bim (or, I am pretty certain, she with me); it’s that I feel like I already have, and it meant a lot, but it’s definitely over. And we haven’t even got to the stare-off yet.
This false familiarity is the strangest thing. It’s closeness without the legwork, a chemical simulacrum of intimacy that comes without a pill, but carries with it the same hollow sense, the next day, that you might have reached your peculiar, private high with anyone. Bim and I discover we have so much more in common than we were aware of; she now knows things about me that I have kept from some of my closest friends. I feel honoured to have learned so much about her, too. Because we are allies in this weird private test, thrown together by circumstance as if we have been marooned on the same desert island, there is a powerful mutual sympathy that I suspect will revive any time I see her. It’s not love: it’s much too close for that. A couple of times I feel as if we are in a slightly overwritten two-hander, and I have the strong sense that any audience would find the mounting intensity a bit implausible. And so it is. All the same, they do say actors are constantly shacking up.
In the end, the waiter has to kick us out; we are the last people in the restaurant. Admittedly, this is more because there are so many questions to get through than because we are canoodling over the coffee, but it still reinforces the sense of occasion. It is nearly midnight, and time to take on the part of the evening we have both admitted that we are dreading: the four-minute gaze. We find a deserted square, and sit across a little cafe table from each other. I set my timer. It is bitterly cold, and hideously awkward. But then, after a while, something weird happens, and there’s just no way to describe it without sounding like a complete arse. For a moment or two, you sort of forget your embarrassment, and start to actually look. It’s like magic eye: there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there – and then, rather suddenly, the picture clarifies, and it turns out it was Bim all along.
Then a group of friends, hooting on their way home from a night out, walks past, and the moment leaves with them. I’m still not in love with Bim, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that the non-feeling is mutual. But during those four minutes, which feel nothing like as long as I thought they would, I have the unsettling thought that it hardly matters; that all intimacy is faked, really, whether after decades of marriage or an evening asking each other when you last cried; and that the simulation, in fact, is the whole point. Love isn’t to be found in someone’s eyes, and it isn’t to be found in the idea that you can ever really know someone. It’s in the knowledge that it is awkward, the certainty that you can’t, and the fact that, all the same, you need someone enough to give it a try.
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