On Being Early

You are always early. Not by much. Enough that I know.

Men are very careful about what they show me and almost none of them think to be careful about this. You will spend a week choosing your words, you will hedge and qualify and leave yourself three exits in a single sentence, and then you will be sitting there ready twenty minutes before anything is going to happen, having done nothing else all evening. The words were a performance. The clock is not.

What I like about it is that you cannot really lie with it. You can claim you happened to be free. You can say you got the time wrong, which is a favourite, and which nobody has ever got wrong in the other direction. But you were ready, and being ready takes a decision, and you made that decision hours ago while telling yourself you were not thinking about it.

Some men are embarrassed when they realise I have noticed, and they overcorrect. They arrive late on purpose the next time, which is an enormously effortful way of pretending not to want something, and it never looks like indifference. It looks like exactly what it is.

Do not do that. Be early. It is not undignified and it costs you nothing, because eagerness is only humiliating in company that would use it against you, and this is not that.

And notice what you do with the twenty minutes, because that is the actual information. If you fill them, you are still managing yourself. If you can sit in them, doing nothing, waiting on purpose, then something has genuinely changed and it did not happen where you were watching for it.