On February 14, before the pandemic, I was having dinner with two clients. They were both from the management team of a company I was working with at the time. We had a hard time finding a seat at a restaurant. I had made the reservation and hadn’t thought that, in fact, that day was not the best day to go out for a business dinner.
The restaurant was full of couples with flowers, gifts on the tables. Everyone was dressed nicely, as if for a celebration, in a decor dominated by red hearts.
At one point we looked around and were surprised to see that only the three of us were talking to each other. Of course, we were a few years older than the others, different generation, different concerns, some would say.
Those who were supposedly in love were more concerned with their own phone than their partner(s).
In that restaurant, we seemed like freaks, old-fashioned, unadapted to technology, finding something to talk about with each other and enjoying doing it.
A friend recently told me that he was in Paris this summer and noticed that people at the terraces were talking to each other, not just preoccupied with their own phones.
I think about what it is about seduction, the shy smile that can make you fall in love with a man. The involuntary gestures, a passing touch of the fingers, the catch of a glance, the micro-expressions, all these represent the unrepeatable, the unspeakable given by the physical encounter between two people, by the intimacy of the space created by their dialogue, hard to render through Whatsapp, emoticons, messenger, Instagram.
What’s the point of going out to eat, after all? To share with each other, to experience the taste of food, to enjoy the present moment.
But who has time for that in this hurried world? Maybe only us, the unhurried, the unwired, the outdated.
Perhaps some restaurants should experiment with the ‘no phone this month’ rule at dinner and instead offer those who comply free coffee or a glass of wine or prosecco. What would be the result?
