Dating : Stars in the Sea

That’s the approximate number of people living in Greater London.

They may be City execs, investment bankers, or nurses. But the one thing most of them have in common is that they’ve all used the tube at least once in their lives. Likely, it was more than once. And the majority of them are likely to ride it a few times a day.

At first glance, you are just a drop in the sea of humans that floods the electric caves beneath London. You haven’t yet managed to spill your decaf Americano onto your pinstriped Marks and Spencer’s suit, but the train is about to depart from Bond Street, and it’s only a matter of time.

Somehow, you manage to find a seat between a brown-cheeked giggling toddler and a rather overweight litigator. Well, you assume he’s a litigator because you catch a glimpse of papers in his file and see what you presume to be names of the parties in a case. You turn away before he can catch you staring and get in trouble for confidentiality breach.

You stare at a seat across from you. Some young woman is flipping through today’s City A.M., rolling her eyes at the antics of a president of some third-world country you’ve vaguely heard about. She catches you staring and smiles, turning her attention back to the paper after half a second. A couple of minutes later, she folds the paper and places it in her purse, seemingly unaffected by the events she’s just finished reading about. You turn your attention to the tube map above her head. The screechy voice of a woman you hear every day announces that the train is arriving at Green Park. The girl across doesn’t move. Neither do you. But the fat litigator stands up and exits. You briefly see him heading towards the corridor connecting with Victoria Line and turn your attention back to the City A.M. girl. You hold her gaze for longer this time and smile. She smiles back and looks down, presumably embarrassed. Staring is rude, after all.

Your thoughts drift towards that board meeting your secretary scheduled for this afternoon. You hate them, really. The people who attend are carbon copies of each other, each more boring than the other. It’s alright though — it’s just work, after all. After work, each of you will take the tube home and join the 8 million of others who do the same. Perhaps they’ll also smile at a pretty girl across them. Although most of them are older than you and are happily married. The tube for them is just a way to get home to kiss their partners and kids. For you, however, it’s one of the only places where you interact with people outside work on a daily basis. Having worked hard towards achieving your career goals, you didn’t really have time for dating and marriage. You still don’t, not really.

What you do have, however, are the opportunities to lock eyes with people like the City A.M. girl. She is looking at you again, trying to be sneaky but failing. Perhaps she, too, is a workaholic. Although young, she seems to already have two faint lines between her dark eyebrows. She folded the paper on a page with a story about a partner in a big law firm — perhaps she is a paralegal. Or a trainee solicitor. She may even be a law student — they are supposed to be obsessed with changes in the legal world, after all.

The train arrives to Westminster and she still doesn’t move. Well, she’s not shadowing an MP, at any rate. Maybe her stop is London Bridge — quite a few big law firms have offices there. Or even Canary Wharf. You tell yourself that your luck can’t be that good, though. She chews on her lip and sneaks a glance at you again. You mentally pat yourself on the back for not forgetting to shave this morning — facial hair has never suited you. You curse the perfectly innocent elderly gentleman in a suit and the purple-haired art student sat on the either side of her.