I'm hearing a lot about lateness of late--meeting a date at a restaurant, often early in a romance, and finding yourself alone….for a half hour or more. I'm hearing not about occasional lateness due to traffic congestion, but chronic, habitual lateness. And I'm hearing that the late, late date thinks it's okay to be late.
The Love Goddess doesn't agree.
Being late is not chic. It's not glamorous. It doesn't signal busy-ness. It doesn't connote power. I asked one high-powered man who is very busy indeed how he manages to be on time virtually all the time, and he said, "It's simple. If I'm late, it means I'm not coming. I've been killed." Indeed, chronic lateness makes the waiting one wish the late person had been, or at least hit by a truck.
Unlike, say deafness, lateness is not an illness or a condition; nor is it a congenital defect, an interesting quirk, something that we all must indulge because it cannot be helped. Inoffensive as the word "lateness" sounds, it can be helped, and it is, I think, serious: It speaks volumes about how that person regards others (in this case, you). For it's not carelessness that underlies lateness, it's disregard. If you've ever sat alone at a table fiddling with your BlackBerry and smiling wanly at waiters who sympathetically, refill your water glass, you'll remember that feeling in your stomach that tells you exactly what lateness is and how angry it is making you, despite your trying to talk yourself down.
It's particularly egregious when someone arrives very late and says, "Sorry I'm late." Sorry, what? I want to know. Did your mother die? Were you hit by a truck? At least he should go to the trouble of being hysterically upset….give me something other than a distracted, insincere apology that means nothing more than "Oh, gosh, I needed to make a few more calls." But see, the chronically late aren't sorry at all. They arrived just as they'd hoped to, in control of who got to the seat first and who waited for whom. And if this isn't hostility, or at the very least, a serious control issue, what is? (I once heard a man tell me that it was a deft power play to arrive late to an appointment….for "it makes the other guy fidgety." He liked to make people wait, he said, for about ten minutes. He smiled as he explained why: "What else can anyone do during those ten minutes while he waits for you?")
So if your new friend is always late, I think it's worth considering that it's not only rude, but a cover for other unpleasantnesses as yet to unfold. The Late Person has options: To leave a half hour early if there's bad traffic. To call early in the day and ask if it would be convenient to make your date a bit later. To set his watch ahead. To have alarms go off all over his house. Meet people you fear will be late at your place, not at a public one, so I you can do more than fidget. If you're stuck in a restaurant, I suggest that you wait fifteen minutes, twenty at the most, then leave a message on his cell phone or with the M'aitre D: "So sorry, I'm not here anymore. Couldn't wait....."
TLG
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