He Listed His Medications Before the Spinach Dip Arrived. Then She Read Hers

The spinach dip hadn't even come yet when the man across the table said, "Before we go any further, I take lisinopril, a statin, and something for gout I can never pronounce."

My friend Lorna had her water glass halfway to her mouth. She put it down.

He kept going. Half a baby aspirin. Eye drops, for the glaucoma that runs in his family. A left knee that was "on the list" for replacement next spring. He said all of it in the same easy voice he'd used five minutes earlier to describe his grandson's Little League team, and then he folded his hands on the table like a man who'd just finished saying grace.

"There," he said. "Now you know."

Ten minutes later I got a text from the ladies' room of a bar and grill on Dodge Street in Omaha. It was nearly two in the morning in Spain, where I live, and I was awake for no good reason.

"He just told me his cholesterol meds. What do I DO with that."

The woman with no knees

Lorna is 56 and the principal of an elementary school. On a normal day she handles a fire drill, a biting incident in kindergarten and a parent who wants to talk about the lunch menu, usually before nine. Very little rattles her.

First dates rattled her.

She'd been divorced for five years. In the last year she'd been on six first dates, and at every one of them she'd worked very hard at being a woman with no body to speak of. No knees. No thyroid. And definitely no night in March of 2021, when what she thought was heartburn turned out to be a blocked artery, and she woke up the next morning in a cardiac unit with a stent and a cardiologist who looked about nineteen.

She takes her thyroid pill every morning at 5:30, on an empty stomach, which is why she can't stand anybody at breakfast. She takes a whole baby aspirin. She did twelve weeks of cardiac rehab next to a retired railroad engineer who told the same train joke every Tuesday.

None of it ever came up on a date. She'd made sure.

When one man asked if she liked to hike, she said she loved it, which was half true. She'd started leaving her pill organizer at home on date nights, the big one with a lid for every day of the week, because once it had rattled in her purse when she put it on a chair.

"I'm not lying," she told me once. "I'm just presenting the highlights."

The six dates had all been fine, and she couldn't remember a single thing any of those men had said.

And now this one, Russ, 61, a retired insurance adjuster with a grandson who played shortstop, had put his whole medicine cabinet on the table before the appetizer.

What the dip was hiding

I wrote back from my bed. "What did you say to him?"

"I said, 'Why are you telling me all this?' And it came out mean. Like a principal."

She'd been startled. It felt to her like he'd broken a rule that everybody over 50 knows and nobody writes down: you keep the body out of it until at least the third date.

Except, when I thought about it, that rule doesn't make much sense.

In 2025 the CDC published a study in Preventing Chronic Disease that looked at chronic conditions in American adults by life stage, using national survey data through 2023. Among midlife adults, ages 35 to 64, 78.4% reported at least one chronic condition. More than half, 52.7%, had two or more. The most common ones in that group were obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. For adults 65 and older, 93% had at least one.

So the odds were very good that half the people eating dinner in that bar and grill on Dodge Street had something in a pill bottle at home. Lorna and Russ just happened to be the only two at their table who knew it about each other.

She came back from the ladies' room and sat down. The dip had arrived. Russ was waiting for her, a little pink around the ears, and he answered her question as if she'd asked it nicely.

"My ex-wife and I spent our last two years pretending we were fine," he said. "Both of us. About everything. I don't want to start anything pretending."

Lorna picked up a chip and looked at it for a long time.

Then she did something she hadn't done on six first dates.

Her list

"Levothyroxine," she said. "Every morning at 5:30, which is why you never want to have breakfast with me. A whole baby aspirin, not half. And I've had a stent since 2021."

She told me afterward that her heart was going so fast she thought, briefly, that she'd need the cardiologist again.

Russ nodded like she'd told him her favorite color.

"Which artery?" he asked.

She told him. He said his brother-in-law had the same one, and he's been fine for ten years, and now he plays pickleball like it's his job. And that was it. They moved on.

They talked about his grandson, who'd hit a home run in August and then run the bases in the wrong direction, and about their tomatoes. They argued about the best fish fry in Omaha so loudly that the server came over to check on them.

When she told me about the night later, it struck me how different she sounded. She remembered whole sentences he'd said and the color of his shirt. And she kept going back to one moment. When Russ had read off his list, she'd thought he was brave. Funny, a little strange, but brave. When she read off hers, she'd felt like she was confessing something.

It was the same kind of list, at the same table.

There's a name for this. In 2018 three psychologists in Germany, Anna Bruk, Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless, published a set of seven studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on how people judge vulnerability. They looked at situations like confessing love, asking for help and revealing imperfections of one's body. The pattern held. People rated their own moments of showing vulnerability more negatively than the very same moments in someone else.

Bruk called it the beautiful mess effect. As Natalie Kerr explains in Psychology Today, when we watch someone else do it we tend to see courage. When we picture doing it ourselves, we see weakness.

Lorna had spent six dates on the wrong side of that gap.

At the end of the night, Russ asked the server for a pen. On a paper napkin he wrote both lists, side by side, his on the left and hers on the right. Then he turned it around and asked her to check his spelling.

He had spelled levothyroxine with two Ys. She fixed it in red, because the only pen in her purse was a red one. She's a principal.

The next man

I'd like to tell you this was the beginning of a great romance. It wasn't, exactly.

They went out five times. He was kind and steady and very easy to talk to, and somewhere around the fifth dinner they both noticed they were having the kind of good time you have with an old friend. He said it first. She agreed, and was surprised by how little it stung. He still sends her photos of his tomatoes.

What she kept was the napkin, and what it had taught her.

In September she had a first date with a man named Gary, an orthodontist, at a wine bar downtown. About twenty minutes in, he asked if she was into hiking. He'd done a fourteener in Colorado that summer and had photos.

Before, she'd have said she loved it.

This time she said, "I like a good walk. I had a heart stent put in a few years ago, so I'm more of a long-flat-trail person than a summit person."

Gary sat back. "Wow. Okay," he said, and after a second, "That's a lot for a first date." He checked his phone on and off until the check came.

She told me the whole story the next morning, over coffee.

"Fourteen minutes," she said. "That's how long it took me to find out. In my thirties that would have taken me a year and a half."

She wasn't hurt, or she was hurt a little and decided not to keep it. She'd been worried for years about the man who'd flinch. It turned out that man existed, and he flinched in fourteen minutes, and then she was home by nine.

The rule

Lorna doesn't open with her list the way Russ did. That's his style, and she says it would make her feel like she was reading the morning announcements.

Her rule for health history on a first date is smaller. Before a first date she decides, at home, what she'll say about her health if it comes up, and she says it in one sentence when it does. She doesn't hide the pill organizer. She doesn't pretend she loves summits.

Then she watches what he does with that sentence. Some men ask a question. A few look at their phones. Every answer is useful. She just didn't get to see any of them while she was busy presenting the highlights.

In December she ran into Russ at the pharmacy counter at the Hy-Vee near her school. They were both there to pick up refills, of course. They stood in line together comparing white paper bags and laughing about it, while the woman behind them pretended not to listen.

Russ held up his bag and squinted at the label.

"Still can't pronounce it," he said.

101 First Dates has a hundred more first dates like this one, after 40 and at every other age, and you can find it on Kindle. I write Love, Rewired, a free newsletter about love and dating after 40. You can subscribe here.