dduane:

If (as some characters at the heart of other fandoms have been heard to suggest) a date is when two people who like each other go out together to have fun, then Nita and Kit have probably been dating for years. In fact, you could make a case that quite a lot of the elective type of wizardry could fall into this category. Human wizards have been getting together to do paired and grouped wizardly interventions for as long as humans have practiced the Art, and they haven’t always done it simply because a group would produce the best results in an intervention. They do it because (like so many other things) wizardry gains in value when it’s shared: or because they like the people they do it with, and want to do more of the same kind of thing.

But normally the concept of the date suggests something besides just going out to have fun. About the word, in English anyway, there hovers a sense that the fun itself is almost secondary. The real business of the evening is seeing the other person (or people) involved in the equation having that fun in company with you, and being in a position to share some of the overspill of their pleasure — but also, most importantly, to have the other person know that their happiness is making you happy too. And in the truly perfect date, this whole set of conditions is duplicated in the other person (or people), so that the exterior delight in the event itself, and the interior delight in the other person’s enjoyment of what’s going on, reflect back and forth as in a hall of virtual mirrors — seemingly increasing one another the way light, so remirrored, seems to increase light even when there’s been no net addition to the energy input. No one who’s ever been on such a date is likely to forget it…whether they’re a wizard or not.

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