Actually, it was just a monologue by the young woman, who spelled out each of the banal uninteresting problems and worries that plagued her life.
All of her mind-numbing anxieties - about work, her friends, what to buy someone for their birthday - were articulated in excruciating detail over the next two hours in a grating, whining voice.
Men just want to be happy right now while women constantly worry about the futureHer companion gazed empathetically into her face from across the table, listening intently as he stroked her hand to comfort her. He was paying her the sort of devoted, patient attention that only a man in desperate want of sex can manage.
Any other guy would surely have found her blathering unbearable. From the tension in his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed as his hand slid ever upwards along her bare arm, it was obvious there was only one thing on his mind.
And he was prepared to listen to two hours of her garbage in the hope that he would get it.
In their idiotic way the couple exemplified a fundamental truth about men and women.
We exist in two different time zones. Men want to be happy right now, today, preferably in the company of a beautiful woman. Tomorrow can wait.
Women, on the other hand, are constantly concerned with the future, and with their prospects financially, emotionally and sexually.
While this girl prattled on about her vague hopes and worries for the future, her boyfriend was anchored by his carnal desires into the immediate here and now.
They exemplified what I've come to realise over the years: that men and women have almost nothing in common, other than the desire for sex and, if they have any children, a shared concern for their wellbeing. Besides that, we have very little interest in each other.
The reason, I believe, is that we are fundamentally selfish beings, only really interested in ourselves.
Some people claim to be lovingly entwined with their partners. They're deluded or lying. I'm in my mid-30s and have met no such couple.
I've known couples of all races and ages, some of them in arranged marriages - all of them simmering with tension and dissonance.
I've never met a couple I've envied. I don't feel sad admitting this. I feel liberated. I no longer cling to the myth that relationships create happiness, and I don't feel guilty or alone when feeling dissatisfied in my marriage.
Everyone else feels this, whether they admit it or not.
Men and women speak two different tongues. We can barely even get to know each other, let alone make each other happy.
Women are pathological worriers, especially the intelligent and successful ones.
I remember how, at university, the brightest girls were the most meticulous notetakers during lectures, while the boys slouched through them half-asleep.
Women can't trust their abilities and go with the flow. Even the most capable ones are riddled with doubts and desperate for security.
And that means security for the future: are they going to meet a nice man they can take home to meet their mother? Are they going to have a nice house with a conservatory at the back?
Women think and think about their lives, they plan and scheme and imagine how things might go with Mike or Sam or Joe. Who would be the best husband, the best father, the best lover? Which would have the best pension plan?
Meanwhile Mike and Sam and Joe are probably just thinking about whether the woman in question will sleep with them tonight, and who is going to win the Champions League this summer.
I remember when I proposed to my wife. We were lying in our hotel bed, on holiday in Thailand. We'd been living together for six months and my wife was now pestering me to find out where our relationship was 'going'.
I had no idea where we were 'going', and it was late and I was tired. I told her that if we were still together in a year's time I'd marry her. Then I went to sleep. Romantic, huh?
My answer was a reasonable response to her demands to know what the future held. It was rational to think that after we'd been together for 18 months that marriage was a logical continuation.
The topic wasn't discussed again for over a year, until I came across an envelope in her desk drawer.
It held the booking receipt for the country house she'd gone out on her own and hired for the wedding. Though I hadn't been informed of this, I wasn't upset. I had, after all, proposed to her.
Women generally drive the direction of relationships, partly because most men are happy just to be laissez-faire, but also because women are natural control freaks, simply because they have an inbuilt paranoia that their lives are going to go horribly awry.
For example, no intelligent man spontaneously asks a woman to marry him. She will let him know well in advance via hints, leading questions and outright nagging that she wants to get hitched.
She might squeal with mock surprise when he offers that ring, but she'll have been nudging him to do it for months if not years.
One man I know proposed on one knee to his long-term girlfriend in their room at a country house hotel. Even as he began his spiel, she began shaking her head violently.
In the end, she had to tell him this was not the kind of place she'd always imagined would be the setting for her proposal. Only a windswept hillside would do. She, you see, had been planning for this moment in her mind for years.
Similarly, men become fathers having never really thought about it. In my experience, they are often swayed by the desires of their partners.
Very few women get pregnant by accident; they generally know exactly what they're doing.
The fathers I know have admitted to being crestfallen when a girlfriend first told them she was pregnant. It was a shock end to their independence they'd never properly contemplated.
But they feigned jubilation and made the usual offers of support.
It generally takes the arrival of an unplanned child for a man to start scrupulously practising safe sex.
One of the ironies of this gulf between the mindset and aspirations of the sexes is that a woman's cloying need for certainty often drives men to be unfaithful.
The oppressive intimacy they force onto a relationship - always wanting reassurance, and always wanting to know what he is thinking and feeling - has the effect of making him seek a cheap ego boost elsewhere.
Men cheat to re-establish their sense of independence, to carve themselves a brief space with someone else that doesn't involve their partner.
My own adulteries - which occurred a couple of years ago on a long trip abroad - were driven by the need to escape the overbearing intimacy of married life.
Women will hate me for doing this and not being coy when admitting it. But I know very few men who've been faithful to their partner. The only men I've discussed sex honestly with who've never strayed are both gay.
I'm not the greatest husband material going, but it hasn't cured my wife's compulsion to seek permanence with me.
After she uncovered my misbehaviour we separated briefly, but got back together and decided to make a fresh start in a new house.
I had nothing to contribute to the deposit and my wife arranged the mortgage, yet she insisted that I sign the deeds.
I didn't feel remotely entitled to it and explicitly told her many times. But signing was her pre-condition for continuing our relationship.
I guess she felt it would be a clear sign of commitment from me, and also put me in debt to her morally.
I, naturally, did not analyse this event in terms of a long-term emotional power struggle the way a woman would. I simply noted that my infidelities had resulted in making me the co-owner of a fourstorey Georgian town house.
Figure that out.
The only reason I can give for why my wife hangs onto me is sex. She fancies me. That's it.
Within the emotional turmoil of the female mind is the primal force of sex.
Though they waffle about their need for empathy and sensitivity, women are actually far more libidinous than men.
God created sex for them. He gave them a body that is one big erogenous zone, and a taste for myriad erotic nuances. Male sexuality is blunt and lumpen: no man is aroused by the thought of warm breath against his neck.
But a woman's body is made for sex. The female orgasm makes the male climax seem a pathetic nonevent by comparison, and is proof that women enjoy sex far more than men do.
In my early and mid-20s, I had a series of liaisons with older women (one of which developed into the marriage I'm in now.
I was then penniless, and had no status and nothing noteworthy to say.
Yet accomplished and intelligent women in their 30s and 40s happily took me to bed.
I knew then that women, like men, are driven by narrow, selfish agendas, be it the desire for security, money, or a healthy young body.
Having sex with those women, I'd watch them lose themselves in the animal intensity of it, becoming oblivious to my presence.
I was nothing. They said they liked me because I was 'sweet' and 'funny', but those qualities would have been meaningless if I wasn't up to scratch in the sack.
I recently had a frank chat with a female friend, and she admitted that women address a man's qualities as though they are scanning his CV with a view to employing him.
Above all, they want a man who turns them on.
Failing that they settle (in descending order) for a man's money, his ability to entertain them, and his willingness to do the dishes.
Her words confirmed my belief that men and women are incapable of a genuine spiritual union.
We're too dissimilar even to understand each other, let alone combine in harmony, so we just grasp what we can from our relationships.
That's why, when a woman does meet a man who flips her lid sexually, she isn't going to let him go. Men and women are held together by biology, not by love.
Love isn't powerful enough to overcome the tremendous contradictions between us. Genetics isn't a recipe for happiness - but then our genes don't exist to make us happy. They exist to keep us alive.
So yes, I believe men and women do exist in different times zones in emotional terms. We find mutual satisfaction in sex, but that aside we must remain strangers.
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