Bids

Offers of love

Apr 04, 2026

0:00

-9:32

The cowboy seated at the table at my right elbow has asked the waitress to smell his cologne and rate it on a scale of one to ten. This is a bid for love.

We are in the Victorian Café, voted Bend’s Best Breakfast so many times you’d think the many other great breakfast joints in town would just give up the race. The menu is varied and satisfying, with a massive and slightly terrifying 24-ounce Proud Mary bloody Mary made with pickle or pepper vodka, a mouthwatering tomato mix, and accompanied by not just celery but also by olives, pickle and pepperoncini, with a shrimp, bacon, sausage, and cheese skewer so you get protein with your booze. (For the fainter of heart there are mimosas, mid-mosas, or hell-it’s-Sunday-let’s-just-go-for-it 16-ounce man-mosas.)

*The Proud Mary bloody Mary at the Victorian Cafe*

The Vic has a small and crowded seating plan with creaky floors that allow me, hunched over my journal, to eavesdrop shamelessly, which is one of my favorite pastimes. It’s a Tuesday after a dental cleaning and the smells of bacon, potatoes, and rosemary are an ache in nose and tongue as I wait for my Green Hornet omelet (extra asparagus, light jalapeños.) I’m flying solo and have been writing intently about how love and horses might be wrapped together for a book, when I hear the love bid next to me. My ears swivel like a Doberman’s toward the next table.

The cowboy confesses to getting a Versace sample at the Fred Meyer grocery store. His name is Cody. The restaurant is empty, save for our two tables and the servers, all female, have nudged the music up. It’s slow, but it’s clear they are not immune to the allure of men who set their cowboy hats neatly on empty chairs next to them; men who have white grins in tanned faces and thick forearms encircled by rolled-up plaid sleeves. In turn, each woman comes to the table and—gravely or with laughter—smells the side of his neck.

While I’ve scribbled my latest thoughts about love and horses as I wait for my food, Cody and his buddy have talked about Cody’s 16-year-old daughter wanting to have sex, and would it be possible to prosecute her 18-year-old boyfriend for statutory rape. They have discussed their warehouse jobs. They have worried over their horses and steers, all wallowing in heavy mud in the aftermath of a massive storm that squashed Central Oregon under feet of snow and then melted far too quickly.

The men, perhaps in their mid-thirties, clearly are good friends and talk easily with each other. I enjoy my shameless aural hovering because I’m captured by and interested in love and it’s rare for me to catch men engaged in bids for love.

Love bids are super-interesting. The idea comes from the book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman and Jan Silver. Bids for love are ways people seek attention or affirmation from one another. Love bids are often the small stuff of interactions. They are verbal or nonverbal gestures like a smile, a question, or a touch, and are ways we reach out to each other. Gottman says that turning towards, rather than away from, a love bid is crucial for maintaining a healthy relationship.

I notice that at the table next to me, each conversational bid is met with acceptance or challenge but it is indeed met, that is, when one man brings up a topic of conversation the other man receives it with alacrity and responds with words, or laughter, or head-shaking, or an expressive moan of commiseration. I am fascinated, because—well, because men.

Food arrives and I lose the thread as I immerse myself in Gruyere cheese, spinach, and avocado interspersed with perfectly creamy and crisp fried potatoes. And coffee, hot and deliciously bitter.

Then the song “Take My Breath Away” comes on the overhead speakers. The first server, the one Cody made his original love bid to, comes back to the cowboy’s table. She stands with a slung hip and says, with a perfectly straight face: “Hey Cody, we’ve decided this is the right song for your cologne.”

There is a hesitation in the room. I can feel confusion radiating from the guy beside me. The three other wait staff, perched at the bar and wrapping silverware in linen, watch intently. Cody clearly is wrestling. Does this mean his cologne a good thing? Or is it bad? And then both men break into howls of laughter and the women all crack up and I’m grinning and trying really hard to remain as flylike on the wall of this interaction as possible, and what is truly delicious in this moment is that it could be both. I am sitting approximately two and a half feet away from Cody’s back and I can smell that cologne like it is on my own skin. But I have a sensitive nose.

Still giggling, I turn back to my breakfast and to my concerns for a book that is just starting to insist she IS a book, thank you very much. She has started telling me: I really want you to pay attention to me and stop pretending I’m just a thing you do because your husband asked you to write down your stories about horses. She is clearly making a bid for my love and my complete attention, and I’m nervous to accept her bid.

I finish my excellent breakfast. I tune out the cowboys and the wait staff and the music. I write in my journal: Horses make bids for love all the time.

Then I am lost, thinking about how an equine nicker is an emotional sucker punch, clearly designed to call you to come to them, pay attention to them. Huh-huh-huh, goes the low, vibrating, and yearning call for connection.

I think about how a horse lifts its wide nostrils to my small ones and breathes me in, clearly tasting me as I then taste their herb-and-toast exhales and how that is a bid for me to attend.

I think about how a horse says I don’t understand and the ways I can respond. Do I say, “Yes, I see that, let me help you” or do I say, “DO IT ANYWAY” or do I simply ignore the way the horse has reached out, asking for my attention?

A lunchtime crowd abruptly arrive at the Vic and in minutes all the tables are full. I rise, pull on my coat, gather up fountain pen and black journal. Cody’s buddy holds open the door for me and a white-haired couple just coming in. I step back as they enter.

“I want one of those bloody Marys,” the woman says over her shoulder to her husband, who has a stern face. “Will you split one with me?”

I lift into a moment of hope and fear for them. Will he respond to her bid for love or ignore her or squash her?

Cody’s buddy smiles down at tiny woman. “Well, if he doesn’t split one with you, I sure will!”

Her face lifts to his in a sudden and beautiful grin that creases wrinkles into the silk of her skin.

Her husband steps through the door and says in a surprising basso, “Those things are a meal.”

All three humans laugh as he takes his wife’s elbow and eases her gently forward. As they pass me he says, “Sure, we can split one.”

I laugh too, relieved at witnessing the love and eager to get to the barn and notice the next bid for love from the next horse.

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TO THE HORSE!