Facebook
TwitterThis is a little unorthodox for this blog, but I’ve been meaning to do it for a while.
For an indefinite amount of time, I will be relating bad dates.
I’ve already done one of these (see “Know Their Obsessions Before You Try to Get Them Into Bed”), and on a particularly bad date a few years ago, I decided I should collect them. Given my usual scheduling issues, I’m ahead of the game.
Why should you read these? Because despite years of slowly improving social awkwardness, I have been on many dates. Several hundred. Far more than I can remember. Far more than anybody should have to go through to settle down and get married. Now the number of people I’ve had sex with is considerably lower, and even though it’s higher than average, the ratio of dates over sex is alarming. What I have to offer is a wide selection of bad choices and things not to do. Imagine dating 100 people in succession and not having sex with any of them. For me, learning to date has been like learning to play chess blindfolded and feeling out the positions of pieces while the clock runs. You should also read these because you’re a human, and humans love reading about other people’s hilarious failures and horrendous character flaws.
The bad dates weren’t always my fault. I was responsible for getting into the date, and sometimes for continuing it, for the usual reasons, when I should have known better. Sometimes I went on several dates in a row before the really nasty one happened, and I was unfairly blindsided. More often, however, I did something stupid.
So if you read these, you can, in the future, not do one of the hundreds of stupid things I’ve done to screw up a date.
The dates will follow in no particular order, besides the one I obsess about secretly that will have a solid narrative flow while seeming to be off the cuff.
Without further ado:
Bad Movie Choice
This whole situation was pretty stupid long before the final failure.
Mistake 1: She came to me, and she was much, much hotter than I was (or am, for that matter). I’m attractive enough, but enough means I can date interesting and super hot girls if I approach them with my best game. Super hot girls tend not to approach me, because I am never the hottest ticket in the bar. Devastatingly charming, friendly, funny, witty, talented, and smooth, of course, but I am not the hot guy. I’m the cute guy. Cute guys have to work for it. This may be indicative of some deep seated cultural self-loathing, but prove me wrong. Strange, super hot girls come to me when they need something.
Mistake 2: I had helped her paint her room on date 2 or 3. If you’re a dude, you know why this is stupid. If you’re a girl, just remember the dude is only doing this because you’re hotter than him and he wants to have sex with you.
Mistake 3: I paid for expensive dinners on dates 3, 4, 5, and 6, which created the impression I had more money than I did, and also created the accurate, but unutterable, implication that she better fucking put out soon if she wanted to keep the cash flowing.
Mistake 4: We had nothing in common. Really. People toss this phrase around like a bad salad, but this time it was true. In fact, I’ll be honest, we had one thing in common: we were both white. That was about it. We didn’t care about the same things, want to do the same things, like to talk about the same things, come from similar places, live similar lives, or, and this was important, have the same expectations for our dating lives.
Mistake 5: It was date 10 and she hadn’t put out. As pointed out in mistake 3, I should have folded at date 7.
Basically, she was a nice enough former go-go dancer and model who had been emotionally traumatized by her ex (and more appropriately super hot) boyfriend, and she wanted a nice, cute enough boy to daddy her sugar and be nice to her.
I was a poor choice for this, because I really only had pleasant uncle Earl sugar in the bank, and I just wanted to get laid. Also, I was seeing three other people at the time, had just come out of a frustrating relationship, and was generally trying to be as much of a whore as I could muster while working full time. Why stay past date 6? Or 4, for that matter? Well, she was fun. Really fun. The kind of fun I for which I was getting a touch old, but didn’t want to admit to it. So I didn’t do the coke in the bathroom but I danced until 4 a.m. and made a .2 BAC multiple nights with her, and that made me think I felt young, even if it probably aged me two years. And did I mention how hot she was? Like really, super hot, dancer, ex-goth, and I could pretend to respect her more than I did because she had blown off her rich friends because she realized they were shallow. I tried to ignore that in her whole painting career, she only painted herself. Narcissism doesn’t necessarily equate to shallowness, right? Right?
Really, really hot.
Anyway, I’ve spent the night at her place on a couple of dates, she’s spent the night at mine at least once, and each time, I’m sure that night’s the night. So we’ve been wanting to see this movie for a while, she likes scary movies, and I heard somewhere that girls can confuse fear with sexual arousal, and I expect this won’t really be that bad a flick and we can finally get down to business.
Audition is the worst date movie of all time. I should have listened to Rob Zombie when he said it was the most disturbing thing he’d ever seen. It might be the most disturbing fucking thing I’ve ever thought about. It makes you fear the nature of your own mind, knowing that some other, presumably similar neurological mass thought of it. It’s like watching Fellini’s evil twin take PCP and murder Harry and Sally. You want to curl up and hide but there’s no way to block out the images in your mind, and you definitely don’t want to have sex. You don’t want to be touched. You just sit, shell-shocked, and try to think of puppies, but the puppies keep getting tied up and mutilated in your head, and you hope sleep will come soon because otherwise you’ll just have to kill yourself.
Now, let me take a moment to describe her bedroom. It’s in the basement. The walls are painted red, something for which I take some responsibility. You can’t tell if it’s day or night. With the door shut and the lights off, it’s inky, total black.
This is what I woke up to, alone, at four in the morning, visions of amputations dancing in my head. I felt around. Nothing. I stumbled for a light. I went outside the room and found her sleeping on the couch. I asked what was wrong. She said I kicked her off the bed. I assumed this was just some night time thrashing and she was exaggerating, so I went to carry her back to the bed and continue to pretend to be a sensitive guy. She said, “no, don’t touch me,” and I decided enough was enough. I put on my clothes and left.
I later discovered I had, in my sleep, attempted to get extra fresh with her, and she fended me off, at which point I forcibly shoved her off the bed. I have no recollection of this. I’m sure I’ve done worse things in my sleep, but I shudder to think what I was dreaming about that make me sexually aggressive after watching that movie.
I probably could have apologized and recovered the situation, but that wouldn’t have done anybody any good, since she thought I was something I wasn’t and I wanted something she wouldn’t give me, so I figured it was easier for her just to think I was even more of an asshole than I was, and that was the end of it.
Lesson: Do not watch Japanese horror movies on dates. Buy American.
