A Dating Story

I've been on quite a few dates since I got back into the "pool" as it were, and since my thesis is at a standstill at the moment (caught up in IRB madness), I figured I'd share one.

Last fall a guy messaged me online, and after exchanging a few messages, we decided to meet for coffee later that week. My first sign that all was not well was when he called me two days before our date. At 12:30am.

I texted him the next day, gently informing him that as a gainfully employed adult I had to be at work at 8am, and therefore am generally asleep by 10:30pm. He apologized saying that he had just been bored and wanted to chat.

Um... Shouldn't you have friends for that?

In any case, I let it slide and didn't think about it much... Until it happened again the next night.

I ignored the missed call, and though I had a few reservations, decided to meet him for our date anyway since I was kind of curious. He showed up, and was even cuter in person than his picture online: tall, broad shoulders, light brown hair flopping adorably in his eyes... Instantly all was forgiven, and we ordered a dessert to share and two coffees.

The conversation started out normally enough with him telling me about his work as some sort of oceanography engineer for an oil company, but took a mildly uncomfortable turn when he kept grabbing my hand. At first I thought it was simply a ploy so that he could monopolize the tiramisu, but realized that wasn’t the case when he set down his fork and encased my hand in both of his. At my questioning look he smiled, chuckled, gazed deep into my eyes and murmured:

"I just wanted to see if you used lotion."

Very Silence of the Lambs, I know.

His smoldering look was something
like this, actually...

I grinned uncomfortably, distracted him with a question about ocean thermodynamics or whatever, and dislodged my hand from his. Things were fine for a few more minutes until he asked me how long I'd been living in town. I gave him my typical canned response: I moved here a decade ago for school, and never left.

His response?

"Holy cow! Ten years ago I was, like, playing little league!"

As if I wasn't already counting down the moments until the date could effectively end (so I didn't end up as a skin cape), this tripled my discomfort level. It turns out that Junior was six years younger than me, which I had never noticed since I'd assumed that the men who messaged me would adhere to my "looking for" guidelines which include a very specific age range entirely composed of men who can remember the eighties.

At this point, we'd been together for all of twenty minutes, and I was dying to get out of there. I all but chugged the rest of my coffee, while he kept the "early-twenties-isms" coming.

"Hey you're a member of my gym too? Wouldn't be awesome to go there right now, and jump into the hot tub?!" 

Um, no. I like my gym and would like to not get banned. It's not a damn resort in Cancun.

"So I just got a really great vaporizer." 

Like for Vick's VapoRub?

"No, like for my weed."  

Oh good god, seriously?

"Do you smoke?"  

No.

"Oh. Well would you want to come over and watch me smoke?" 

...

At this point I pushed back my chair and told him that I really should get going because it looked like someone else might want our table. He agreed, and we walked out into the rainy night.

"Hey, I'll walk you to your car!" Junior volunteered. I told him that he REALLY didn't have to, since I'd walked from my apartment instead of driving, and didn't want him to know where I live. "Well then, let's take a walk," he said.

I grudgingly agreed, wondering how I could extract myself from the situation. It was then that Junior started putting the moves on in earnest: he tried to take my hand, and I conveniently switched the umbrella from my right to my left hand. He tried to lean in closer to me, and I “accidentally” poked him in the head with umbrella spokes. At one point, I looked up from puddle jumping and playing umbrella defense to notice that instead of walking towards highly populated shopping areas, we were walking towards dark residential streets.

It puts the lotion on the skin...

I quickly noted that there was nothing to see in the direction we were walking, and that we should probably turn around.

Giving me what the freshman girls at his university probably thought were his "smoldering" eyes, Junior turned on the charm. "We could go explore one of the dark streets over that way," he suggested.

I feigned regret, told him I had a ton of homework to do, and hauled ass back to the coffee shop where I had to pry myself out of an unnecessarily long goodbye hug before zig-zagging my way home so I could be sure he wasn't following me.

Lessons learned:

• Don't trust guys to adhere to the standards you put forth; ALWAYS check age, location etc. before agreeing to anything. If I'd paid attention to his profile (which listed his age, mentioned that he was 420 friendly, and had a picture of him with a bong) more than his hazel eyes, I would never have wasted an evening feeling simultaneously old and creeped out.
• When you're ready to leave, just leave. I should've ended the night WAY sooner instead of pretending to be interested so I didn’t hurt his feelings.
• Never give out your full name on a first date. He tried to friend me on Facebook the next day. Um, not so much.