It’s Always Sunny In Medford #6

Today, we venture into a place usually reserved for self-loathing Facebook status messages. Look out world, I’m talking about dating!

Anybody who has known me for any period of time knows that I have been neither fortunate nor successful in my dealings with the opposite sex as far as relationships go. I didn’t go on a date until Freshman year of college when, after leading me on for a matter of months, the other party informed me that it had all been a big “mistake” and was sorry for the inconvenience. Whoops! The next few years at school were quiet on that front. I did my thing: joined a few clubs, played video games, drank with buddies, and so on, but somehow the whole college love thing always eluded me. Now I’m done with school and sit where I was when I began. Well, so much for all of that.

Even before I was finished with school I had decided to give different things a try, one of them being the exciting fast paced world of online dating (provided it didn’t cost money and did not include eHarmony – those fascists rejected me). “Lots of people do it!” I was told. There was no longer a stigma attached to it and, I imagine for most people, there still isn’t. Now, before you think this is going to be a bitter or self-pitying piece about the life of a single dude: it’s not. The tale I’m about to tell is one particularly absurd chapter of a voyage that, while so far unsuccessful, has not concluded yet (Man, that sounded fucking deep). It should be a caution, but it should also serve to amuse, because honestly it amuses me after the fact. And if you can’t laugh at yourself, what can you laugh at, right? Um, right?

Onto our tale: early this year I had set up a profile with a free dating site (which will remain nameless – everything is nameless here). After sending out a few messages without any responses I was discouraged and wasn’t as active, but after a couple of weeks I received a message from an interested party – “You’re really 6’10? That’s hot!” Whoa, a girl likes me (albeit for a reason I’m not crazy about)! That doesn’t happen too often! We began chatting it up and I soon got a certain feeling that something was “off”. I can’t describe this in any better detail – the conversations were bizarre. Topics ranged from intimate questions about my personal life to how hot I was, to ex-boyfriends and what assholes they were, all with this weird internet-stalker tone to it. I wish I could be more specific, but I purged those logs from my brain long ago. There was little common ground or interesting discourse. Actually, there was none. There were just a lot of weird instant messenger come-ons and weird question and answer sessions.

Okay, so that probably was not a good sign. If there’s one awful talent I have is that when I have a bad feeling about something, it tends to be proven right. It’s a curse. I had a bad feeling about the potential for dating this girl after a few conversations. My friends encouraged me to try it, however, and they were right – how bad could it be? Plus, God knows I don’t go on many dates, and the attention was at least a bit flattering. In retrospect, if this is the only attention I get…

I digress. We made a date for a day when I didn’t have class at a local Chinese restaurant. What did I have to lose other than a few hours, right?

Well, friends, imagine for a moment that you went on a date. Now imagine that everything that person could conceivably say or do would in some way offend you or run counter to your values. Imagine scripting such an encounter. That is what I am about to do, with the caveat that this is not scripted. This is what I actually experienced.

I pulled in with my vehicle at the time, a crappy old barely working minivan. Her car cost about 100 times what mine did – I only mention this because her car will come up again. We got out and said hello and went in for our table. She was not unattractive, but there was definitely too much perfume. Fine, whatever – I too had my Axe phase. By the way, I just wanted to say that putting Axe on does not make girls want to take bites out of your chocolate-coated ass. That is a lie.

I had dressed nicely for the occasion of course and was surprisingly relaxed – it might have been my low expectations. Little did I know what I was in for.

We sat down to eat and immediately the topic became our respective life goals. I said something about wanting to maybe work in government or somewhere I could help people, with my master’s degree. I told her of my interest in the environment and how I would not mind working to protect it in the future, which led to this interesting comment:

“You know, I don’t see what the big deal is. My car eats lots of gas, but I’ll be dead before it’s a problem, so why should I care? I want to drive it around as much as I want!”

An extremely well thought-out and not at all shortsighted stance! I imagine if humankind had always gone with the “I’ll be dead so it won’t be my problem” stance on the issues I’d be chipping this article into the side of a rock somewhere in Southern Europe.

She had just transferred to a local school and was living by herself (all paid by her parents) and was pursuing two degrees. For what purpose, I asked?

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really want to do anything. I just want to get degrees so I can say I have them.”

Um, okay! She had recently transferred from a school in the city: “I hate the city, I hate the people there. They are so rude. I will never go back there, ever” she told me gleefully.

New York City is my favorite place on Earth. Obviously, we were off to a good start! Why didn’t she transfer to Stony Brook?

“They rejected me once. I will NEVER go there.”

I’m sure Stony Brook University and its millions of dollars in tuition money are stung by this snub to this day. Clearly, admissions are a matter to be taken personally.

It was clear she had few friends – she had abandoned her old friends for “fucking her over”. Seemed a bit strange to me, but in light of what we were about to talk about, it makes more sense. Her only friends were, by her own account, pretty big losers who hung out at a pet store. Then we started talking about her exes, and this is when her eyes became the crazy eyes!

I estimate at least half the time we were together was spent regaling me with stories about her ex, in particular one – her stories made it clear that he was a balding “momma’s boy”. She spared no expense in slamming him for that seemed like forever. She also made it clear she trusted nobody and proudly told me how she spied on her boyfriends to catch them lying (and succeeded once, to her delight). Like, literally spying. I could now see why she had few friends.

Admittedly, I’m kind of an idiot with this whole dating thing, but I imagine one thing you don’t want to make clear right away is your bitterness towards your exes, or the fact that you used to spy on them because you don’t trust anybody. Holy shit! Anybody who spies on me is unlikely to find anything interesting – probably me sitting on my ass with a beer watching a hockey game – but still, I don’t want to envision being the target of some elaborate surveillance sting or amateur PI work by my girlfriend. God forbid I tuned in to watch women’s volleyball on ESPN 2 for a couple of minutes; I’d be in deep shit.

It became clear that she had little regard for a number of things I felt strongly about, didn’t have much of a plan or a goal and was a bit, well, crazy. Towards the end of the date the conversation sort of died, largely as a result of my attempt to digest everything I had just heard, but one thing we had in common came up – we were both Mets fans! Unfortunately, this also was the coup de grace on an astonishingly bad afternoon. She had one last opinion in store:

“I hate guys that wear David Wright jerseys. They’re so gay!”

I swear to God I could not have made this shit up if I tried. She went on that tangent for a while, at which point I began shooting blood out of my eyes. The date was then mercifully finished when the EMS came to take me away. No, actually, that’s only what I sort of wish had happened.

What actually happened is that I stared at her in horror, then attempted to explain that I had followed Wright through the minors and was at his first major league game, and that he had become my favorite player in a short time – one whose jersey I owned. For what it’s worth, she actually looked a bit embarrassed by this – I had let the other stuff slide without so much as an argument, but not this time.

Now, there was a lot of insanity during this date, but mockery of one’s admiration for the greatest third baseman in Mets history is really the hilariously over-the-top capper on all of it. If this date was a firebombing, then this last part would’ve been the equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on the ashes for the hell of it. It was that bad.

We just sort of sat there quietly making small talk for awhile after that, well after we had finished eating (at least the food was good). We had been there two and a half hours and it seemed she had no interest in being the one to call it a day, when I had to think of possibly the shittiest escape line from any bad date ever:

“Well, I think I should start to get going. I need to go, uh, collaborate with a friend on a blog we’re working on.”

To be fair, this isn’t totally false – at the time a friend and I were collaborating on a short lived political blog – but holy crap, have you ever heard anything worse than that? In my defense, I was desperate at this point to leave. Really desperate. And it worked. She said something about wanting to go hang out with her friends; we paid the check, and went on our way.

Later that day, I helped a friend try to physically move her car (which was not starting) up her dirt driveway. It took two hours and was not nearly as painful or tedious as the two and a half hours in that restaurant. I then went home and stared at the ceiling for a while before falling asleep, pondering how I could have such fantastic good fortune once more.

Needless to say, I haven’t talked to this girl since the encounter. It serves as a caution to meeting someone without having some filter beforehand, although I’m sure everyone has their own horror stories they could share. Mine is no worse than many – it’s just something I can laugh at now. While things haven’t really worked out with any of this dating business yet, that’s not really a story anybody would care to read about, at least not until it has a proper ending.

And hey, at least I found a decent Chinese restaurant out of all of that.