Love and Other Tragedies, 2019, Part II

Perhaps because of my recent experience sitting in a restaurant by myself, I was more than a bit dubious about the quality of men on these dating apps.

But at this stage in my life, dating has become more of a way to amuse myself than an actual hope-filled venture into romance. And I'm okay with that.

I swiped right on Scott's Bumble profile for the sake of nostalgia. We'd attended Wheaton at the same time, although our paths never crossed.

I hold a certain fondness for Wheaton, although I find some aspects of it disturbing now. On one hand, I met some strong, incredible women there, and I got to transcribe Madeline L’Engle’s lectures while working in Special Collections at the library. On the other hand, this was a college that wouldn't allow dancing because it could cause people to "stumble" into wickedness. But for real tho.

So when I swiped right on Scott's profile, it was from my gut, while my brain yelled, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, he's probably one of those dudes who think women in bikinis at the beach are harlots or whatever!!"

When we matched and set up a brunch date, the closest I could get to explaining this impulse to Rosa and Charlotte was: "It's a common culture. You have to explain less about your own crazy background and shit when someone else has had similar experiences."

I decided recently that I need to stop talking politics on dates... I get all wound up, and to what avail? So maybe that was the reason my brain seized upon the ONE other topic you are also not supposed to talk about on dates: religion.

Yeah, I don't know what's wrong with me either.

Scott informed me that not only had he gone to Wheaton, but then he'd gone on to seminary.

WTF!?!

HAVE I NOT PERMANENTLY SWORN OFF ALL MEN WHO GRADUATED FROM SEMINARIES!?!?!? Four of them was my limit!!!!!

But I was already drinking a bloody mary by this time, so it was too late for me to bail. There was nothing for it but to talk about religion.

Turns out we not only went to the same Christian college but also to the same church here... before I was graciously invited to step down from the Welcome Team because I was experiencing doubts about the existence of God. After that, I quit going altogether.

At this point, I started crying. Yes, you read that right. I cannot talk about God, faith, or my apparent non-chosen status without bursting into tears, and what better place for that than a first date?

I don't think Scott knew what to do, and can you blame him? So I wiped my tears away. With my hand that had just touched the jalapeno from my drink.

Scott was in the middle of a story when I ran, screaming, to the powder room in back of the restaurant.

The more I scrubbed my eyes, the worse they burned...probably because I had not bothered to wash my hands with soap before I started dousing my face.

I glanced in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, my nose was running from the heat, and now I had giant circles of mascara all around my sockets. I basically looked like this:

I like to keep things classy.

Resigned to the fact that I would probably never recover from this, I headed back to the table. It was hard to look my date in the eye after that, mostly because I was half-blind, but I tried.

Scott was very compassionate. To make me feel better, he told me about the time he touched a jalapeno at a restaurant and then forgot about it and went to use the men's room...which was a mistake.

That did the trick. I figured, no matter how dumb I look or feel, at least I don't have a flaming dick.

Love and Other Tragedies, 2019, Part I

Ma thinks I'm elitist and that what I really need is to give some nice, uneducated, blue-collar frogs a chance. I can't help it. All the misspellings and camouflage and freshly-killed deer in their profile pictures make me shudder.

I'm really not trying to be elitist! It's just -- I read at least 50 books a year and love learning/discussing new things. It just seems very unlikely that someone with a high school education is going to want to discuss Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's books with me. 

That's just about the only reason I agreed to go out with Bruce. When I showed his picture to Rosa and Charlotte, they said he looked smarmy... slicked back hair, arrogant stance, not looking at the camera.

"He went to college and spells all his words correctly. Plus, this says he's a money-laundering analyst. That sounds like an interesting job. It's just dinner."

The one thing that worried me: the app only gives you 200 characters to describe yourself and what you're looking for, and Bruce had used some of his for shameless self-promotion. "Catch me on episode X of the Netflix series, Dirty Money!"

That sounded a bit egotistical to me, but maybe I was reading it incorrectly. Either way, the fact remained that he spelled all his words right and didn't include any pictures of himself holding up an animal carcass, which was a WIN.

Everything was fine until the night before our date, when he sent me this message: "Good evening, Elle! I'm looking forward to our date tomorrow. In case you'd like to know more about what I do for a living, here's a link to my show, Dirty Money."

I was suuuuuuuuper repulsed. Was this dude even for real? He was sending me a link to watch him on TV in preparation for our date?!

I mean, Rosa, Charlotte, and I had already watched the episode because, come on, it's just common sense to Google someone nowadays to make sure they're legit...Otherwise you could end up dismembered in the back of a van in Idaho or something.

But still.

"DON'T GO OUT WITH HIM!" Jared told me. "What a douche!"

"I have to, I already agreed to dinner. It would be really rude to cancel now."

It turns out that while I'm kind of a hard-ass in most aspects of life, I'm a real pushover in dating. Plus, I'm practicing being tactful and gracious now, just as a general Life Skill.

So I responded to Bruce: "Perhaps we can just do things the old-fashioned way and you can tell me about your job over dinner tomorrow night :-)" 

See that? Gracious as shit. That's the new me.

In preparation for our date, I went back to look at Bruce's profile, which it turns out, he had updated. Now, in addition to telling women to please check him out on Dirty Money, he had actually changed one of his 6 allotted pictures to a picture he took of himself, on TV. 

It was captioned: "Screen grab from my appearance on the Netflix show Dirty Money"

Blog world, I just could. not. even.

I don't care how many words you spell correctly, 3 attempts to make me watch you on TV means you are too self-aggrandizing for me, cool job be damned.

I mean, I still showed up for the date, because like I said, I'm a pushover. I can't stand the thought of someone waiting at a restaurant for ME to show up!

But he never came, sooooo... It's one for the books.

There are definitely worse things than being single. And one of those things would be having to bolster some prick's ego for the rest of my life.

Love and Other Tragedies

(2013-2014)

A terrible thing happened one day: my therapist told me to get a life, to go on dates. I took umbrage with this. Did he not think I had been doing that very thing for the last decade while my friends snapped baby pictures and coached Little League games?

My friend Lena is the worst of these offenders. I was in her wedding to Deke 10 years ago, and she was the most beautiful bride I'd ever seen. I remember looking longingly at her in her big, white dress and thinking, "She looks like a snowman."

Lena, Deke, and their 3 offspring live in a 4-bedroom house in the suburbs now. She is a Juice Plus consultant which means that she has a fun hobby while she tends to the more serious business of raising children. Lena posts many adorable pictures on the internet. Not only do I have to look at her perfect blond brood, but now, thanks to Juice Plus, I also have to face regular images of the beautiful "Tower Garden" she's growing to teach the children healthy living. Even the produce is mocking me! It knows I can't grow beans.

I myself live in a one-bedroom apartment with my cat, Mocha, who my friend Nikki assures me is getting fatter every day. I cannot help this. I feed her 1/3 cup of cat food in the morning and another 1/3 in the evening. It is not my fault if she has a slow metabolism, although I spend considerable time worrying that I'm not exercising her enough. How do you exercise a cat? I don't know.

Aside from gaining weight, Mocha is also excellent at leaving tufts of fur everywhere. I tried using a Furminator to groom her, but that ended with both of us mad and even more fur on the floor. Eventually I gave up and took her to a groomer. I paid $70 to have my cat groomed. I'm becoming *that* person, the one who spends more money getting her cat groomed than herself. Maybe that is why the psychologist thinks I need to start dating more.

The idea of dating exhausts me. Gone is my youthful exuberance in getting dressed up and going out with different men every week in an effort to find the "right" one. Now the thought of wasting 2 hours on someone boring or pompous or just okay is merely annoying. Nonetheless, I was commanded to go on dates, so on dates I was determined to go.

Online dating has many pitfalls but perhaps the worst is that there is only so much you can tell about a person from a few pictures and a short profile. That is how I ended up on a date last week with a guy who was... intellectually disabled.

"Couldn't you tell!?" cried Nikki, when I relayed this information later. Nikki can afford to be judgy because she has been married for 8 years. Also, she has 7 cats and a big house. People like her with all their houses and cats make me sick.

"No, I could not tell," I responded defensively. "His emails just sounded like, 'Hi, E. What did you do today? I went running and then ate tacos.' And you know, some men just can't write."

"So what did you do when you realized he was slow?" Nikki asked, bemused.

I will tell you what I did. I sat there for an hour and a half and talked to him, while the guy at the next barstool over looked on in wonder. You can't just be rude and leave because someone is a bit handicapped. Think of his feelings!

That experience put me off of dating for almost a whole week. Then another man asked me out and I knew there was nothing for it but to get back in the saddle. Sigh. This time, I was determined to stay positive and try my best to be charming. Watch out, World. Also, I figured that since he was a doctor and had quoted an actual poet, it was unlikely that he, too, would be mentally handicapped.

So I put on my highest heels and ventured into a wine bar in the Central West End. It started out all right, I suppose. He told me all the languages he knew -- Italian, German, French, English, and Latin-- and then I had to guess where his second home was, based on his accent. Then he told me lots of stories about his family's yacht. You wouldn't think one family could have an hour's worth of yachting stories, but they did. Then he moved on to their vacation home in the French Riviera and all the 5-star hotels he'd stayed in during his motorcycle trip through the Swiss Alps. He tried to teach me about the Venetian carnival season, but my eyes glazed over somewhere around, "After I left my apartment in Monaco..." 

In my head, I calculated that if I had talked for 2 minutes about international education, then he had been talking for 1 hour and 53 minutes. Could anyone think himself that interesting? Even if he did own lots of homes in Europe?

When he took a breath -- and believe me, I'd been watching for it for 20 minutes -- I said I was having a bad reaction to my anti-fungal medication and bolted for the door.

There has to be an easier way to "Get a life! Go on dates!" and yet I know there isn’t. If there were, certainly I would have found it by now. So I keep going on these dates, convinced that for every dozen bad ones, there is one good one. I told my single friend Casey this when we were at the art museum pretending to be classy. Casey created a summer schedule for us that includes salsa dancing, wine tasting, evenings of jazz, and several cultural festivals. This is all courtesy of her belief that the more we expose ourselves to crowds of tasteful people, the more likely it will be that single, straight males will notice us. You have to admire her tenacity and vision.

When I told Casey my theory about one good date out of a dozen, she wanted to know what actual research this was based on. A Harvard study? A Gallup pole?

“It’s based on me going out on actual bad dates,” I explained.

Casey, to her credit, thought that this source of research was even better than the professional, scientific kind.

See, that's why you cultivate friendships over relationships.