On A Scale of One To Mad
My Very Worst Date was with I guy I had been with for a few months. Let’s call him Andrew. We met through training seminars that we had regularly at work, and although he lived a few hours away, we got to see each other at weekends and we chatted on the phone a lot.
I bought a ticket to a concert in his city that I was dying to go see. I asked if he wanted to go, but he had his friend’s birthday dinner that night and besides, he wasn’t familiar with the band. We agreed that I’d stay at his place for the weekend and on the we’d get together after the concert.
The weekend came and the concert was amazing, then I sent him a text to let him know I’d meet him at the restaurant. Timing was perfect as they were just finishing up dinner and getting ready to leave. Some of the people at this dinner were also good friends of mine so we all decided to go out. Andrew was really desperate to go to a gay bar. The two of us were the only gay people in the group, and I myself am not really a fan, but it was the closest place so we followed him.
The bar turned out to be quite nice. I was catching up with the people who were at the dinner when I saw Andrew talking to another guy, that we’ll call Bruce, as if they were old friends. I went up to Andrew and he introduced me to him. Bruce was nice and we chatted for a little while, but I still didn’t really know who this guy was. Andrew took me to one side and said “Look how flirtatious he’s being! I think he likes me!” I laughed a little and said he should tell Bruce who I was.
I started to feel a little uncomfortable about how much time Bruce was spending with Andrew, but I trusted him and continued chatting with our friends. Andrew storms over to me and says, in front of everyone, “So, on a scale of one to mad, how mad would you be if I kissed him?” I would have thought my death-glare would have given him some idea, but he repeatedly asked me and the opinion of my friends. The friends, understandably weirded out, all left and I was left watching the guy I had came in with all over someone else. It soon became clear that Bruce was in fact a total stranger whom he had just met.
Bear in mind, I was staying at his place and had nowhere else to go. I asked for Andrew’s key so I could go to bed. Andrew threw a hissy fit about how he wanted to stay and how he wanted me to be there at the club. He thought it was really funny and cute that I was mad and again, kept asking how mad I was “on a scale of one to mad.” I told him that I wasn’t going to stay, so I took his key and went back to his place to sleep. When I woke up I started to gather my stuff together to get the hell out of Andrew’s house. He woke up beside me and asked why I was leaving. I told him he must have been really stupid if he didn’t know why and I had to spell it out to him. “Oh… that…,” he said.
He told me nothing happened once I left and just stood around alone for a while, and that he felt so bad afterwards and blamed it on the alcohol. I was still pretty mad, but I said I would take some time to think about us. Taking this as forgiveness (?), he did an about-turn and said “Well, actually, I went back into the club to find Bruce to make out with him.”
The saddest part is he genuinely thought I would have been OK with this and he believed he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t understand how I felt humiliated in front of our friends, how much of a scene he caused or how he ruined my and other people’s evenings.
Unfortunately, we had to see each other repeatedly because of our mutual friends as well as work. He made me feel uncomfortable when we did meet because he would ask my friends why I was being off with him and putting everybody in an awkward position. I began to realise how lucky I was because he became very emotionally unstable at times and developed a real Jekyll/Hyde personality.
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. I suffered months of having him undermine me, but the last straw was when I heard him brag about his big promotion with double the salary. I built up a dossier of all the misdeeds he told me about while we were together and ones that I discovered afterwards, and sent it to his superiors.
Let’s just say he has a lot more free time now to spend hanging round bars.
