I met this guy through a dating site and in his profile it said he was 35 (at the time I was 25).  I had just moved to the city and was excited to meet people.  He was from Australia and he looked very attractive in his photos.  We emailed each other for about a week before deciding to meet up.  He worked in fashion and it was a busy time for them so we just decided on coffee.

He told me to meet him in front of his job. As I walked up I saw a guy there.  He looked vaguely familiar.  I thought this cannot be him.  This guy had a head FULL of grey hair; the guy online had dark hair.  Ok, whatever, it’s distinguished like Anderson Cooper.  I got closer and, wow, this guy was ABSOLUTELY NOT 35.  His profile photos were at least ten years old if they were a day.  He saw me and smiled -  I then had a flashback and noticed something else: he was not smiling in any of his photos and now I knew why.  Eek.  I thought to myself, well, it’s just coffee and he may be a great guy.  This is  a new me and I’m not going to be shallow about this.

So we got coffee and were having pretty great conversation.  I was thinking, I can look past this, I really can.  Then he reached over, took my hand, and started talking about marriage.  Huh?  He wasn’t specifically talking marriage to me, just marriage in general – but on a first date it’s still a weird subject.  I wanted to get up and leave but, damn my good manners, I stayed.  Thank goodness this was only coffee and he was on a break from work, which he had to get back to.

We talked a few more times on the phone; he still kept bringing up marriage and trying to get me to come to his house.  It slowly started to dawn on me that he probably needed a green card.

I was 19 when I met R. R was cute, he seemed knowledgeable, and liked the same things I did. We started seeing each other, usually going to diners after I got off work at 2 A.M.

The week after we started seeing each other was when it all went downhill.

My friends and I were partying at a hotel (about 30 minutes from my house) for a concert. I kept texting R, to see if he was coming. He was being vague and flaky, saying he had something else to do.

When he came to the hotel, very late, he kept trying to be the center of attention. He grabbed my friend, who was in the Air Force, and grabbed him in a headlock. My Air Force friend managed to get out of it without hurting R, but things just kept getting weirder.

R asked to come up to my room with me, which I had opened to two other friends while the drummer of the band was downstairs hanging out with everyone. I agreed after he kept pressing, and we went upstairs. Now, I was drunk at this point, admittedly. I had some Jell-O shots, among other things that everyone had brought. R told me he wanted me to go home with him, that he wanted to go all the way. I was hesitant – I didn’t want to leave the festivities – but I agreed. I will state again that I was fairly drunk, and in my PAJAMAS!

So, the next morning I woke up in his bedroom. There were women’s clothing, pill bottles with a woman’s name, and jewelry boxes all over the place. When I finally woke up enough, I demanded to know what was going on. He explained to me that I met him at an awkward time, and that he was engaged to be married and she had just given birth to his child the day before he met me! The reason he could come out late to eat with me was because she was in the hospital, dying. She had less than a 50% chance of surviving, and that he would be all alone raising his newborn son. So, instead of being with HER while she was dying, he was out partying with me.

I pretended to be sympathetic so he would drive me back to the hotel, which he did. I got back to the hotel, and with my friends backing me up, I told him that under no circumstances did I want to continue seeing him. He left, and I went to change and wait for the hotel shuttle for the venue.

We got to the show, and guess who was there – waiting to “surprise me?” I reiterated that I didn’t want to see him. He claimed that he would win me back, no matter what.

So as I was standing with my friends, enjoying one of my favorite bands, R came up to us, beer in hand. He took the beer cap – I have NO idea how he got it at the venue, since they took the caps off of all their beers – in his palm. He then grabbed my arm, with the beer cap in his palm, trying to force me to come with him – using the beer cap to dig into my skin, leaving a scratch and an imprint. My friend C (Air Force friend) grabbed my other arm and led me away, telling R to buzz off. This just enraged R and he kept following me and C. C has ZERO interest in me, but R kept provoking him. C kept his cool, we listened to the show, and we all went back to the hotel after it was over. C kept playing bodyguard, for which I was grateful.

We were all hanging out in my room (we reserved an entire floor) playing music and singing. A few of us had gone to bed, but the rest of us were up and enjoying some drinks and some good food. Suddenly, R walked in and sat down like he belonged there. C quietly got up and asked R to leave. R refused, because this was his “girlfriend’s room.”

As C was about to drag R out for a brawl, I loudly announced that I was going to call the hospital and let the woman whose name was on the pill bottles know that her son’s father was cheating on her while she was dying. R freaked out, because apparently his mother was spending every single second there with his fiancee and his son. C escorted him out, and the next two days were spent lounging around the hotel with my friends.

It’s not the last I saw of R, because he keeps injecting himself in my life.

MVWD just happened the other day and I didn’t even know it was a date!

An old friend from high school, Bob, recently returned to the US after living abroad for a year or so.  Since his return, we haven’t really spoken or hung out.  I know we both have our own busy lives and I’m perfectly fine doing with an occasional checkup.  Also, it can sometimes get a little awkward with Bob since he is best friends with my ex, Dick.

The other night while I was at a friend’s graduation party, Bob called me up and wanted to chat.  We talked about nothing for a bit and ended up agreeing to meet the next week for lunch and to catch up.  The very next day, Bob texted me to get the when and where for dinner.  I was slightly put off as I thought it was a lunch, but it was just Bob so I thought nothing of it.  We decided on a Thai restaurant near his place since he currently does not have a car and I would need to pick him up.

The day of the dinner arrived and I picked Bob up at the pre-determined time.  The first thing he said upon getting in my car was, “Wow look at that ring!” and wanted to know why I didn’t tell him I was engaged.  I explained that I am planning on getting married but it won’t be for about two years as we are both saving up money for the wedding, honeymoon, a car, and a house.  My fiancé currently lives about two hours away for work and sometimes that two years seems like forever.  The ring belonged to his grandmother and I feel really honored to have gotten it instead of his older brother’s fiancée.  Bob only seemed to half listen and then started talking about cars.

We arrived at the restaurant and within five minutes of sitting down I wanted to leave.  Every conversation I tried to start somehow got turned to sex.  How many girls he has been with, how good he is, how do I deal with having my fiancé so far away, blah, blah, blah.  The poor waitress could see my face and was getting the food out quickly to try and let me leave.  Mercifully, there was almost no conversation as we ate.  We were sitting there waiting for the check when Bob reached across the table and grabbed my hand.  He then proceeded to suggest I come inside back at his place to get intimate since I am most likely really deprived because of my situation; he won’t tell anyone. I forcefully pulled my hand away and said “No way in hell!”

Bob got up and slumped off to the bathroom, most likely to devise a new tactic.  He left his cell phone behind.  I reached across, found my name in his contacts (oh the joys of having a name that starts with A so I can find it quickly) and deleted it.  I threw $40 on the table to cover the food and then ran out to my car and left.  I have no idea how Bob got home.

MVWD happened in July 2010, and was a second date. On a lark, I went speed-dating, and met someone (now called S.) with whom I seemed to hit it off. He lived in my hometown, with a roommate (“this lady and her kids, it’s actually a good situation”). Our first date was fantastic (great dinner, great conversation, no drunken gropiness or general weirdness) so a second date was a given. We decided to meet at a mall in town, on a very rainy day. Although this sounds incredibly lame, I should mention that I live in a Canadian city with the largest mall in Canada (indeed in North America), so it was a good choice given there is so much to do.

The original plan was to grab some dinner and play some mini-golf or go bowling. When we met up near the restaurant, S. greeted me with a hug, which was nice (no creepy “I’m going in for the hug and OOOPS accidentally grabbed your butt” action going on), and we had a nice dinner. Afterwards we began the trek to the mini-golf course. When we arrived, the girl at the counter told us that they were closing in 10 minutes so they weren’t taking any new customers. Okay, fine, it’s a huge place, we can find something to do. We did a little window shopping and talked, and at some point he took my hand, very casually. I was fine with this too (actually a little giddy, since S. was very good-looking) and we strolled the mall hand-in-hand discussing the next plan. Finally we decided to go see if anything good was playing at the movie theatre.

When we got there, it became clear a movie was out: either only lame summer movies were playing, or the good ones had already started and the next showing wasn’t until 11pm. So now what? Well, the movie theatre has this large, animatronic dragon hanging from the lobby ceiling. It moves around and blinks its eyes, and every 10 minutes or so it opens its mouth and shoots fire. It’s actually very well set-up and cool to watch, so S. suggested we go upstairs where we could see the dragon closely. (From here, you can get close enough to feel the heat from the fire-breathing.) Okay, sure, I hadn’t really checked out the dragon before and it seemed pretty cool so let’s go upstairs.

We were standing at the top of the stairs, quite close together, when he put his arm around my shoulders, which again, I was fine with. (I hadn’t had a date in a while, so maybe I was starved for the touch of another person?) He then dropped his arm off my shoulder, reached down and full-on grabbed my breast. This wasn’t any “accidental boob-graze”, it was full-on cupping. In a theatre lobby full of people. Every good thing I’ve been thinking and feeling about S. just leaves my head, and I get the creeps big-time.

So I carefully step to the side, away from him, and take his hand again (I figured if I was holding it, I’d know where it was). We do some more window-shopping while I try to think of a way to extricate myself from this. As soon as my watch clicked to 9:30, I turned to him and mumbled something about having to be up early the next morning, and I live a good 35 minutes from the mall, so I’d better get going. He seemed fine with this, walked me to my car, gave me an appropriate good-bye hug and I left. He texted me several times to set up another date but I kept brushing him off and he eventually got the hint. He tried contacting me on this online dating site I occasionally frequent but I ignored him.

The kicker? A few months later I was scrolling down Facebook, and saw a comment from someone with the same name (it was quite unusual) on a post from my friend. I clicked on the comment and sure enough, it’s the same guy. And right smack on his wall, what do I see? A post dated sometime in JUNE 2010 reading “happy birthday to my beautiful husband! I love you soooo much xoxox.” Given that our dates were in July, this definitely caught me eye. So I sent a private message to my friend X. (reproduced here verbatim):

Me: Hey X, I know this is maybe a weird question but I was wondering about your friend S. Is he married? (I’m not asking for the reason you might think.)

X: Yes he is. They have a very interesting relationship

Me: I can imagine… since I met him speed dating, and he copped a feel when we were on a date, and now he keeps visiting my profile on the dating site I’m on… “Interesting” is probably a good word.

X: Wow!

So I probably dodged a bullet there. I’m thinking the “lady and her kids” who are his roommates are probably his wife and kids.

I was introduced to my date by a mutual friend.  After a few months of talking, we decided to go on a hike in a nearby state park as our first date.  I guess I’ll enumerate all the things that went wrong, which on their own wouldn’t be so bad, but combined made for a disaster (in my mind).

1) We got stuck in horrible traffic (2 hours’ worth) getting to the trailhead, which was already an hour’s drive from where we lived.

2) We had to drive on some curvy roads to get to our destination.  I got horribly car sick and we had to stop every few miles for me to vomit up my breakfast…

3) Even though I was a seasoned hiker and knew better, I wanted to look “hot” so I wore super tight black pants and a tight black blouse.  In the desert. In the summer. So instead of looking sexy, I was sporting some nasty B.O., very visible sweat stains under my boobs, and foundation and mascara melting off my face.

4) I discovered a stash of really really nasty porn in the back seat of his car.  Um, wouldn’t you at least try to hide that kind of thing on your first date?

5) I saw a “Native American heritage” trail listed on our map and was convinced it was a hike I’d taken before and had seen some cool petroglyphs and stuff on.  I hyped it up the entire day.  Then we went on the broiling 5-mile hike and it turned out there were only a few scritch scratch marks high up on a canyon wall.  Guess I remembered wrong!

6) On the way back over the curvy mountain pass 14 hours later, my date got distracted talking to me and we nearly careened off the edge of a cliff.  And then I puked again, this time *in* the car.

This was one of my worst dates but it was also the best. In the insanely long traffic jam, we got to talking and discovered we had a lot in common. On my puking spree, my date wasn’t  fazed at all and kindly held my hair for me. Although my pants were so tight I couldn’t lift my leg to climb over a boulder, he was very chivalrous and lifted or pulled me over every obstacle on the trail (let me remind you that I was pretty rank at that point, too). It turned out his hoopty had broken down the day before and the car was borrowed from a friend who is a pornaholic. And as for the nearly getting hurled off a cliff and walking five miles through the desert for nothing….well, it makes for a good story.

In the end, we went on many more dates and now we are engaged.  My really bad memory and Mary Katherine Gallagher brand of sexy and his general bumbling have become common (and comical) themes in our relationship. We were lucky that our chemistry was enough to overcome a series of unfortunate events. And it ended up making for a sweet story that I got to share with you!

My Very Worst Date happened a few weeks ago. We met on an online dating site. He seemed pretty normal on his pictures and when chatting, it wasn’t all about sex. He was kind of short 5’7 (I prefer taller guys) and he told me that he wasn’t too skinny. I don’t mind the size thing because I’m kind of into the Seth Rogen type. I decided I couldn’t be too picky because he seemed nice online plus he was half Swedish, which seemed interesting.

When I saw him, I immediately felt betrayed. He wasn’t 5’7 he was more like my height (5’3) and he wasn’t cute chubby he was just plain fat. And his clothes looked like he stole them from his little brother (a too tight beige shirt with orange stripes and he wore an horrible cap). Normally, I’m not a big fashion queen but at least I made an effort to look nice. And I could see why he never smiled on his pictures because his teeth looked like those of a rat. Small and brown.

While sitting in the pub during our date, a few guys were loudly talking about how a guy like that could ever go out with a girl like me so it got even more awkward. Then he started talking about how all his “black interns” (yes, he used another word) were so lazy and how there were all these “gay people” on the bus (yes again he used another word for it). As a person with gay and multicultural friends, I felt really uncomfortable sitting at a table with such an ignorant person. I told him I had to get up real early in the morning finished my drink and left.

When we left, he grabbed my hip and tried to kiss me. I gave him my cheek and ran. I decided to ignore his texts, which got more mean every time I ignored them. The last one he send was that I should grow the f**k up.

I was complaining to a friend at work about not having been on a date in awhile and a male coworker overheard me. He asked if he could set me up with a friend of his who had been feeling down and “could use the company of a good woman.” I agreed to meet his friend for a happy hour drink a few days later. The co-worker showed me a photo of the guy so I would know who to look for.

When I arrived at the restaurant, he greeted me and I thought he was cute. I soon found out what he thought of me.

“You look so much like my ex-wife – it’s amazing!” he said squinting at me.

I was a little shocked since I did not know he had been married before. He then explained, without my prompting, that the “ex” was actually still his wife since they had been married for seven years and only separated for two.

He then proceeded to tell me that she already found a new boyfriend, that she had most likely cheated on him before they were separated, and that he couldn’t believe she had done this to him because they had a daughter together. I did not know the daughter part either, but at this point I had already give up on this date.

He then called his ex-wife every four-letter word I know of, and some I hadn’t heard before. He kept running his fingers through his hair and talking quickly, and he seemed to get more and more agitated as he talked about her. He never asked me a single question about myself!

I made up an excuse to leave after about 30 minutes, and he insisted on walking me home. It was getting dark, so I agreed. For the entire 15-minute walk, he talked about his salary, repeating over and over: “you don’t want to even know how much I bring in.” And I really didn’t want to know, so I stayed silent.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he said. “It’s more money than you have ever seen in your life.”

Finally, acting exasperated as if I had been trying to get him to reveal his income, he told me that he makes $400,000 a year. I doubted this, but stayed silent. I don’t think I said a single word during the entire walk.

When we reached my house, he leaned in to kiss me, and I ran into the house before he could make contact. I ran upstairs to peek through a window to make sure he sauntered away.

Like it or not, wedding season is here. The ritual can be lots of fun, especially when you are genuinely close to the couple tying the knot, but many times the months leading up to a wedding can be painful, especially if your friend is a Bridezilla-in-training and you have to hear the proposal story again and again (and again). BuzzFeed’s video roundup of 16 Embarrassing Marriage Proposals is sure to make you laugh (and lighten up on the subject). Then check out Passive Aggressive Notes’ hilarious post about Facebook Wedding Drama.

Bad boys, femme fatales and impossible relationships. We’d sworn that we’d quit all that masochistic mental fun and games a while back but if we’re being real about it, we’ll concede that there’s something inexplicably alluring about that charming, intellectual that never calls you back despite all your deep conversations (and other activities), or that stunning girl that turns up at your doorstep at her convenience (and in the wee hours of the morning) and that on-off relationship that’s punctuated with addictive drama.

Cristina Nehring’s new treatise, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century has, well, vindicated our difficult love obsession. She argues that in the quest for picture-perfect relationships, crazy passion and all it inspires has been sacrificed.

“We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence … Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing.”

Nehring calls for throwing caution to the gusting wind  - and covers celebration of failure, feminism’s fault for the passion deficit and other sexy/buzz kill areas. We’re looking forward to reading the tome but even reviews have got us hot under the collar. When we read the first lines of the NYT book review – “For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary” – we thought : really? Then we read and kinda agreed with Amanda Fortini’s central take in her Salon piece that our contemporary ideas of all-consuming ardor are perfectly in place:

“…most people long to experience love, especially love of the wildest, most complicated sort. And I would venture to guess that many have — romance born of mischief, with a co-worker, perhaps, or a professor or student; obsessive love characterized by vigilant waiting for calls and e-mails, or a humiliating inability to stop calling even after the relationship is broken. Most of us have not consciously or categorically banished passionate love from our lives, we just can’t seem to make it fit…One of the reasons…may be that we can’t seem to afford it economically or temporally.”

We also perused (and giggled a bit) Ross Douthat’s NYT Op-Ed, which reckons that mad love is well and thriving – except amongst the members of the chattering classes. Enough of other people’s thoughts, what are yours? Tell us below!

Summer is officially here and what is it about the heat that makes us want to date more? Perhaps it’s those warm nights or days at the beach wearing close to nothing that’s getting us all hot and bothered. Or maybe we’ve just seen Grease one too many times. From festivals, weddings and BBQ’s to boating, fireworks and outdoor screenings, it seems that the warmer months make us more social — and in turn more likely to look for love. To help get you in the mood, Glamour has compiled a list of romantic beach reads.  And The Hypnotic Love Coach Debra Berndt has a few tips on how to keep your summer romance alive so that it doesn’t expire come fall.

What was your best summer date, fling or love story?