My Very Worst Date happened when I was in my early 20′s and had not dated much. A man asked me out. I was very excited. At that time in my life I enjoyed going to bars and just having fun, so it was no problem when he suggested just going out for drinks. Great, I looked forward to it.
He picked me up and we went to a bar. I did not really pay attention to the name of the bar as I was a little nervous (first date and all). We sat and have a drink or two and then, to my horror, I realized he had taken me to a STRIP CLUB!! (There was no ubiquitous pole at this place. A girl just came out on a small stage and started stripping.) I told him I was very uncomfortable and asked if we could just go to a regular bar and just have fun. He was reluctant but we went to a bar across the street.
We ordered drinks. Next thing I knew, my date took his coat off (which he had kept on until that point), got up on an adjacent table, and started dancing! Not the worst of it. Hanging from his belt was a huge BOWIE KNIFE! The bartender told him he must leave. My date said to me “Let’s get out of here,” but I asked the bartender to please call me a cab. Thank God I never saw that guy again.
My Very Worst Date was the first date I ever asked someone out on. A girl named Janet moved into my church congregation in high school and I fell hard for her immediately. I knew that someday, somehow, I would win her over, even though her responses to my flirting were mixed at best. I eventually got up the courage and asked her to the Homecoming Dance.
At the dance, I did my usual thing of flirting with her a lot and she did her usual thing of giving a lukewarm or cold response. When I got home from the date, I was feeling tired and decided that I was tired of chasing her. Just like that, I was over her.
So the date itself was pretty uneventful, except for one detail that becomes important later. It was extremely hot at the dance–very crowded, low ceiling–and like most people in that situation, I was sweating quite a bit. I thought about bringing it up–telling her that we didn’t have to keep dancing–but decided it would be too awkward. She ended up sitting out for much of the last part of the dance anyways, and I can probably guess why.
After the date I saw her around but made sure not to go out of my way to talk to her for a while, mainly to show that I wasn’t interested and partly because I was slightly embarrassed.
Three months later, I saw her at a church dance and decided to ask her to dance. Immediately she started to say some things that seemed to hint at the date. For a little background, she liked to mock people: If you said something she thought was stupid, she would repeat what you said in a really dumb-sounding voice.
She said some things using that voice, like “Gosh, it’s hot in here” and “too bad I forgot to put on deodorant” and “I really like you, Janet.” Obviously I didn’t say any of those things. I was shocked and didn’t know how to respond, so I just changed the subject.
I can understand that it wasn’t the most pleasant date for her, but I can’t fathom why she felt the need to say those things. It would’ve been worse if I had still liked her, but since this was my only experience dating at that point, it really made it hard for me to go on dates after that.
NL was a twenty-six year old undergrad I met at a print lab on campus. I was a first year PhD student. For our first date, we met up at a coffee shop. There just happened to be a craft festival across the street, so after we grabbed food, we wandered around the stalls and talked for hours.
Then came the second date. The place NL suggested was closed, so we went back to the same coffee shop. Then things started to fall apart. He offered to buy my lunch, then whined about his tight budget. He recited an anecdote from a TV show and pretended it happened to him. I mentioned something he posted on Facebook and found out that he’d been turned down by another girl hours after he asked me out. Then came the clincher.
I made a joke about OCD. NL turned dead sober and said, “I was never diagnosed with that.”
I froze. “Um, what were you diagnosed with?”
“Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I lose my temper and destroy things. It’s a mood disorder.”
My face turned white. “Like bipolar disorder?”
“Yeah. That was one of my diagnoses my psychiatrists pinned on me too.”
“Are you being treated for it?”
He noticed my expression. “No…but I’ve gotten really into meditation.”
I made some excuse about needing to give my dog his medicine. NL didn’t pick up on my discomfort and gave me a goodbye kiss. He’d lit up a couple cigarettes while we waited for lunch. His breath reminded me of my chain-smoking grandma.
I went home and looked up IED online. The first site that popped up was about a man who beat his fiancée because he couldn’t find his sock. And no, meditation was not a recommended treatment.
NL never got a third date.
My own personal VWD was actually something I hadn’t realized was a date at all, and I’m not the unobservant type. Let me preface it by saying that I had no reason to suspect it was a date. I was a blatant, loudly outed Atheist at my extremely Christian university. While I didn’t have trouble making any friends, dating wasn’t really something I had my eye on.
I mostly hung out with guys, the nerdy crowd that played D&D and video games far more than they did their homework. One Friday night in the student union we’d all planned to go out and get some food after their hours long D&D game. This was pretty common practice, game for 8 hours and then everyone goes out to eat. But this particular night, to make a long story short, pretty much everyone was too beat after the game to go out. I was still hungry so I was polling anyone to see if they still felt like it. The only other person who was still hungry was Gavin (clearly not his real name). (And the short description of Gavin is that he’s 6’4” and 260 pounds of mostly redneck muscle. With a great big redneck beard and a nearly-juvie criminal record.) By this time, a couple of years knowing him and his girlfriend, I had a long standing semi-friendship with him. He’d often attempt to engage me in religious debates and provoke me with sexist, incredibly dated statements and opinions. Normally, I wouldn’t relent on my views. He wasn’t really a bad guy, and not NEARLY as bad as half the guys on campus who were even more vehement. He’d gone to my high school, a freshman when I was a senior, and we’d ended up at the same college.
We ended up at Chile’s and that’s when things started going sour. He began his forays into why women need to be behind the stove, essentially barefoot and pregnant. I disagreed. He started complaining about how women were trying to have rights. I rather liked having rights. I endured this for a couple of hours because he drove and I was miles from campus and it was late. (There was no one to pick me up.) This was a side of him that I hadn’t seen before. BEFORE he had always been, at least, somewhat polite about our debates. If I wanted the conversation stopped he’d mostly chill out. Not this time. Now we were finally alone together. And at what great timing. It was just after his girlfriend had broken up with him. He saw this as a sign.
When dinner was over and done with the waitress came along to hand out the checks. She asked if we were together or separate. Before she could finish I blurted out loudly, “SEPARATE.” Gavin was annoyed and argued that the man always paid for the woman. I hadn’t realized this was a date. It was never supposed to be. He argued and argued and when the woman came back he snatched my check. I demanded it back so that I could pay for myself, but he insisted that I was being “unattractive.” (Good!) As soon as the waitress came back with his change he sat there staring at me. “So, do you wanna go somewhere else?”
WHAT?? That’s right. He wanted sex. I could tell in that skeevy way he eyeballed me. “No, Gavin. I’m tired and I’d like to go home.”
He proceeded to explain to me his philosophy on how more or less all women were prostitutes. That the trick to getting them to sleep with you was to pay the right price. And he said that it had cost enough to pay for dinner that he thought I rather owed him SOMETHING. I told him that I didn’t agree to it at all and that he’d paid for my food against my will. I offered to pay him back with money. He’d hear none of it.
Finally, he agreed to leave the restaurant without a definite answer. We climbed into his giant truck-thing and drove off into the dark night. Only to end up miles from town, near a lake. I wasn’t worried for my safety. I’m a pretty scrappy and tough girl, and anything but little. And I’d known him long enough that he wasn’t going to try to do anything truly horrid (like rape). But I wasn’t happy. He tried to kiss me. It’s akin to kissing a 1-foot brillo pad thanks to the redneck beard. He tried feeling me up. Nope. “I’m not comfortable with this. Take me home.”
He did, eventually, take me back. And I was no worse for wear, given what could have happened. But later I found out the whole story. Not only had he gone around telling people that I had “pretty nice tits for a fat chick,” but he’d been mysteriously obsessed with my since he was a freshman in high school. While I was in high school I had not even realized he existed. But he apparently had been infatuated with me. I heard this from his ex-girlfriend, a friend of mine, who told me some years after they broke up and she was no longer bitter about it. Apparently, during their relationship he kept harassing her to try to convince me to get into a threesome with them so he could sleep with me. And that’s actually why they’d broken up.
He then proceeded to stalk me for a couple of weeks. It’s pretty creepy when a 6’4”, 260 pound redneck is pacing the edges of the parking lot where your car is located at 2:00 am in the dark. Thankfully, he eventually seemed to have gotten over it. And I live in a different town now.
He said that, like me, he loved classical music, so we decided to go to a concert together and have drinks after. Each of us got our own ticket, so we weren’t sitting together. During intermission, we got together and I found out that, to my horror, he had kept his bizarre sideburns, which were long and skinny in shape and sparse in hair, just for this special evening out. When he turned around, in contrast to the sparse, straight, and over-waxed hair on his head, there were thick tufts of unruly, curly hair sticking out from behind the collar of his shirt. I had never seen something like that and was so disgusted that I couldn’t finish the drink in my hand. I caught a whiff of his cologne (or maybe his own scent?), which smelled like baby vomit, and kept backing away from him while he tried to get closer.
Without any attempt at lowering his voice, he told me that the second piece in the program had put him to sleep. I saw a couple of genteel-looking patrons turning their heads to look at us immediately. He did not know “Wagner” was supposed to be pronounced as “VOG-ner” – he pronounced it as if he was speaking English – “WAG-ner”, even though the conductor had pronounced it correctly during his pre-performance talk. (I wonder if my date was asleep then too.) People were talking about Chausson’s violin concerto and French romanticism, which was the theme that evening, and he would just go off on a tangent on drumming techniques and Vivaldi.
After the concert, I thought I would just try to end this quickly – a drink shouldn’t take that long to finish. He told me he had not had supper and would like to have a full square meal. So, he ordered a three-course meal at 22:00 and took two hours to finish it, knowing that it would take me one and a half hours to get home from the city. He bragged about his grades in high school and university more than 15 years ago, as if they mattered now that he’s 41. He took his suit jacket off as if it was just a piece of outerwear. I was really nervous that he might start loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves.
He couldn’t talk like everyone else did, but had to turn every notion in his head into a metaphor, and was completely oblivious to the fact that he was no metaphysical poet. He started swearing aloud in a foreign language to show me how diverse an individual he was, although he had no idea what he was talking about. I noticed the waitress staring at the hair behind his neck. Oh, yes, more on drumming techniques and that one and only one composer he knew about, even though he didn’t really discuss anything beyond the fact that he liked Vivaldi.
After catching that last whiff of baby vomit and thanking him for a wonderful evening, I threw away his business card on my way home, thinking that I was definitely not interested in him, but perhaps someone else would appreciate him more than I did. I could barely recognize his name two months later when I got this insulting e-mail from him out of the blue. It was a long-winded, hostile prose on how terrible a person I was. In a shockingly straightforward and inaccurate fashion, it attacked every thinkable aspect of me, including my appearance, my character, my friends, and my family. He said I was given a chance to seek something better in life (like him) and I didn’t take it. He concluded his email by saying that my prospects for a happy life were bleak and that he was glad that he had done his window-shopping from afar and realized how unappealing the goods were (another metaphor, you see). When did women become merchandise in the display case?
