MVWD occurred during my first semester of college. I worked in an organic grocery store which attracted a number of strange customers, one of whom was a rather nice gay man, P, who was a favourite of all the cashiers. I was 18, and I closed the store by myself most weeknights, a time when P would come in and buy his favourite chocolate milk. After seeing him nearly everyday for a while, we got to talking and he mentioned his exotic Asian travels. When he gave me his Facebook information, I didn’t think anything of it.

A few weeks later, he commented on one of my status updates about my craving for pumpkin pie and asked me on a ‘pie’ date. I was thrilled, an older gay guy (he was 34-ish) wanted to take me out? That’s awesome! We agreed to meet at the store I worked at was it was near my house and a safe place to leave my car. We met, and naturally, things got awkward fast. I realized the second we started driving to the sushi place he’d picked that not only was he a lot older than I had thought but we’ve got absolutely nothing in common other than he shopped where I worked.

After an uncomfortable and rather expensive dinner, we invited me back to his place, to eat the pie he had lured me with in the first place. Agreeing, more because I was too uncomfortable not to agree, we went back to his place where he proceeded to provide me with alcohol and (badly) attempt to seduce me! What? I thought he was gay! I was surprised, but in retrospect, I know that it was my mistake for assuming.

After two hours, he finally agreed to take me back to my car. I was relieved and immediately ran inside the store and hid in the bathroom until he was gone. For the following six months after the date, he sent me invitations to parties, events, marathons, etc. Finally, my last communication from P was on my birthday, a very detailed and graphic discription of his desire to “eat” at my “restaurant,” if you know what I mean…

I was on a long cross-country trip with a relative one summer when this guy, M., who’d found me online somewhere and started writing to me. I had sort of a mentor-ly feeling toward him as he seemed somewhat inexperienced. He apparently felt more of an attraction to me and since he seemed nice, I agreed to go out with him when I got home. He seemed especially excited when I half-joked about never missing “The Golden Girls” on Lifetime. Perhaps he was hoping to demonstrate some gay street cred.

I had arranged for us to go to a moderately nice restaurant, so I was bemused upon climbing into his ratty, fry grease-smelling car to find that he was dressed in a stained t-shirt and shorts. He also hadn’t seemed to have showered for a week. He acted extremely happy to be out with me, judging from his breathless, awkward attempts at witty repartee. I tried to reply politely, but I was distracted when he reached around to the back seat and put his cavernous, hairy crack in full view. At dinner, he ordered chicken fingers off the kids’ menu and loudly dropped F-bombs into conversation as often as possible, despite the presence of actual kids at nearby tables. I ordered a couple daquiris to help see me through that and the movie afterward.

Despite having grated my teeth down to nubs by the end, I was unfortunately not stern enough when he made his next suggestion –  he’d took my comments from the other day as an invitation to go back to my place to watch “Golden Girls”. So there we were, him with his smelly arm around my shoulder in my place. I was just too nice a guy to tell him to get the hell out, but at least the antics of Sophia et al served to stifle conversation and whatever “moves” he may have planned to make.

Then, the cable went out. I had to endure the next 20 minutes with him snuggling up to me—literally rubbing his head against my shoulder like a cat—cooing that he’d never done this before and how great it was to finally “be with a guy.” The cable finally came back, the Girls finished their adventure, and I pleaded tiredness in order to shoo him away. I accept part of the blame for my awful night—I’ve learned my lesson and will be much more direct the next time I’m stuck with a horrible date!

I hadn’t been on a date for a while, so I agreed to meet a guy from an online dating site for coffee one afternoon. When he greeted me at the coffee house, I immediately noticed he had thinly plucked eyebrows, which were not apparent in his photos. He was also much shorter than his purported height of 5’9. We had never spoken on the phone, so imagine my surprise when he began talking and had a thick foreign accent. He told me he had only been in this country for two years. Again, this had not been apparent from his emails because he did not write in the same way that he spoke. I started wondering if someone else had been writing his emails for him.

On top of all this, I noticed that he was very metro in his style, right down to his perfectly manicured fingernails. While he was speaking, he was exhibiting very effeminate mannerisms and I started to wonder what I was doing on this date. More so, what HE was doing on a date with a woman. I really knew it was going badly when a homeless guy sat down nearby. We were sitting outside and I had my sunglasses on, so while my date was speaking, I found my eyes wandering over to the homeless man and I completely tuned out my date. I started checking out the homeless man and thinking he was actually super attractive under all that dirt and facial hair. I knew then that the date had to end immediately, so I said I had to go. As I drove off, I don’t think I had ever felt so relieved to end a date.