A few weeks ago I was asked how many dates I went on in an average week. Ever since my date with the man who feared electricity, the average has been easy to calculate: zero. I’ve been traveling a lot and have to admit I’ve been a bit reluctant to throw myself back out there as the odds of me dating a fascist who practices taxidermy and witchcraft seem to be rising with every new oddball date.
Instead of the average week, today I’ll relay the tale of the week where I went on the highest amount of dates. It was about a year ago that from a period of Tuesday to Friday I went on 3 dates and was introduced to 3 other guys at a happy hour. Yep, that’s right: 6 guys in 4 days. It was exhausting and a little confusing. I didn’t start out the week intending to take up all the time not spent working or sleeping with dating; that’s just how it ended up happening.
Tuesday: Tuesday was my first blind date not arranged by an internet site in a pretty long time. A friend set me up with a teacher she knew from work. She didn’t know him extremely well but said he seemed nice and was cute; to make things ostensibly less awkward, my friend and her husband joined me and Pete* at the bar where we were to meet for trivia night. I even harangued another friend into joining us to check this guy out. Pete was great. He was pretty quiet, but had a decent sense of humor and was attractive. The conversation was a little awkward but then again I don’t think he had been on a blind date in a long time either and we did have an audience. We didn’t kick butt at trivia but it was still a fun time. Then we all walked over to another spot to get some ice cream. At the end of the evening, Pete said he had fun meeting me and would give me a call so we could meet up again, with my friend saying she’d send him a note with my contact information.
And then nothing. No calls. No emails. Nada. Of course I wouldn’t really determine he was not going to call for a few days. So I went on about my hectic dating week fairly confident that if none of these other guys worked out, it was ok because I had already met a really great guy. My friend said he never really mentioned it again but said something about how she thought he didn’t feel any sparks right away and was the sort of guy that if the chemistry wasn’t there for him right away he didn’t see the point in wasting time. I can understand that point of view; but obviously it was still disappointing. But all that would happen later because shortly after Tuesday there was…
Wednesday: Wednesday was actually my 2nd date with Albino Dan*. Ok, he was technically not an albino but I do give nicknames to these guys with their more memorable traits. Albino Dan was extremely fair: white-blond hair, fair complexion that inevitably pinked up in the warm weather, and had very light-colored eyes. Those who have known me for a while know of my misplaced fear of/anger towards albinos due to an unfortunate viewing of a Mentos commercial with a very fair man when I may or may not have been inebriated (yes, you read that correctly and no, it won’t make any more sense if you read it again); those same individuals were surprised that I went on one, let alone two, dates with Albino Dan. Regardless, we met up for our 2nd date and he was perfectly nice and I had an okay time. Not great, but ok. He was a very nice guy, however, and I have a problem with leading on very nice guys when I am fairly confident that I cannot see myself in a remotely romantic situation with them. Since I would rather have woken up with my head stapled to the floor than have been in a romantic situation with Dan, it was time to end it politely but firmly.
Thursday: Now to put Thursday in perspective, I have to mention that on my Tuesday date, I saw a guy at the trivia bar that gave me a very, very strange look. I stared at him for a while myself as I was pretty sure I had met him before or knew him in some capacity. That all became clear on Thursday when I realized that I had seen my Match date for coffee that day back on Tuesday at the bar. He looked at me strangely as we had been emaling for a while and had seen each other’s pictures. So when I first walked into the coffee shop, he started off by fairly aggressively mentioning that he had seen me talking to a guy at the bar a few days earlier and asked if I was already dating someone. Off to a good start, I said that I had been there with several friends and that he was a friend of one of them and that was the first time we had met. Tim* got pretty huffy and made a point of letting me pay for my own coffee before we sat down at a table to get to know each other. Tim also was a teacher but spent the entire time talking about how much he hated his job. I found it a little disconcerting how much he blatantly disliked the kids he taught and the job itself, especially since at the time he was on summer vacation and hadn’t seen them for a few months but stayed preoccupied stoking up his anger and frustration. The date more or less fizzled after that; it’s hard to try to get a conversation going when the other person, whom you have just met, spends the entire time talking about how miserable they are. We ended the date by shaking hands and wishing each other luck.
Friday: I would need all the luck I could get come Friday as I was going to a work happy hour with a friend to meet all her colleagues and not one, not two, but three potential guys that she wanted me to check out. With that ratio going, how could I lose? Well, by the time I got there, her first pick for me was already hitting on the waitress and her second choice was chatting up one of their coworkers (who he would eventually follow on a trip to Paris or somewhere else similarly wonderful). The third guy was actually a friend of my friend’s boss and he was decidedly not warm for my form. He was a firefighter from the country and decided early on that I was a city-slicker who wouldn’t fit in with his way of life. Thinking of me as a city-slicker is fairly absurd but this guy had his mind made up and I might have tried to sway him had I not decided to drown my sorrows in fruity beverages and shuffleboard. At this point, I apparently caught the attention of Smelly Will* who unlike the firefighter was decidedly a smitten kitten for yours truly, but my friend was so aghast at the thought that she forbade me from spending any more time with Smelly Will. Since I could tell early on where he got that nickname from and I was more than a little socially lubricated, I took her advice and called it a night when she and her husband decided to go home.
After my week of intense dating, I took a mini-break before diving back in with Jared* the caveman and the Hairlicker. You’ll have to wait for another time for those stories. The gym is calling to me and although my couch is louder and more persistent, I will attempt to get going while the getting is good.
*Name has been changed
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