The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Andrea

A few years back, I was living in a blue-collar city where the social scene centered around the bars, and I kept meeting That Guy – fratty, with all the vapid things he screamed in my ear reeking of stale beer. Out of sheer desperation to have one conversation with the opposite sex about… well, anything aside from how much he could bench press, I signed up for an online dating service.

Of course, the site was populated with a lot of the same guys. The upside was, I got to screen them over e-mail – can’t string two sentences together? Can’t name the vice president? Off the list. Finally, I came upon a guy who got the pun in my bio. Worked in finance, cracked a couple jokes, knew a good restaurant to meet up at for a drink. We clicked online, exchanging e-mail messages about vacations and college lit courses. It seemed like a safe bet.

Apparently he had some kind of strange performance anxiety, because in person, he didn’t speak. I mean, at all. I asked questions about his e-mails, tried to be engaging. Usually men love to talk about themselves, right?

We struggled through 45 minutes of my chatter and his one-word answers. I thought I must have disappointed him. I didn’t expect a second date. The next day? E-mail asking me out to sushi at one of my fave places. It showed promise, so I figured, what the hell.

“Lather, rinse, repeat.” What happened to the witty, well-read man from the e-mails? How can a 6-day trip to Thailand be summed up solely as “trippy?” I started to think that someone else must be writing the e-mails for him.

Despite another evening of awkward conversation, the next day dawned to a new invitation, this one for February 13th. Dangerous territory. But the date showed so much promise – dim sum! Symphony tickets! Seriously, in that town? What a find!

Third time’s the charm – kind of. This time he talked, and talked, and talked. A pleasant change, if only it had been about Thailand, or Wordsworth. Instead, it was an ode to my perfection, which started out as sweet but very quickly turned creepy. The near-perfect memorization of nearly every word I’d typed or spoken made me squirm, and when he started talking about why our combined features would make for beautiful children (on the third date!), I wanted to stand up and run out of the restaurant. The speech culminated with the delivery of a hand-made pop-up Valentine’s Day card that prominently featured a question last seen in junior high study hall: “I like you, do you like me? Circle one: YES or NO.” Did I mention it was all drawn in crayon?

I begged off after dinner with an upset stomach and skipped the symphony, and in the coming weeks suddenly became a very busy girl. I also cancelled my online dating membership – stalkers are too high a price to pay for free sushi!

About the author: Andrea moved to Boston last year to take her dream job as a consultant for the arts. In addition to being a marketing research nerd, Andrea also volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. She and her cat, Vivaldi, have adopted an adorable man named John - who, it should be said, they met through a friend and NOT on the Internet!

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 3:55 am and is filed under Horror Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.