First Date Horror Stories: Women Tell All

Brace yourselves for what you’re about to read. These stories take the words “bad date” to a whole new level of scary. A first date is awkward enough without the added pressure of dealing with an awful guy. From the classic, cheap guy to one girl’s first and last experience with JDate, the following stories will have you laughing, crying and laughing ’til you cry. Even though I’ve taken the liberty of keeping the identities of those involved under wraps, keep in mind that the following are all true accounts. Make sure you click through to page three for my favorite worst date story of all.

The Fruit Stand Bandit
I went on a date with a guy I met at a party. He was a theatrical actor, and throughout the entire meal he kept divulging to me how well-off his family was. He kept making bizarre remarks about how we should date because it would help him fight gay rumors and how well our heights and looks compliment each other, because I was “oriental.” By the end of the date and on the walk to the subway, conversation was strained and I off handedly mentioned how much I liked mangoes. We finally (!!) get to my subway station and I go to say good bye. My date hands me a mango. When I asked where he got this mango, he replies, “I stole it from the fruit stand across the street when you weren’t looking.” DK

Lessons: Talking about how loaded you are is a huge first date no-no. In fact, you can probably take it as a lesson for life that no one likes to hear people brag about money. It’s weird Almost as weird as stealing fruit…

The Cheap Guy Always Finishes Last
I Told the guy I was seeing I liked live music so I guess he tried to be creative and had me meet him at Mercury Lounge on a Wednesday night after work. When I got there, the person at the door told me there was a $15 cover, but I had no cash. I texted the guy I was going to meet because I thought he would have either told me there would be a cover or pay for my cover. So I ended up having to use the ATM with a service charge. Then, when I finally found him, he was already drunk and made me pay for my drinks all night. To top everything off, it was heavy metal night so the music we were listening to was absolutely terrible just screaming and jumping. I left after 20 minutes. JP

Lessons: Loosen up the purse strings buddy! I’m all for equality, but if you invite a girl out and you’re still in the “I’m trying to impress you phase,” then do something impressive and act like you give a damn.

Annother Penny Pincher
Went ice skating with a guy and he made me pay for both of us rentals, admission, etc. After ordering at the register, he turned to me and said, Arent you going to get this? In shock, I took out my credit card and paid. In retrospect, if we hadnt been in an obscure area of Long Island City, I would have walked out. I know were living in a modern society where people go Dutch all the time, but Im not ready to completely wear the pants on a first date. During our ice skating session, I sent one kid plummeting to the ground and narrowly avoided running over a herd of other little ones. Dangerous, not romantic. CL

Lessons: If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times… cheap guys don’t stand a chance. Even less so if you’re gonna be rude and presumptuous about it. I’m not saying you have to be made of money, but there are lots of ways to plan a good, inexpensive date without splurging.

Drunk Driver
So I went on a first date with someone who was from my hometown. We had mutual friends, but I didn’t really know him that well. He said he wanted to go to a Japanese restaurant and try their food because he was into trying new foods. When we got there, all he ordered were cucumber rolls because he was Vegetarian. I thought it was a little weird but I ignored it. He then proceeded to order sake AND beer and pound back shots by himself. He then proceeded to ask me if I could drive. He ended up driving though. On the way home, he asked if I wanted to hangout for a little longer, but he suggested going to the city or doing something “crazy.” When I said the city was too far, he asked if it was okay if we hung out with his cousin. So we picked up his cousin, who was even stranger than this guy. He was wearing a du-rag. Then, the guy asked if it was cool if we hung out in his garage (a garage “party” with three people…. so lame). He stopped to pick up some four loko Meanwhile, I texted my friend to pick me up and get me the hell out of there! When we got to his garage I kindly told him I had to leave and hopped into my friend’s car. TC

Lessons: First of all, don’t get in a car with a drunk driver… duh! But this also further proves my point that getting bombed on a first date is never a good idea (especially not on four loko), and it will ruin any chance of a second date. Not to mention, drinking solo is a little weird dude!

Liar Liar Pants on Fire
This guy asks me to go with him to a concert at the rock shop in Brooklyn to see some obscure band, which he assures is “a cool indie band.” We get there and the guy at the door tells us we can’t get in because we don’t have a kid since it was a kid’s show (think The Wiggles). Strike two: he makes me walk several blocks when I insist on taking the train over to a diner. After a few minutes of forced conversation, I want to leave already. He doesn’t pay the waitress a tip, claiming he “never does.” We decide to go watch The King’s Speech (well, I decide) and he offers to pay, but only if it’ll get him “brownie points.” I proceed to pay for myself and make sure we have seats that are surrounded by people because god forbid he tries to makes a move. THEN, he yells at me because I didn’t recognize the trailer for Transformers, his “favorite movie ever.” He proceeds to fall asleep during the movie, snoring loudly. He abruptly wakes up and wants to leave right in the middle of the movie, claiming it was terrible (this is a week before it won the oscar for best picture, btw). He falls asleep again. After the movie, he raves about it (despite missing 3/4 of it) and tries to get me to take a photobooth picture… I evade successfully. I’m dying, yet he insists on taking a train that will take me two other trains to get home, and gets mad when I look for directions. During the agonizing ride, he tells me he interns at a nameless Fortune 500 company for a nameless “big CEO” and also works at Conde Nast and, oh, happens to have a friend who owns a theatre (this is all after I mention I love fashion and Broadway). After parting ways he still insists on texting me, and we have a very brief conversation about classes. He tells me he’s reading “The Cast of Ontiago” by “sum writer” named “Egar Alan Oh”….and if I didn’t already have enough reason to erase this from my memory, that sealed the deal. He can butcher our date, but butchering literature is where I draw the line! RT

Lessons: If you’re going to lie to try and impress a girl, then at least make the lies believable. And if you really don’t know who Edgar Allan Poe is, then you need more than a dating lesson my friend. And I’m not even touching on the falling asleep during the movie incident.

Halloween Disaster
A few weeks after I broke off my engagement, my sister tried setting me up with this guy she worked with. I had met him a few times at the store they both worked at and thought he was cute, so I agreed to going out with him (ignoring the fact that he was a year younger than me). My sister gave him my number and we texted back and forth and made plans for Halloween night, 2009. He said he would be working that night so he would pick me up at 11 PM. That night, 11 came and went. He texted me 20 after 11 to say he was running late because he needed to shower and change (did I mention he works in a CLOTHING store, as a cashier?). He finally shows up around 12:30, and it’s raining by now. He pulls up in a bright blue cadillac with rap music BLASTING, does not come to the door, does not open the car door, and we proceed to make small talk as we head for Buffalo Wild Wings. We sit down and order drinks when the waiter asks for our IDs, I pull mine out as he pats down his jeans and says “ohhh I left my wallet in the car” swift guy. He runs out to the car to get his wallet, but I am not amused at his “forgetfulness.”

Once he returns, we order drinks and continue the small talk of a first date. My sister had explained to him that I was new to the dating scene again, so he uses this as a topic of discussion. He then mentions he broke up with his ex-girlfriend a few weeks ago. I don’t ask details I just nod politely, listening to him uncomfortably venting about his ex girlfriend. He begins to tell me she “tricked” him into thinking she was pregnant. Although, he goes on, he didnt fall for her trick because they only had sex three times, each time using a condom. By this point, I not only need another drink but a MUCH
NEEDED change of topic, so I suggest we go somewhere else. I make the mistake of letting him choose the place. He takes me to an AWFUL dive bar. Did I mention it’s Halloween night? We walk into this old shack it smells like urine and I immediately see someone dressed as Sasquash as we walk in the door. We get drinks (he pays… obviously remembering his wallet this time) and we sit at the back of the bar at a broken table, continuing awful conversation.

By this time, I have had enough. I tell him I’m tired and we
leave the bar. We get into his car in this dark parking lot and he doesn’t turn the car on. Instead, he puts his arm around me and asks if I would “just like to hang out here for a while.” I look at him as if he’s not serious and tell him I really have to use the bathroom and need to go home. He suggests I go back into the dive bar to use the bathroom. I then decide I can not continue to beat around the bush and tell him there is no way I will
use that bathroom. We pull up to my house and I realize he might try to go in for a kiss. As he is pulling up to the curb, without waiting for the car to stop I open the door and begin to step out, thanking him for the night. He texts me about 20 minutes later and says he “had a great time.” This feeling was not mutual and we never went out again. RB

Lessons: First of all, Buffalo Wild Wings? Really? Let’s just pretend that part didn’t happen. The most important lesson to take away from this one is it’s never under any circumstance ok to talk about your ex on a first date, especially when both you and your ex are cray cray!

Maybe JDate Isn’t For Everyone
Okay, so here is a recap of my first ever JDate experience. The young man was a twenty something Jewish guy transplanted from Philadelphia to DC. He seemed nice/normal/cute enough. Little did I know what horrors would ensue

We met for happy hour around 6:00. I was a few minutes late, and in the five minutes he was there before me, he had also started what he later referred to as “spitting man-game” on another Phillies fan at the bar. And not just talking about the Phillies game, they were discussing life, he was asking if the guy had friends who needed an apartment, blah blah blah. Steve legitimately started a man date with this other Phillies fan before I even arrived at the bar. The whole time, if something good/bad/indifferent would happen with the Phillies game, he would lean over to his new boyfriend at the bar, lets call him Chet, and talk to him before coming back and talking to me. This happened multiple times to the point where his new lover, was actually like, Hey, man. Arent you on a date over there? Thanks, Chet. Maybe I should go on a date with you.

I had only stopped at my apartment for a second after work before meeting him, so I had on the blouse and cardigan that I had worn to work, but I swapped my skirt for some skinny jeans and flats. A little into our date, he decided to tell me that he hated cardigans. Oh my, I thought This silly boy doesnt even know what a cardigan is! So I said, Oh, no actually this is a cardigan, gesturing to my adorable ensemble. To which Steve stated, Yeah, I know. I hate itI like your tight and sexy pants though. Uuh, how do you even come back from that? In addition to insulting me, he also seemed to enjoy talking about inappropriate topics of conversation. For instance, we were discussing Russel Brandt and he brought up how he read that Russel is a sex addict and once had sex with 100+ women in one month. Neat! You read that in the Wall Street Journal? You are so wise. So then he started doing the math and realized that that means that Russel Brandt must have had sex with multiple women on the same day/same time! Novel idea, right? Then he decided to explain to me that he prefers to have sex with one person at a time. At first he was joking around and that was fine, but then he kept coming back to it and asked me if I preferred more than one person at a time. I told him that in general, I like to keep it an intimate one-on-one situation, but thanks very much for asking. And then he wanted to go into a conversation about shaving private areas??? Um…no gracias. He also would say “woof” whenever any female would walk past him at the bar. When I called him out on it he said, Whatever, I was in a frat. Vomit.

At the end of the date, I started talking about how I was tired and needed to get up early in the morning, which apparently to him meant order another beer. In any case, the last hour was pretty blah because I wanted to get out of there and probably should have just left, but Im too nice of a person. I stuck it out and probably took a step backward for womankind everywhere. Sorry, suffragettes. At the end of the night, I was just going to go in for the handshake/hug/get me the hell out of here spin-move and he went full-on MAKEOUT. Like, didn’t even start with a peck! It was tongue city and it was not cute. My face was sexually assaulted and I literally had to wipe his SLOBBER off of my chin. This went on for way too long and I spent the metro ride home wiping slobber off of my chin and questioning my faith in the opposite sex.

He kept G-chatting me after the date (which I ignored) and he finally fizzled away into the JDate ether, never to be heard from again. That is until I was leaving St. Paddys Day Happy Hour with my girlfriends a couple of weeks ago and walked past him on the streets of DC. I kid you not, I LITERALLY saw him, pointed and laughed, and promptly ran into Banana Republic to try on some cardigans. AA

Lesson: Too many lesson here to count. Don’t strike up a bromance on a first date. Don’t insult a girl’s appearance. Don’t ask about someone’s sex life. Most importantly keep your tongue to yourself, unless instructed otherwise.