Date-fu fail tales.

"Yeah, I said it. I said it." - Chris Rock


I think it'd be amusing to share any messed up stories about dating the opposite sex in here, particularly when things go wrong.

I'll actually post an amusing one later on, but I just wanted to throw up the marker.

While the stories I have are vaguely embarrassing, they are mostly comic and ridiculous. In some ways, a bad date is better than a good one, because you can always milk it for sympathy with people. (Which I guess is what this topic is all about -- the whole zeitgeist of trying to out-tragicomedy one another for humor points.)

I've been the guy that doesn't realize a relationship is over, so I can sympathize with this guy.

But at the same time, I was celebrating my graduation with a date out with a woman from one of my classes, because we'd both quit and gone back to school and so forth. My plan was to shuttle her out to Fell's point, grab a really nice meal at a casual place that did seafood and then kind of shop around Fell's Point, which has stuff like music and clothing and costume and jewelry stores, before doing a bar-crawl. It was sort of like an afternoon of fun planned for as soon as the final final ended and we could get on the road from DC to Baltimore.

Anyway, her boyfriend, whom she is still living with, finds out. And while I wasn't really thinking 'date' in the way of trying to hop in the sack (because I was aware she had a relationship that was slowly dying and I decided, wisely, to be a source of amusement rather than a source of man-angst) finds out and schedules his mother for a visit, which means that she is committed to holding up the facade that she still has a relationship for this Italian mom.

Well, turns out she really wants to do the pub crawl and drink-date, so she decides to juggle the schedule -- I get the impression he wasn't happy with it, and I was like (knowing that the best move was not to be uptight) "Okay, no prob! What time do you need to be back by?"

So it turns out that this guy is gonna come pick her up and haul her back to the mother-meeting...which I think is way out there on the controlling freak boyfriend scale, a real desperation move.

So yeah, we're halfway through and the guy pops up early, which I sort of saw coming.

Well, we were already drunk and ensconced in a bar.

End result? He gets to drag a drunk nearly-ex girlfriend back home to his mother, who must think that something is up, and I get a 'je t'aime' text halfway through the mandatory mom-date. A month later, the relationship is over and the way is clear por moi.

It worked out pretty well, up until the point that geography got in the way, but it was funny as hell to have the dude there half the time. But the moral of the story is: let the other guy be the dick. I just wish I could have been a fly on the wall with the a) drunk soon-to-be-ex b) the delusional boyfriend and c) the mom who must be flipping at the whole sordid scene. Because she left reeking of beer and smoke.

And the thing is, I still had a good time. It takes a lot more to drag me down.