In college, I really didn’t date much. Most of my dates to sorority semis and formals were friends, or friends of friends, so except for the time that I kind of stole my friend’s formal date and asked him out (with her permission!), I didn’t date. That is, until my senior year.
When I got back from my College Program and was back in Boston for my final semester, I was pretty hung up on Christian (don’t judge me) and having some serious symptoms of Disney-withdrawal. Meanwhile, he decided to get back together with one of the girlfriends he’d dated when he was a teen, telling me that he was only with her because he missed me so much, he had to be with someone else to ease the pain of me not being there… I was an idiot, I know. So to get over him and how much I missed Disney, I thought dating a bit would help me, too.
Have you ever heard of the app Happn? It’s an app where basically, you can match with and chat with people that you’ve already crossed paths with – at the coffee shop, waiting for the T, in the store, etc. A friend of mine had something to do with it so I downloaded it out of support, and I matched with this guy. We’ll call him Adam.
Adam looked cute. He was smart, looked like he was tall and in pretty good shape, and just generally seemed nice from his profile. We chatted for a couple of days on the app, then he asked for my number. So we texted for a bit, and then spoke on the phone a few times (yes, I am that person who likes to talk on the phone). He kept telling me how pretty I sounded and how cute my voice is, and asked me out. I told him I wanted to go bowling, and he said that would be great. Fun fact for any guy who wants to date me – bowling will ALWAYS be my favorite and #1 choice for a first date activity!
The night of our date comes, and he calls me 30 minutes before we’re supposed to meet to tell me he’s going to be late. Like, two hours late, because he decided to go visit a friend that afternoon and lost track of time. Okay, fine. Then, he tells me that actually, he doesn’t want to go bowling, he thinks we should just get hot chocolate. Okay? I tell him I’ll meet him at Max Brenner, which if you don’t know, is like a chocolate restaurant/bar in Boston that has amazing hot chocolate and desserts.
I show up to meet him – he’s still a few minutes late – and let’s just say, I was cat-fished. HARD. He wasn’t nearly as tall as his photos made him look – which wouldn’t have bothered me if he didn’t lie about it. He was also about 20 pounds heavier than his photos, had awful skin, and really bad teeth. Literally none of this was shown in the photos – I don’t consider myself a vain person, and I value personality over looks, but if you’re going to lie about your appearance THAT much, I’m going to be a little irked . But, being the polite person I am, I figure I’d give him a chance. The real kicker is that then he actually had the audacity to say to me that he was so glad I actually looked like my photos because he would have been really mad if I didn’t, and if I wasn’t hot as my pictures made me look he probably would’ve left. Okie dokie.
So then, he tells me that he doesn’t want to go to Max Brenner’s. “Let’s just go to Starbucks,” he says. I’m sorry, WHAT? I have enough Starbucks gift cards to last me a year, I did not need him to buy me a $5 hot chocolate that I wouldn’t even like (Starbucks makes disgusting hot cocoa, comment if you agree). But there we are, at a Starbucks, with him talking over me and interrupting me, and me just trying to get this date over with. He brought up no less than 10 times that he works at Harvard, but he probably couldn’t have even told you what I was in school for.
While on a walk back to my apartment, he tries to hold my hand. I say no, because I’m not comfortable with that when I don’t know him well at all. For some reason, he thinks that because I don’t want to hold hands, backing me against a tree is totally okay. I finally get him to keep moving, and we end up at my apartment so I bring him inside to the lobby area for a bit, figuring if I need to I can make a quick escape. I don’t remember all the details of the conversation, but I do remember him asking me why I didn’t want to hold hands and me saying that I just wanted to take things slow, so he told me if I wasn’t going to put out, he could walk across the street to any bar and pick up any girl he wants. He then proceeds to tell me about how when he goes out with the other Harvard guys, they compete to see how many girls’ numbers they can get and he always wins. I asked if he ever actually called the girls and he said no. When I told him how rude that was and how hurtful that could be to a girl, he laughed.
But my favorite part of all this was when I opened up about Christian, and how that was all very recent and part of why I was hesitant to go crazy with physical stuff, and he tells me, “You’re pretty, but honestly, no guy is going to want to be with you if you’re like this with physical stuff on the first date. You’re pretty fucked up, I don’t think anyone is ever going to love you.”
Somehow, my idiot self though that despite this absolutely asshole-ish comment, it would be okay to let him use my bathroom. Bad idea. He used the bathroom and then he wouldn’t leave. I kept asking him to go, and he wouldn’t budge. He more or less told me in so many words that I couldn’t stop him from doing anything he wanted (he was still bigger than me), so when he went to hug me, I let him all while taking inventory of what items I could use as a weapon, and which of my knives would be the easiest and fastest to get to. Finally, my fake-playing nice got him to agree to leave.
On his way out, he texts me asking what my problem is because he could tell I wasn’t happy. I told him I didn’t appreciate the way he talked to me, or about women in general, and that I didn’t think we hit it off. After acting like a little bitch for a minute, he shut up. Meanwhile, I was sleeping with a knife next to bed after calling Christian crying three times about how awful the date was. So much for trying to get over him, right?
Because guys like this ALWAYS have to make a reappearance, like the serial killer at the end of a slasher film, about a year or two later, I randomly got a text from a new number saying, “Hey it’s Adam from Harvard, remember me?” First of all, working at Harvard is not a personality trait like he seems to think it is, but that’s not what I said in my reply. Instead, I responded, “Hey! Yeah, I think I remember you. You’re the self-absorbed, pompous asshole who told me I was too fucked up to be loved, right?” And then blocked him.
Moral of the story, don’t use Happn — you never know what kind of creep you’re going to meet. Fortunately, I’m an eternal optimist so after some time to process everything that happened, I decided that because I didn’t date much in college, this was just all of the bad dates I was supposed to have by this point in one night… right?
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