It Was That Bad

“So this one time I took this girl out, one thing led to another, yada yada yada, and to sum it up, it was the absolute worst date I have ever been on in my entire life.”

Is something every single one of us has told a group of friends. 

For full effect, download “Another Saturday Night” by Sam Cooke, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

I would also like to give a shout out to the wonderful Jordan Del Toro for being the co-contributor and brainchild behind this blogpost. Her inspiring words recounting the time when she was taken out on a first date by a schmuck wearing a hockey jersey who tried to describe the size of his penis to her was some true inspiration for your entertainment this beautiful Sunday morning.

We all have bad, terrible, piss-poor awful dating stories. Go ahead and dig into your memory bank to retrieve some of yours, because they exist. You know they do. I love hearing bad date stories. They can make your stomach hurt and eyes water with uncontrolled laughing fits.  And last night when a roomful of twenty-somethings sat together getting drunk on hot chocolate started pulling out all of the stops to describe the worst dates we have ever been on, things began to get interesting.

Here are just a few of the highlights.

“And so there I sat at 2:30 in the morning, waiting out in the boonies for my Mom to come pick me up, meanwhile the girl I took to prom was back at the cabin getting frisky with her boyfriend on the pool table.”

“Who in their right mind would think taking a girl to a double-feature matinee was a good idea? This guy.”

“He sort of just leaned over and had his mouth open.  It didn’t turn out well from there.”

“When I picked her up I thought she looked a little bit familiar, and then after she told me how old she was, I put two and two together and realized when I was finishing up my practicum, I had taught this girl as a 7^th grader.”

“Pretending to be a schizophrenic is never a good way to entertain someone.”

“And so we sat there in his house, watching the most racist independent movie about African-American profiling I have ever seen.  Never mind the fact that I’m half black.”

“His name was Harold.”

“In her eyes, she probably thought we were making out.  In my eyes, I felt like I was getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from a plunger.”

We sat around telling tall tales one right after another trying to one-up each other with the worst dates that we had ever been on in our entire life. When after the dust had settled one of the guys pulled out the ultimatum of bad date stories that put a hush on the room that no one could even compete with.

“To sum things up, after spending $800 to fly out to Delaware and meet this girl, the only contact I had with her was the hug welcoming me off the airplane, and a 20 minute dinner conversation.  That was it.  I basically just hung out with her Dad instead for 4 days. Worst. Weekend. Ever.”

Yeah, anyone who flies 2,500 miles to take a girl out to dinner and gets the shaft, ultimately has the worst dating story ever.  But at that point in our conversation, a valid perspective was brought into play.

“Can you just picture her at a cabin somewhere in Delaware, telling all of her friends the story about that one guy who was a creep, who flew across the country to take her out? In her eyes, you’re probably the worst date she’s ever had."

And that’s when it hit me.  We have all been someone’s absolute worst date of all time. Yes that’s right. We have all been creeps. We have all been awkward. We have all been stars of someone else’s story describing to all of their own friends about the worst date they ever had. We can try our best to deny that fact in our own heads, but the bottom line is plain and simple. You, and me, and everyone else has been the instigator of an awful, terrible, piss-poor date.  And there is nothing any of us can do about that.

 So enjoy it. Tell the stories, relive the bad memories, have a laughing seizure fit remembering that one awkward doorstep scene.  Just remember one thing.  Somewhere out there, some random stranger that you have probably forgotten at this point in your life is sitting in a cabin with their friends, retelling the story of that one ridiculously bad date that they had with you.