MexicanishGuy and I decided to meet up about a week after our first date at a speakeasy in Soho (in London...obviously) called Milk & Honey after discovering that we both love the concept of a speakeasy - even if alcohol and merriment are no longer illegal.
I arrived at the place that Google maps told me to go to, and only found a large wooden warehouse type door and nothing else to indicate that I was in the right place. I waited outside for MexicanishGuy to arrive and when he did, it was like a large round balloon (his head, obviously) floated towards me with pursed lips, closed eyes and that weird hmmm sound - I was almost immediately panicked because what if he really was terrible at kissing and it wasnt that he was drunk or nervous the first time we met!?
I remedied this by dodging his balloon head and giving him my cheek.
We went inside and were seated at what I can only describe as a mushroom table - one, because it was mushroom shaped and two, because it was about the size of a mushroom and very uncomfortable. I think he was as uncomfortable and underwhelmed by the place as I was because he suggested that we leave after the first (mediocre) drink.
I suggested then that we head off to a lovely cocktail bar that Id been to before called SixStorey - it was an old six storey house that had been turned into a multi function restaurant/cocktail bar/event space. We unfortunately walked into the middle of an all girl piss up session and had to deal with some rather noisy birds at the table next door, and as I rarely deal with inconvencience very well, I quickly went from being chatty and pleasant to threatening to body slam ever drunken girl I saw. MexicanishGuy seemed concerned by this - or my well being..Im not sure, but kept trying somehow defend my honour every time one of them came into contact with me. Around the time I progressed to wanting to cut a bitch is when I suggested that we leave. He didnt need to see my turn into my dad on the second date.
The one thing that struck me about the way this guy spoke, which is what had perplexed me during our first date, was how he referred to people: which is to say that he seemed to categorise people by their "mental disorders"...we had previously discussed depression and I had mentioned that I had gone through a period of depression in my twenties and that I had a few friends that suffered from it, and since that moment, he kept referring back to my "previous mental health disorder" and was asking about my "friends with the mental health issues". I was oddly struck by this.
For the third date, he'd invited me to an early dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant in Elephant and Castle (there are no elephants or castles here...only filth and traffic) and, while the food was pretty decent, the conversation....it was otherwise.
He told me a story about his week where he had visited a difficult patient of his and how the relative of his patient has been quite rude to him about something. He told me that she, the relative, had had severe mental issues...again, that odd expression. I asked him what he meant by "severe mental issues" and he told me that the way that she was treating and speaking to him gave him the impression that she had mental issues that she had to deal with. I asked him if he knew if she had been diagnosed and he told me that he didnt know, only that it seemed that this woman was mentally disturbed.
It dawned on me at this point that he had said something similar on the first date about the girl that he took Japanese classes with.
Basically, this dude was taking visceral and emotional reactions that people were having to situations, classing them as "mental health issue" and then speaking about these people as though they had been diagnosed with actual clinical mental disorders.
After processing what was going on and having the disbelief dawn on me, I told him that it was possible for people to have emotional reactions to unpleasant situations without meaning that they have mental issues - he didnt get it.
I didnt get him.
What was worse was that he was a qualified therapist and likely knew better than to run around tacking mental disorders to people when he wasnt actually qualified to do so?
Suffice to say, I was wholly stumped and ready to GTFO.
I had fortunately told him that I didnt have time to spend the entire afternoon with him as I had a previous commitment (I didnt), and so after about an hour and a half, I said that I had to leave, so we paid the bill and walked out of the restaurant. He stepped forward to kiss me and, as he did so, I was overcome with physical repulsion: not only was the mental categorising thing really weird and mildly offensive to humanity, I was now also one hundred percent certain that he was the worst kisser in the history of homo sapiens, so when his balloon head and smacking lips started coming towards me, I basically did an upside donkey (or perhaps a wheel pose if you are a yogi? Or maybe just a full on back bend into a crab-like formation) just to get away from his face, half shouted that I had to go and then turned and ran off towards my bus.
I had been puffing on a vape that day and his parting words to me were "oh okay, well...good luck with the vape...bye"
Ummmm....good luck with my vape? Errr....okay, thanks? What a very random thing to say to someone.
He texted me the next morning at 7am to ask me if I had watched the last episode of Game of Thrones - to which I responded questioning his logic being that it was 7am and I was on the way to work so when exactly would i have watched it - considering it came out in the early hours of the morning UK time. Not only was he a terrible kisser, but apparently, he was not hit with the proverbial logic stick very many times in his life.
I texted him about 3 days after that last interaction and told him that, lovely though he was, I was not feeling the spark and that I thought I was looking for something (anything) else. He responded with something along the same lines and there it was: liberation from having my face sucked into a black hole.
Tuesday, 27 August 2019
Monday, 12 August 2019
That time that my face got stuck
Around March time, when the weather was in the that weird limbo of being too warm for a serious winter coat and too cold to wear a jacket with a light top, I dared venture out on a Friday evening with just a jacket and a light top - and, as my date for the evening was running late, I was sitting outside at a pub in Notting Hill (in London...obviously) having a glass of wine on my ace and enjoying some people watching, freezing my noombies off.
My date for the evening was some new potential from the highly elite dating application, otherwise known as Tinder - a Mexican Spanish Guy, henceforth known as MexicanishGuy.
We'd matched on Tinder some days before and between chatting, I'd ascertained that he was only 3 years younger than me, he was an occupational therapist, he lived with his brother in the house that his parents owned (but did not live in), he was learning Japanese and had grown up between Kuwait and the United States - no major red flags here, folks!
Despite being half an hour late to the date, it started off really well - he took me to a Japanese bar for a few Japanese pints which were very tasty and we engaged in conversation about learning languages, our respective professions and the like. He explained that he had worked in the charity sector prior to becoming a therapist and had decided that he wanted to help people more than he was doing at the time, and that it was the motivation for going back to university to study occupational therapy. We also discussed the shortfalls of the NHS and then progressed onto our families and friends.
He started telling me about a woman that he knew from his Japanese class that had been acting really weird towards him since she had found herself a boyfriend and, without going into the details, explained the story of what had happened with them - which is to say, not very much. They'd been friends and she'd, apparently, become quite attached to him and then, when she found herself a boyfriend, she'd distanced herself and started acting strange. What he said next struck me as a little odd - he said, very specifically, that she suffered from a lot of "mental issues". Now, because this is not a thing that one typically hears people say about other people, unless spoken in jest, of course, I thought he meant that she had been diagnosed as having actual mental issues, which I enquired about and to which he replied that he didn't know if she had been diagnosed. I was a little confused, but I left it at that.
Anyway, I was on the route to being drunk at this stage - after two pints, and plodded off on slightly unsteady legs to the bathroom down a thousand stairs (Why are the bathrooms always in the basement!?) and, once I had returned, he lead me off to the next venue, which was a lovely tapas restaurant just off Portobello Road.
We sat, we chatted, he ordered Sangrias - it was really turning out to be a lovely date.
After about half an hour of drinking and chatting, he suggested that we get a few tapas as it was getting late and dinner time had come and gone. I wasn't sure what I was picking up as everything was in Spanish and, being vegetarian, I was cautious about picking things that might contain sneaky meat, so I ended up with 4 plates - two of which contained variations of olives. As I sat down with my mostly olive-based dinner, he sauntered off to get his tapas and returned a few minutes later with a few extra plates for me because he knew that I hadn't known what to pick.
I was quite impressed - this had, thus far, been the best date I'd been on. This guy was thoughtful, he seemed to have his shit together, we got on well - what more could I ask for?
More importantly - what was I missing? This was definitely a "too good to be true" situation, but where was the catch?
After a few more sangrias, we headed off to another pub for a drink for the road and, all of a sudden, it was 11pm and time to go home.
I was slightly drunk, and felt a little fuzzy on the inside because the date was going so well (although I'll admit the fuzziness might have been because of the alcohol). I had already imagined our future in my head: we had become a mutually respectable power couple - him with his private therapy practice and me with me ever-evolving tech career. We had little Mexican/South African spawn running around; we had a golden retriever named Burt that Eevee (my cat) loved sometimes and we all lived in our lovely little cottage in the English countryside with our 1GB fibre internet connection and weekend trips to Cornwall and the South of France. Perfect, right?
As he walked me to Notting Hill Gate station holding my hand, he leaned over, told me I was "so cute" (errrrr....come again? Cute? I haven't been called cute since I was about 5, but sure...okay...I could deal with "cute"), and then he kissed me...
This was the "WHOMP, THERE IT IS!" moment.
It was like kissing a vacuum cleaner.
To be honest, I didn't actually do any kissing - I just stood there while he, basically, inhaled my face while making strange "hmm mmm" noises.
It was weird.
As fuck.
Towards the end of this, for lack of a better word, experience, he somehow hoovered my top and bottom lip into his mouth and I stood there making a pouting face with my lips stuck between his while he tried to kiss me...in my mind, this was reminiscent of what I would call a "Hollywood kiss" in my youth: two characters kissing each other but swaying their bodies dramatically to make it look far more passionate that it was - except that I wasnt swaying, or doing any kissing.
This lasted a good 5 to 10 seconds and all the while he continued making their weird "hmm mm" sounds - so long enough for me to feel really awkward about it. I think I even opened my eyes at one stage just to check out what actually was going on with him.
I'm pretty sure he was unaware of how awkward it was.
He, thankfully, released my face eventually and took my hand, pulling me towards the station to go home, while chatting along the way. I don't remember what we spoke about, but I remember my prevailing thought being that I didn't know if I could actually deal with someone who kissed so badly and that I hoped it was just because he was drunk and/or nervous.
We eventually reached the station and descended down into the depths of the Lundy Undy before going our separate ways and, just as we parted, he kissed me again and...well, I'd like to say it was better, but it wasn't. This time, I physically pulled my face back from his vacuum-like lip lock and could swear I heard a *smack* sound as the air lock broke.
I, then, hastily said good-bye and ran off like it was the last train home and I was about to miss it (it was, in fact, a 24 hour tube so....)
As I walked to the train platform, I felt my dreams of our perfect little family going up in flames in my Sangria-drunk brain and then berated myself for being so fickle: I told myself that I was a 33 year old woman who couldn't base the worth of a person on their ability to kiss the way I want them to because I wasn't a teenager anymore. I also kept telling myself that I cared about so much more than just their ability to coordinate their bodily movements.
I had to keep telling myself this daily until I saw him again - it even became a sort of mantra, because I really wanted to like him. I really, really did.
I also kept telling myself that I had been drunk that night and he had been drunk that night, and that it couldn't have been as bad as I remembered it being - which is why we went out a second time...and a third time....
Thats a story for another post.
My date for the evening was some new potential from the highly elite dating application, otherwise known as Tinder - a Mexican Spanish Guy, henceforth known as MexicanishGuy.
We'd matched on Tinder some days before and between chatting, I'd ascertained that he was only 3 years younger than me, he was an occupational therapist, he lived with his brother in the house that his parents owned (but did not live in), he was learning Japanese and had grown up between Kuwait and the United States - no major red flags here, folks!
Despite being half an hour late to the date, it started off really well - he took me to a Japanese bar for a few Japanese pints which were very tasty and we engaged in conversation about learning languages, our respective professions and the like. He explained that he had worked in the charity sector prior to becoming a therapist and had decided that he wanted to help people more than he was doing at the time, and that it was the motivation for going back to university to study occupational therapy. We also discussed the shortfalls of the NHS and then progressed onto our families and friends.
He started telling me about a woman that he knew from his Japanese class that had been acting really weird towards him since she had found herself a boyfriend and, without going into the details, explained the story of what had happened with them - which is to say, not very much. They'd been friends and she'd, apparently, become quite attached to him and then, when she found herself a boyfriend, she'd distanced herself and started acting strange. What he said next struck me as a little odd - he said, very specifically, that she suffered from a lot of "mental issues". Now, because this is not a thing that one typically hears people say about other people, unless spoken in jest, of course, I thought he meant that she had been diagnosed as having actual mental issues, which I enquired about and to which he replied that he didn't know if she had been diagnosed. I was a little confused, but I left it at that.
Anyway, I was on the route to being drunk at this stage - after two pints, and plodded off on slightly unsteady legs to the bathroom down a thousand stairs (Why are the bathrooms always in the basement!?) and, once I had returned, he lead me off to the next venue, which was a lovely tapas restaurant just off Portobello Road.
We sat, we chatted, he ordered Sangrias - it was really turning out to be a lovely date.
After about half an hour of drinking and chatting, he suggested that we get a few tapas as it was getting late and dinner time had come and gone. I wasn't sure what I was picking up as everything was in Spanish and, being vegetarian, I was cautious about picking things that might contain sneaky meat, so I ended up with 4 plates - two of which contained variations of olives. As I sat down with my mostly olive-based dinner, he sauntered off to get his tapas and returned a few minutes later with a few extra plates for me because he knew that I hadn't known what to pick.
I was quite impressed - this had, thus far, been the best date I'd been on. This guy was thoughtful, he seemed to have his shit together, we got on well - what more could I ask for?
More importantly - what was I missing? This was definitely a "too good to be true" situation, but where was the catch?
After a few more sangrias, we headed off to another pub for a drink for the road and, all of a sudden, it was 11pm and time to go home.
I was slightly drunk, and felt a little fuzzy on the inside because the date was going so well (although I'll admit the fuzziness might have been because of the alcohol). I had already imagined our future in my head: we had become a mutually respectable power couple - him with his private therapy practice and me with me ever-evolving tech career. We had little Mexican/South African spawn running around; we had a golden retriever named Burt that Eevee (my cat) loved sometimes and we all lived in our lovely little cottage in the English countryside with our 1GB fibre internet connection and weekend trips to Cornwall and the South of France. Perfect, right?
As he walked me to Notting Hill Gate station holding my hand, he leaned over, told me I was "so cute" (errrrr....come again? Cute? I haven't been called cute since I was about 5, but sure...okay...I could deal with "cute"), and then he kissed me...
This was the "WHOMP, THERE IT IS!" moment.
It was like kissing a vacuum cleaner.
To be honest, I didn't actually do any kissing - I just stood there while he, basically, inhaled my face while making strange "hmm mmm" noises.
It was weird.
As fuck.
Towards the end of this, for lack of a better word, experience, he somehow hoovered my top and bottom lip into his mouth and I stood there making a pouting face with my lips stuck between his while he tried to kiss me...in my mind, this was reminiscent of what I would call a "Hollywood kiss" in my youth: two characters kissing each other but swaying their bodies dramatically to make it look far more passionate that it was - except that I wasnt swaying, or doing any kissing.
This lasted a good 5 to 10 seconds and all the while he continued making their weird "hmm mm" sounds - so long enough for me to feel really awkward about it. I think I even opened my eyes at one stage just to check out what actually was going on with him.
I'm pretty sure he was unaware of how awkward it was.
He, thankfully, released my face eventually and took my hand, pulling me towards the station to go home, while chatting along the way. I don't remember what we spoke about, but I remember my prevailing thought being that I didn't know if I could actually deal with someone who kissed so badly and that I hoped it was just because he was drunk and/or nervous.
We eventually reached the station and descended down into the depths of the Lundy Undy before going our separate ways and, just as we parted, he kissed me again and...well, I'd like to say it was better, but it wasn't. This time, I physically pulled my face back from his vacuum-like lip lock and could swear I heard a *smack* sound as the air lock broke.
I, then, hastily said good-bye and ran off like it was the last train home and I was about to miss it (it was, in fact, a 24 hour tube so....)
As I walked to the train platform, I felt my dreams of our perfect little family going up in flames in my Sangria-drunk brain and then berated myself for being so fickle: I told myself that I was a 33 year old woman who couldn't base the worth of a person on their ability to kiss the way I want them to because I wasn't a teenager anymore. I also kept telling myself that I cared about so much more than just their ability to coordinate their bodily movements.
I had to keep telling myself this daily until I saw him again - it even became a sort of mantra, because I really wanted to like him. I really, really did.
I also kept telling myself that I had been drunk that night and he had been drunk that night, and that it couldn't have been as bad as I remembered it being - which is why we went out a second time...and a third time....
Thats a story for another post.
Monday, 5 August 2019
That time that I got it seriously wrong
Sometimes, in the crazy, modern world of dating apps, you match with someone who seems to just get you - you seem to share a similar sense of humour, have similar life values, joke about the same topics, both think kids are gross (but secretly we all know we actually love them a little bit); things you say seem to resonate and things they say perceivably tick so many of your boxes.
In other words, you find people who seem too be good to be true.
That's because they usually are.
Around the beginning of June, I matched with a guy whose profile made him seem like a lovable goof. He had a bit of a non-chalant, messy-but-not-too-messy, cuddly, lovable, jokey aura about him, and his pictures appeared to back this up.
We started chatting and instantly clicked. I teased him about his Britishness, he teased me about my South Africanness; we joked about how noisy and messy children are and how they ruin everything; he told me he had nieces and nephews that he baked for. We discussed our work situations and he told me that he had worked as a curator at a local museum, but was retrenched and was now working for his parents at their "property management company" while looking for something else suitable.
We spoke about life aspirations, and I told him that I wanted to have a child one day, but that I didnt mind if I ended up adopting, and he told me that he wasnt sure if he wanted his own because he thought that having a copy of himself running around wasnt a good idea, but that he was also open to adoption.
We joked about my divorce situation, we joked about being British, we joked about so many things.
In hindsight - and this is the danger with online dating - I believe I had made up my mind about the kind of person he was: the father of my perfect future children, my soul mate, the one I had been looking for, my hartse punt - and everything he said seemed to feed into this idea of how I thought he was.
In reality, if I think back to our conversations, the signs were there and I was, very obviously, mislead.
The problem is that when you are having a mostly jestful conversation with someone, you dont expect them to actually be telling you the cold, hard truth about themselves.
ConservativeTwatGuy (though I didnt realise at the time that this is what he was) and I agreed to meet one Friday evening at a pub in Hampstead (in London...obviously), and as I walked into this lovely pub that I'd randomly picked from Google Maps, I was immediately disappointed.
Not only was he shorter than he looked in his pictures, he also didn't quite look the way he did in his pictures: it most certainly was the same person, but, suffice to say, his pictures didnt quite portray him as the hobbit that he was in real life.
Nevertheless, I persisted. I am, after all, far more interested in people for who they are than (for the most part) how they look (or so I tell myself on a frequent basis), so I greeted him the way I would usually greet a date which starts with becoming really awkward and then wildly over compensating by being loud and funny (so I think) to cover up how awkward I feel, coupled with fake nonchalant-ness while throwing (shot-putting, really) my bag and coat onto the floor and then exclaiming, with wildly gesticulating arms, about how nonchalant I am about my possessions.
Basically, I played it super cool - as you can tell.
We ordered a bottle of wine and then I followed him while he plodded around the pub looking for somewhere to sit, too shy to actually ask if we could sit at any of the open tables. Eventually, getting tired of aimless wandering, I asked a waitress if we could sit at one of them, which she said we could, and so we did.
What transpired is really, almost, beyond words - I mean, I woke up the next morning wondering how the hell this date had spiralled so badly.
He basically began to tell me that he was from a conservative family who supported the Leave campaign and all Tory policies because they, ultimately, supported his and his family's agenda which was that they were a wealthy, Jewish family and wanted to keep it that way.
He told me that his parents "property management company" was actually just him, their son, "managing" his parents numerous properties while they were off living in Spain, and that he was "waiting" for the right job to come along.
In other words, this guy lost his job and was living off mummy and daddy's money with no plans to do otherwise.
I dont have a problem with families who own multiple properties - please dont get me wrong. I do have a problem with people who live off their parents money, support policies that are designed to keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor and then complain about the "state" of the country.
He also told me that he had a very difficult relationship with his parents because he was the youngest child and was convinced that his father intensely disliked him (to be honest, I was starting to understand why his father might feel that way) and that, despite the fact that he bakes for and often fetches his nieces and nephews from school and spends time with them, he actually really dislikes them. I, convinced that he couldn't be serious, made a joke about how we all say that we hate kids, but that we really dont and would love our own - he looked me dead in the eye and told me that he does, in fact, hate children....
You may imagine that, after 20 minutes of listening to this, I might have been necking the white wine. If you were imagining that, you would be correct - I was necking the white wine.
By the time the second bottle of wine arrived (yes, there was a second, because I needed it to be able to deal with this dude and seriously - who hates children!?), we had started discussing books that we were reading and I, innocently, mentioned that I was reading a booked called "How Not to Die" (read it - it will change your life) which is about nutrition and how the food we eat affects the diseases we suffer from in our lives.
Its something Im interested in, okay. Stop judging me.
By this point, he knew that I was (am) a pescatarian and proceeded to army-style interrogate me about my thought process and choices around being a pescatarian.
The way it was going, it really started to feel like he was trying to catch me out - for what though, I wasnt quite sure.
At one point, while talking about empathy towards animals, he asked me why it was okay to kill insects in my house, but not to eat animals because they are all creatures after all?
I stated that I dont kill insects in my house and that it was strictly a catch and release zone (my cat, however, doesnt agree with me on this), and that I was aware that I was a hypocrite because I occasionally eat fish, but that it was something I was working on.
I assume because he was drunk, he missed the hypocrite part and started firing questions about why I think its okay to ride elephants in the East, and to eat meat? (He was half shouting at this point and I was a little shocked, to be honest), so I politely replied that I didnt think it was okay which is why I didnt do, or agree, with either of those things.
Obviously, realising what he had said and that he had made a bit of an ass of himself, he then proceeded to lecture me about how humans are meant to eat meat and that, if we were meant to be vegetarian, we wouldn't have incisor teeth (like, mate. I dont care. Eat whatever the fuck you want).
I tried to diffuse the conversation by bringing it back to the book I was reading - which is all science based, in case you were wondering - and mentioned how so many foods that people eat today causes and/or worsens a myriad of diseases that people suffer from. I started to mention that I have asthma, for example - which is when he cut me off and told me that asthma, like many diseases, is a man-made concept. Shocked, I retorted and told him that I definitely have asthma and have been diagnosed and have taken medication for it for a number of years, and that it is made worse when I eat dairy products. He, then, made a sort-of half laugh, half disgusted sneer at my perceivable "brain washing" and told me that I was imagining it.
Now, we may have finished two bottles of wine by this point, but I was not in a drunk enough state of mind to be able to sit there and pretend like I wanted to be there any longer.
I downed the rest of my drink, slammed the glass on the table and just as he was starting to say something about the date, I stated that I was "fucking leaving", picked up my bag and stormed out of the pub and in that moment I knew how Cameron Diaz's character in "The Holiday" felt when she kicked her ex-boyfriend out for cheating, because I was performing similar sort of actions which, I suppose, sort of looks something like a large, oversized wasp darting about, fists flying while making high-pitched "Humph" sounds and wilding shaking my head while frowning, with that old, familiar thought creeping into my head:
"HOW THE FUCK DO THEY FIND ME???"
As I said, in hindsight, this guy had, in one way or another, alerted me to these character flaws before we met, but because it was wrapped up in, what seemed to be, a goofy, funny, charming package, it essentially me sold a dream that didnt exist.
I spent the rest of the night slightly drunk and raging at myself for such poor judgement. To be honest, I still wonder how I made it through two hours of that.
He texted me later that evening to apologise for it not working out and I responded by blocking him.
The one lesson I learnt that night was that sometimes there is not enough alcohol in the world to turn a bad date into a semi-acceptable one.
In other words, you find people who seem too be good to be true.
That's because they usually are.
Around the beginning of June, I matched with a guy whose profile made him seem like a lovable goof. He had a bit of a non-chalant, messy-but-not-too-messy, cuddly, lovable, jokey aura about him, and his pictures appeared to back this up.
We started chatting and instantly clicked. I teased him about his Britishness, he teased me about my South Africanness; we joked about how noisy and messy children are and how they ruin everything; he told me he had nieces and nephews that he baked for. We discussed our work situations and he told me that he had worked as a curator at a local museum, but was retrenched and was now working for his parents at their "property management company" while looking for something else suitable.
We spoke about life aspirations, and I told him that I wanted to have a child one day, but that I didnt mind if I ended up adopting, and he told me that he wasnt sure if he wanted his own because he thought that having a copy of himself running around wasnt a good idea, but that he was also open to adoption.
We joked about my divorce situation, we joked about being British, we joked about so many things.
In hindsight - and this is the danger with online dating - I believe I had made up my mind about the kind of person he was: the father of my perfect future children, my soul mate, the one I had been looking for, my hartse punt - and everything he said seemed to feed into this idea of how I thought he was.
In reality, if I think back to our conversations, the signs were there and I was, very obviously, mislead.
The problem is that when you are having a mostly jestful conversation with someone, you dont expect them to actually be telling you the cold, hard truth about themselves.
ConservativeTwatGuy (though I didnt realise at the time that this is what he was) and I agreed to meet one Friday evening at a pub in Hampstead (in London...obviously), and as I walked into this lovely pub that I'd randomly picked from Google Maps, I was immediately disappointed.
Not only was he shorter than he looked in his pictures, he also didn't quite look the way he did in his pictures: it most certainly was the same person, but, suffice to say, his pictures didnt quite portray him as the hobbit that he was in real life.
Nevertheless, I persisted. I am, after all, far more interested in people for who they are than (for the most part) how they look (or so I tell myself on a frequent basis), so I greeted him the way I would usually greet a date which starts with becoming really awkward and then wildly over compensating by being loud and funny (so I think) to cover up how awkward I feel, coupled with fake nonchalant-ness while throwing (shot-putting, really) my bag and coat onto the floor and then exclaiming, with wildly gesticulating arms, about how nonchalant I am about my possessions.
Basically, I played it super cool - as you can tell.
We ordered a bottle of wine and then I followed him while he plodded around the pub looking for somewhere to sit, too shy to actually ask if we could sit at any of the open tables. Eventually, getting tired of aimless wandering, I asked a waitress if we could sit at one of them, which she said we could, and so we did.
What transpired is really, almost, beyond words - I mean, I woke up the next morning wondering how the hell this date had spiralled so badly.
He basically began to tell me that he was from a conservative family who supported the Leave campaign and all Tory policies because they, ultimately, supported his and his family's agenda which was that they were a wealthy, Jewish family and wanted to keep it that way.
He told me that his parents "property management company" was actually just him, their son, "managing" his parents numerous properties while they were off living in Spain, and that he was "waiting" for the right job to come along.
In other words, this guy lost his job and was living off mummy and daddy's money with no plans to do otherwise.
I dont have a problem with families who own multiple properties - please dont get me wrong. I do have a problem with people who live off their parents money, support policies that are designed to keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor and then complain about the "state" of the country.
He also told me that he had a very difficult relationship with his parents because he was the youngest child and was convinced that his father intensely disliked him (to be honest, I was starting to understand why his father might feel that way) and that, despite the fact that he bakes for and often fetches his nieces and nephews from school and spends time with them, he actually really dislikes them. I, convinced that he couldn't be serious, made a joke about how we all say that we hate kids, but that we really dont and would love our own - he looked me dead in the eye and told me that he does, in fact, hate children....
You may imagine that, after 20 minutes of listening to this, I might have been necking the white wine. If you were imagining that, you would be correct - I was necking the white wine.
By the time the second bottle of wine arrived (yes, there was a second, because I needed it to be able to deal with this dude and seriously - who hates children!?), we had started discussing books that we were reading and I, innocently, mentioned that I was reading a booked called "How Not to Die" (read it - it will change your life) which is about nutrition and how the food we eat affects the diseases we suffer from in our lives.
Its something Im interested in, okay. Stop judging me.
By this point, he knew that I was (am) a pescatarian and proceeded to army-style interrogate me about my thought process and choices around being a pescatarian.
The way it was going, it really started to feel like he was trying to catch me out - for what though, I wasnt quite sure.
At one point, while talking about empathy towards animals, he asked me why it was okay to kill insects in my house, but not to eat animals because they are all creatures after all?
I stated that I dont kill insects in my house and that it was strictly a catch and release zone (my cat, however, doesnt agree with me on this), and that I was aware that I was a hypocrite because I occasionally eat fish, but that it was something I was working on.
I assume because he was drunk, he missed the hypocrite part and started firing questions about why I think its okay to ride elephants in the East, and to eat meat? (He was half shouting at this point and I was a little shocked, to be honest), so I politely replied that I didnt think it was okay which is why I didnt do, or agree, with either of those things.
Obviously, realising what he had said and that he had made a bit of an ass of himself, he then proceeded to lecture me about how humans are meant to eat meat and that, if we were meant to be vegetarian, we wouldn't have incisor teeth (like, mate. I dont care. Eat whatever the fuck you want).
I tried to diffuse the conversation by bringing it back to the book I was reading - which is all science based, in case you were wondering - and mentioned how so many foods that people eat today causes and/or worsens a myriad of diseases that people suffer from. I started to mention that I have asthma, for example - which is when he cut me off and told me that asthma, like many diseases, is a man-made concept. Shocked, I retorted and told him that I definitely have asthma and have been diagnosed and have taken medication for it for a number of years, and that it is made worse when I eat dairy products. He, then, made a sort-of half laugh, half disgusted sneer at my perceivable "brain washing" and told me that I was imagining it.
Now, we may have finished two bottles of wine by this point, but I was not in a drunk enough state of mind to be able to sit there and pretend like I wanted to be there any longer.
I downed the rest of my drink, slammed the glass on the table and just as he was starting to say something about the date, I stated that I was "fucking leaving", picked up my bag and stormed out of the pub and in that moment I knew how Cameron Diaz's character in "The Holiday" felt when she kicked her ex-boyfriend out for cheating, because I was performing similar sort of actions which, I suppose, sort of looks something like a large, oversized wasp darting about, fists flying while making high-pitched "Humph" sounds and wilding shaking my head while frowning, with that old, familiar thought creeping into my head:
"HOW THE FUCK DO THEY FIND ME???"
As I said, in hindsight, this guy had, in one way or another, alerted me to these character flaws before we met, but because it was wrapped up in, what seemed to be, a goofy, funny, charming package, it essentially me sold a dream that didnt exist.
I spent the rest of the night slightly drunk and raging at myself for such poor judgement. To be honest, I still wonder how I made it through two hours of that.
He texted me later that evening to apologise for it not working out and I responded by blocking him.
The one lesson I learnt that night was that sometimes there is not enough alcohol in the world to turn a bad date into a semi-acceptable one.
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