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.
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