Seven

All right. Let’s do this. Let’s get this over with so we can all have a good laugh and a good gasp and a good WHAT THE FUCK and watch The Bachelor and sleep soundly tonight.

And you all should. Sleep soundly that is, because you are all lucky that you are not I. I’m not a fan of the “My Life Sucks The Most” game. In fact, I hate it, but I would pity anyone who had to sit through a two and a half hour date with Seven like I did last night.

Oy. Fucking. Vey.

Seven talked a lot. His text messages were long. His emails were long. When we graduated to phone calls, they were loooong phone calls. I did my best to chalk it up to nerves when he would interrupt me mid-story on the phone and tell me to “save it for the date.” Ok, but you just spent ten minutes telling me about your stupid job, so what the fuck?

I’m not in the mood to be cute about this.

I got lost on the way to the bar to meet him. It was in some weird looping mall-town-roundabout place that blew my GPS’s mind. I called him to have him direct me to the bar, since he claimed to frequent it often, and he was great about directions.

Great. Fine. Wonderful.

When I pulled into the parking lot, the place was empty. It was a Sunday night, the night before everyone was, presumably, going to be starting their New Year’s resolutions to spend less money and stop drinking so much and start working out more. Yeah, no one was at the fucking bar.

I did better with clothes this time. I wore black pants, black boots, a patterned, flattering top I recently purchased at Banana Republic. I felt good. I felt comfortable and pretty and in control of my breasts. All a good start.

Turns out it was a sports bar. I was entirely overdressed. Have I mentioned how much I hate sports bars?

I hate sports bars.

Well, to be fair, I hate dressing for sports bars for first dates. Second and third dates? Fine. I just don’t want the first time a man sees me to be in a t-shirt and jeans.

Moving on.

When I got out of my car, he crossed the parking lot from his.

No, I thought. That can’t be him. He’s so short. And he got shorter as he got closer. By the time he reached my side I realized heels were the wrong decision.

Um, I’m 5’1”. They were two-inch heels. You do the fucking math.

He came up to my side, made the motion of it being really cold out, said something along those lines, leaned in for a hug, and kissed me on the cheek.

Um.

Excuse me.

You are not family. You are not even a friend. I JUST met you. Keep your lips to yourself. I’m only consenting to this hug because you initiated it. I’m hardly comfortable with your arms being around me already, let alone your hands being so close to my ass, ok?

This respecting of personal space was an issue throughout the evening. Please, keep reading.

We sat the bar. The empty bar, in the empty restaurant. The waitress served us tall glasses of beer on tap, carding both of us (not surprising, considering the company), and placing our drinks on cardboard coasters with her thin arms covered in dark hair.

I played along at first. I did. I tried to smile a lot. I kept up the conversation, listening as he talked about how often he drank, how much his family drank, how shocking it was that I spent my New Year’s at home with my mom and my dog not drinking.

“You didn’t even down a bottle of wine?” he asked. No, dude. I woke up early and went to the gym and started the year off right. He, on the other hand, had to postpone our date, originally scheduled for Friday, because he was still sick from partying so hard.

When he picked up his glass of beer, he left his mouth open around the rim and let the liquid pour into his mouth as greedily as water pours from a bucket. It was disgusting.

Did I mention he had a cast on his arm? When I finally got a word in edgewise to ask him what had happened he laughed and said it was from a rough night. He was drunk (surprise!) and fell down the stairs and broke his hand and was so inebriated that he didn’t feel anything until later the following day when he was at his parents’ house and his mother noticed how swollen it was.

He brought his half-full glass (always the optimist!) back to his lips and emptied the entire thing into his gullet.

Yes. He chugged his beer on the first date. He ordered another one.

“Do you want another?” he asked, both of us taking the opportunity to look at my glass with only a few sips missing from the top.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I only have one drink if I’m driving, so I’ll pace myself.”

“Oh, wow, really? That’s impressive.” He threw back the beginning of his next beer. “I always need at least three beers to make me a good driver.”

This is where I stopped playing along. This is where I stopped being cute. This is where I stopped giving a shit what he thought of me.

“Wow, that’s a bunch of crap,” I said.

“No, really. It makes me focus more.”

“I’m sure the police who will undoubtedly pull you over would disagree.” He laughed.

I think this was the point in the evening where he started burping, covering his mouth with his sweatered arm and belching often, his whole body expanding under the pressure of keeping them behind his closed lips.

The thing that struck me the most was that he was fairly hyper active. I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. Maybe some sort of problem with picking up on social clues? He kept putting his hand on my leg. He kept inching closer to my chair. At one point he leaned in so far that, had my chair not been in front of his to hold it up, he would have tipped right out and onto the floor.

What I realized very quickly was that he wasn’t socially awkward or some poor Asperger’s kid. What I realized, as the smell of beer emanated from his mouth and he spoke more and more quickly without any memory of what we had already discussed, was that he was drunk.

Perhaps if he had been sober he would have stopped himself, but he began a one-sided conversation about his fraternity and how he had the mama’s boy hazed out of him and how they forced pledges to eat loogies and chug gallons of milk and do wall sits for forty-five minutes (hi, impossible) and about the one black pledge they had who was, you know, not black like BALTIMORE black but cool black and they had to watch what they said when he joined and how they wanted to nickname this pledge “Cotton” or “Boy” and how he would gladly do it all over again because it was the best experience of his life and how everyone had to have a little bit of an asshole in him to haze people.

All right. Let’s summarize, shall we?

1. Is a sloppy drunk
2. Admits to being an asshole
3. Has gladly engaged in hyper-masculine behavior
4. Was mentally and physically abusive to others
5. Enjoys racist jokes

We have ourselves a winner here, don’t you think?

I think the only good thing about him was that he was a liberal and eagerly bashed Sarah Palin. Although there was a questionable moment in which he launched into some convoluted tirade about how he couldn’t understand how any woman could be pro-choice, and when I gave him a confused look and said, “You mean pro-life?” he spastically changed his story to that and went with it.

We’ll blame that blunder on the booze.

Close to the end of the date he got up to go to the bathroom, and I soothed myself with checking facebook on my phone. It’s like mother’s milk. When he came back to the bar, he sat down with purpose and looked me square in the face.

“104,” he said, “when was your last relationship?”

“Um… uh…” I fumbled. “Like real relationship or just long-lived dating?"

“Like a really real relationship.” Nice sentence. And before I could even inhale to exhale an answer he took over, “Because I don’t want to date someone who has some old ex boyfriend who is constantly on their mind and that I can’t ever live up to. It’s just that that has happened to me in the past, and I’m not interested in anything like happening again because that was really painful for me.”

Whoa. Taxicab confessions?

“Well,” I started slowly, anticipating another interruption. “I’ve been actively dating for a while now, but my last relationship of significant length was at the end of 2007.”

“Ok. Good. That’s fine.” He sucked disgustingly at his drink. “Because the last girl that I dated had a fiancé who had died a few months before and she never got over it and had to end things with me because she wasn’t ready to date me so soon after he died and that was really terrible for me. That really pissed me off.”

Whoa.

Dude, having a long lost love is worlds away from having a dead fiancé. One is nostalgic and a nice point of comparison. The other is a fucking tragedy. It was terrible for YOU? It pissed YOU off? You’re an asshole.

I was done.

“Well, I should be getting home,” I said, and started to gather up my purse and jacket. He, of course, chugged the rest of his beer.

“Are you going to finish yours?” he asked, both of us looking back at my glass, filled halfway with yellow Coors Light.

“No. I don’t want to chug it just to drive home.” He looked once at me and then back at the glass, picked it up, and drank the rest of my beer in three gulps.

He walked me to my car. I opened my driver’s side door immediately, not taking the time to linger. I threw my purse into the passenger seat and stood back up to say goodbye. When I was upright, he was in my face. I moved my head to the left of his to give him a hug and he caught the corner of my mouth with his. I leaned further in to transition into a kiss on the cheek to make this moment less awkward, but he took advantage of my turned face and kissed the right half of my lips with his open mouth. I struggled. I pulled back, seeking a way to be as far away from his offending lips as possible, and he grabbed my face in both of his hands. He planted his lips, open and wet, on my terse two and pressed himself into a kiss. I laughed uncomfortably and watched while he literally sucked on my lips with closed eyes. I kept my lips closed in an uncomfortable chuckle, hoping he would realize it was completely unreciprocated. I pulled back, and he dazedly smiled as if what had just passed was some beautiful moment and not a drunk raping of my face that it actually was.

I got into my car, sped out of the parking lot, and called my best friend. Apparently the message that I left her was fairly stellar. All I remember is laughing hard and uncontrollably and saying over and over again, “What the FUCK?!”

He texted me before I even reached the highway. He said it was really nice meeting me and that he hoped I drove safely. I never responded.

Seven was, by far, the worst date I have ever been on. And, remember, I accidentally dated a felon who stalked me for weeks afterward, prompting me to go as far as to call my phone company and have his number blocked.

Yeah. Seven was even worse than that.

Six: The End

How has it only been seven? How am I not on Forty-Seven? How am I this exhausted after a measly seven dates?

You’re going to get the brunt of my mood tonight. I hope you don’t mind. Six started showing flaws. Seven was a nightmare.

Ok, fine. Let’s get this out there: Six stopped communicating some time early yesterday. I brushed it off as not a huge loss, because my list of his accumulating flaws was growing by the encounter.

1. He took FOREVER to decide what to do on Saturday. I spent a good ten minutes rolling my eyes on my end of the phone as he hemmed and hawed over what to do in his own town. It was uncomfortable how long he took. In the end I suggested we meet in the middle and go to his favorite museum.
2. He didn’t know what states make up New England. If you think this is beyond offensive, you’re going to love,
3. He thought, because New England is, admittedly, made up of mostly white people, that they were all rich Republicans. Dude, have you seen the demographics of conservatives and liberals in this country? How can you, as a history major, not know that New England has ALWAYS been a pioneer on the liberal front, embracing Vermont’s legalization of gay marriage AGES ago, Massachusetts’s mandated health care, and Maine. Maine speaks for itself, doesn’t it? It’s Maine for crying out loud.
4. He was completely city-centric. He tended to make multiple comments per encounter about how I lived in the middle of nowhere, outside of civilization, outside the reach of electricity. Had he ever been to my town? No. Did he care to hear that my town was only an hour outside of the city? No. Did he listen when I said that it has a population of 70,000 people and, relative to where I grew up (where the population was a tenth of that and there were no grocery stores and the nearest HIGHWAY was an hour away, never mind a city [three and a half hours, in case you were wondering]) it was quite sizeable? No. I started to grow concerned over whether my future plan to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere would coincide with his plan to be a fancy pants international lawyer at the country’s epicenter.
5. He would send pointed text messages, asking me specific questions, and then, when I would reply, take HOURS to respond. Annoying. If you’re too busy to talk, then don’t text me.
6. There was no chemistry, really. After our second date, I found myself thinking, “Oh, I hope he doesn’t kiss me.” Never a good sign. Not that I was ducking and running like I have with other men (AH HEM, SEVEN!). I was never turned off by him, but I was never dying to get into his pants.
7. And, not to be a bitch, but he lives at home with his parents. And not because of unfortunate circumstances. No, he owns a townhouse that he shares with his friends, but it came out at the end of our second date that he hasn’t stayed there in five months. He’s been living at home, never fully moving into freedom. That’s a kind of momma’s boy I began wondering if I even wanted to touch.

But all of these flaws seemed like things that would come up in the future, and I am doing my best to not jump immediately into THE FUTURE and MARRIAGE and CHILDREN and IF I CAN’T SEE MYSELF WALKING DOWN THE AISLE WITH YOU THEN THIS IS OVER, you know? I’m working on hey that was a fun date and that was a nice conversation and I like how you just put your hand on my back.

Baby steps.

But when he didn’t even try to kiss me at the end of our second date, and I didn’t stress over the lack of intimacy, and when he didn’t respond to my text message that I hope he got home safely, I anticipated never hearing from him again.

This is not a post with any intention of bashing. In fact, can we all rise and give Six a resounding round of applause, because what happened next is worthy of nothing less.

He called me. He called me this morning and told me that he had a really fun time on Saturday and then listed off the reasons why he didn’t think the timing was right: he was applying to law schools far away, he would be busy with applications, and we lived awfully far away from each other, all of which was a roundabout way of saying that he just wasn’t that into me.

But MY GOD he CALLED ME and WAS A GROWN UP. It’s a (belated) Christmas miracle!

(It’s sick and twisted that I’m kind of more attracted to him after the phone call than I was before, right? Yes. Say yes.)

I don’t know what he expected from me, probably not what he got because he avoided my response for a while, rambling off excuse after excuse, all while I sat on my bed smiling like an asshole. And when he was done, I gushed, “Thank you SO much for calling to tell me that. I REALLY appreciate it.” What a refreshing change of pace!

He must have thought I was insane.

But, you know, he was fun. Not uninhibited and outgoing kind of fun like I prefer, but we had a nice time. There is no need to burn bridges. Maybe we’ll still hang out as friends. Maybe, one day, I’ll need a good lawyer. Lord knows, with the way things have been looking lately in the land of love, I will.

Seven: The Build Up

If it weren't nearly one in the morning, if I hadn't just gotten home, and if I weren't already neatly tucked into bed, I'd write Seven tonight.

There was face rape involved.

Believe me, you all are going to LOVE this one.