Why women stay through a bad date
Every week, the Toronto Star’s Life section runs the Dating Diaries, a first-person column I put together about our readers’ best, worst and weirdest dates.
Some of the dates the anonymous Diarists tell me about are first-date fantasias that end with some gleeful reveal about how they got engaged two weeks later. Some are comedies of online-dating errors.
Some — not my favourites, but honouring other people’s experiences doesn’t mean including just the sweet ones, the hilarious ones and the one where the guy showed up in a full suit of armour — are about spending disappointing hours on a date that the Diarist seems to want to leave (or, says she wants to leave), but doesn’t.
Those dates might not be bad-bad — because those aren’t the kind of dates that women want to relive, for fun, in a “tell-your-friends-over-brunch-about-it” dating column — but they are, you know, “bad” dates with men who don’t listen, who only talk about themselves, who say nothing at all.
(And that’s before the drinks arrive.)
These guys are boring, or annoying, or rude. The Diarist doesn’t want to be there, but doesn’t leave.
(I’m always after more stories from men, and all queer daters, but the majority of submissions for Dating Diaries come from straight women, so the stories about wanting to walk out come from straight women. I don’t think a male Diarist on a bad date with a woman has ever suggested that he wanted to leave, but that’s probably in part because the pool of male Diarists is so much smaller.)
Sometimes, Diarists will write that they thought about leaving early, especially when the date has descended into the kind of WTF-ery that you would rescue a friend from in a borrowed helicopter.
If the Diarist writes that she wanted to bail, but didn’t, I usually write back and ask why she didn’t. I tell them that I get it, and I do, but a lot of readers won’t.
Out in the world, in this political moment, asking “Why didn’t she leave?” is so loaded it can’t be asked without the weight of the question making it tip over and explode.
Women are taught, explicitly and implicitly, that our own comfort is less important than someone else’s, an expectation that shapes friendship, dating, marriage, work and the relationship a woman has with herself.
She didn’t leave because she didn’t.
By far, the most common reason Diarists give for not leaving bad dates is that they didn’t want to be rude. Women are taught — or, were — to be nice, to be accommodating, to be small in both literal and figurative space; 2018’s little girls are, it seems, learning that good manners are less important than a loud “No.” The second-most-common reason is because it’s just not something people do: Dating is a ritual, with certain beats and rhythms; leaving early upends the social contract and familiar narrative of a date, even a bad one, in the same way that calling out a racist-sexist-whatever joke at a party puts the onus of awkwardness and attention on the person who was minding their own business by the Twizzlers, instead of the person who did something wrong.
In both cases, the Cool Person is making the social transgression of the Uncool Person known, instead of smoothing over it, or adhering to the fiction at work, and in so doing is socially punished for it.
Women are so used to carefully protecting male egos, it might be a habit that’s ingrained enough to stay through dinner. People don’t date only to meet someone they want to be with: They date to make friends, to hook up, to have fun, to very simply experience, or have experiences with, other people.
I went on some bad dates in my 20s that I didn’t leave, because then — classic for a 20-something who flees their generic hometown for a city, and who has no sense of their own mortality — time was endless, and everything was new, and I was still learning what “bad” was: Bad restaurants, bad dates, bad guys.
Now, in my 30s, every person and opportunity and possibility has to exceed a high bar to keep me out of the house past nine. Still, like most women, I have to remember what choices I’m making about other people, and why I’m making them.