Worst dates ever!
Hey, we’ve all been there. And a problem shared is a problem halved… right?
I was in Granada, Nicaragua, and trekked to the other side of the city for a date – only for the guy to confess he had a fiancée and ask if this would be OK. We were speaking in Spanish, so I thought I’d misunderstood at first. I said I wasn’t interested and he continued to text me daily long after I’d left the country.
SOPHIA,* 23
I flew to Sri Lanka with a guy for a TV dating show. After many hours spent fishing together, I got a DM from his girlfriend saying she thought he was in Portugal with the lads. She’d seen a photo I’d tagged him in. I don’t know what he thought would happen when it aired.
PLUM, 23
He told me off for wearing a short dress… in the height of summer. Then he said he’d be embarrassed to introduce me to his housemates.
ESMÉ, 25
At the cinema, he picked popcorn out of his teeth for the whole film. When it finished, he saw a girl he knew and walked off with her, leaving me trailing behind. She turned around and asked, “Who’s that?” He just said, “No one.”
HOLLY, 20
He kept referring to his “death list”, which, when he got it up on his phone, turned out just to be a bucket list. Almost everything on it was sexual. I ran away while he still had half a beer left.
PHILIPPA, 28
We were trying to get it on in a shared hostel room while I was backpacking when a member of my tour group burst through the door in a drunken rage and exclaimed, “That’s a lot of condoms,” before passing out cold on the next bed. Ruined the mood to say the least…
ALANNAH,* 22
He didn’t show up for our dinner date. After six months, he turned up on my doorstep saying, “Sorry, I didn’t stand you up. I was arrested – I’ve just got out of prison.”
KATE, 30
My date told me all about the solo acid trip he’d taken while watching Planet Of The Apes as part of his spiritual quest. He was fit but I had to call it quits.
LEILA,* 28
I’d said no when he asked if I wanted kids. He proceeded to shout and swear at me, saying I was a woman and was put on this earth to have children.
ISABELA, 42
He begged me to smoke weed with him before dinner. I refused. Then, at the end of the meal, he asked if I could pay his half because he’d already spent the daily allowance his mum gave him.
CHIARA, 19
I went for a picnic in the park with a girl that I really fancied, and I was so anxious I vomited banana out of my nose. I didn’t have any tissues with me so I had to mop myself up using a sanitary towel.
MARGOT,* 22
Things were getting heated when she took her top off and I saw it: her bellybutton. It was full of grey/green/brown goop that was the same consistency of phlegmy peanut butter and it stank! She clocked me looking at it, giggled, scooped it out and wiped it on the sofa. She left soon after.
FLEUR, 22
After asking if we could eat at a place where the food “doesn’t have too much flavour”, he proceeded to obsessively watch the rugby over our pub veggie burgers without speaking to me. I said, “I don’t understand rugby. What’s happening?” and he replied that he didn’t understand rugby either.
ANGELINA,* 28
After arriving drunk, he broke down his exact salary, including how much he was saving in order to buy a house by 27. I hope he bought the house because his life sounded quite bad.
ASHA,* 28
On holiday in Thailand, I met a fellow traveller for a drink. I was already quite drunk, so it took me a while to clock that his arms and legs were covered in bandages. He’d fallen off his motorbike the day before. I finally understood why all my friends had been giving him weird looks.
JASMINE,* 22
He robbed a fiver out of my purse right in front of me. The new plastic £5 notes had just come out, so he thought it was worth £85,000. When I insisted it wasn’t, he still kept it as “a memory of our date”. He messaged me a year later offering me a tenner to go for a drink with him.
SEANA, 31