Flying sandwich, $45 wine bottle and other dating disasters
Welcome to the Doctor of Love’s Valentine’s Day edition of the Looove Connection, only a week late.
I mention the timing because a reader complained she didn’t see my promised compilation of your bad date stories last weekend. I explained that my columns mostly run twice a month, and it wasn’t my turn.
Anyway, here we are. I’ve already received more of your dating stories than I can use in one column. As a result, this will spill over into next month.
As I read your tales of romantic woe, it reminded me how much I missed doing Looove Connection columns, even the ones where I functioned as an inept matchmaker. I’m grateful that so many of you have shared your stories — some deeply personal — with me over the years.
For those of you who consider these columns pure fluff, I’ll note that I received one story so shocking that we decided that it might lead to a libel suit, so we had to eliminate it. It broke my heart.
Rest assured that I have plenty more good ones, though. Although a couple of you were willing to use your names, most preferred anonymity, so I’ll stick with that for consistency.
Let’s start with this one:
“My worst date was in the 1980s. I asked this girl to go out to dinner, and she said she knew a great restaurant out in the country, so I said OK. She made the reservations, and I picked
her up.
“It was a very nice place, but a little on the expensive side, which was fine. We had just ordered our meals along with a couple of cocktails when she spotted a couple she knew. She went over to talk to them. When she returned she told me it was their wedding anniversary, so she sent a $45 bottle of wine to their table.
“I assumed she had paid for it. Wrong. When I got the check it was on the bill. I ended up paying it for two people that I never met, and she appeared to be this wonderful person to them. I was lucky to have just enough money to pay for everything.
“I took her home and left. I never called her or saw her again, and she never tried to contact me.”
“My worst, and first, bad date was decades ago. We went to Dorney Park. He didn’t spend a cent. No offer to go on a ride; not even a soda. We just walked around. And there wasn’t even an entrance or parking fee at that time. He did not ask for a second date.”
“I had only one blind date. It was for lunch at the old Steak and Ale. Knowing my tendency to spill food, I ordered an open-face sandwich that I could eat with a knife and fork. On my first attempt to cut off a piece, the whole sandwich flipped up in the air and landed on my lap. I was laughing so hard that the guy must have thought I lost my mind.
“I wasn’t the least bit embarrassed; I just thought it was too funny. We finished lunch but I never heard from him again.”
“I was out to dinner with a date and the waitress came over to help us and she was young and beautiful and very sweet, and my date definitely caught onto that. He poured on the charm and started a conversation with her. So obviously flirting.
“When she walked away he said to me, ‘I hope she thinks we are brother and sister.’ Needless to say there were no other dates with this man.”
“I had a lot of bad dates in college. One memorable one was some jerk I drew the short straw on. We ambled around the Loop in Chicago as I not so subtly kept trying to avoid what he thought were slick moves.
“Finally he suggested a movie I’d never heard of, ‘The Producers’ with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. From the first scene I forgot everything, including my date. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. ‘Springtime for Hitler’ did me in completely.
“Tears streamed. My nose ran. I was wrecked. After watching my laughter meltdown, he quietly drove me back to the dorm and never called again. I guess this isn’t a good example of a bad date, but it has a happy ending.”
His loss. Great movie.
More bad dates next time.