Never Let 'Em See You Sweat

It should be said that my first online date wasn’t bad at all…if it had been bad it would have been indicative of what was to come and I might have been able to avoid it all. Not to say I blame this nice young man. I mean who would think that an average date as your rookie outing would be setting the bar too high? He was nice…a med student who was born and raised in Manhattan. Ironically enough, the date that popped my online cherry was intelligent, cultured and polite.

That being said we shouldn’t spend much time on him since he was clearly a fluke of the (or MY) online dating world. At the end of the date I don’t feel that either one of us was feeling any fireworks, though we agreed to be in touch and go out again. We would exchange some emails and texts but never made it out on that second date.

This quickly led into Date #2. I should say here that the first few weeks on a site are complete mayhem. Matches fly in one after the other, most or all requesting communication. It gets so overwhelming you think you need a personal assistant to handle it all. Luckily I had one…my best friend of 25 years. She knew me better than anyone and was just bored enough at her job to be able to relay all communication to me and handle all admin work so I could provide my answers and she could go back on the site and post them. In the interest of time management this helped greatly, and her synopses of the matches were always entertaining. There were few I didn’t reply to, I mean this was an experiment in trying something new! Being open to guys I wouldn’t normally consider, dates that were not typical and conversations that were eye opening. Now, understand, as I did not at the time, that everything I’ve just listed can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Date #2 definitely fell into the latter. We spoke on the phone just once before we went out when he called on a random Saturday and I was out shopping. We chatted while I browsed the shoe department at Nordstrom’s and set up a date for the following Tuesday. He finished our easy conversation saying he was excited to meet me and I have to say I felt the same.

We agreed to meet at one of my favorite restaurants in Providence with a great outside dining area. It was a fairly hot summer night and as I was walking up to the entrance I saw him from about 200 feet away. I knew it was him because he was alone and was waiting….and that was it. Certainly not because he was the cute blonde guy with the great smile leaning up against his garage with his dog as he was in his picture online. No no…this guy was bald, somewhat chunky and so pale the sun actually reflected off of him like a white sheet. Had my mother not raised me right I would have turned around right then and called with some last minute excuse as to why I couldn’t make it. But I quickly regrouped after a brief pause and set out to have the best possible date I could with this guy, regardless of my feelings of his false advertisement. Again, this was an experiment in trying new things!

We opted to sit outside despite the heat and were doing the usual introductory chit chat dance when our food was served and that’s when The Sweating began. Perhaps it was the heat outside coupled with the heat from his steak but I gotta tell you, he was shvitzing everywhere. It was dripping onto his food, he would wipe a pool off of his brow with his napkin, I mean it wouldn’t stop. I asked a couple of times if he wanted to move inside but he was insistent we stay out. Now, as if that weren’t enough to turn someone off the conversation during this entire time was his recount of his last relationship and the problems they had in the bedroom. He went on and on about how six weeks into his relationship with his ex she no longer felt they needed to have sex because that was something you only did in the beginning to get a guy.

I couldn’t help but wonder if when they were in bed (though believe me this is not something I wanted to picture but there was no way out) he would sweat all over her like he was over his poor steak and if that had anything to do with it. The longer this went on the closer I came to suggesting that that might have been the reason.

I wrapped up the date pretty quickly after dinner and couldn’t help but chuckle a little as I walked back to my car. THIS was dating! You have to have a couple of bad ones amongst the good ones and the whole thing was fun, something I had never done before. I almost felt a sense of pride having had my first unfortunate experience under my belt. I overcame my first “picture shock”, my friends would be entertained at the story and the first bad one was out of the way.

After my recovery I was refreshed and excited thinking about the multitude of matches I was in communication with and the great dates we would inevitably have.

Please note the overconfidence here and feel free to remind me of that later on…