Some dates good; most dates bad. In ELLE.com's Dates of Wrath column, anonymous daters share true stories of their very worst rendezvous. This week: He said he waited for me for an hour, but I was totally there the whole time.
It's actually one of the weirdest things that's happened to me, in general. This was my first or second Tinder date ever. Also, this was about a month after Donald Trump had been elected, so I was in a dark place. I matched with this guy, I thought he was cute. We met for drinks at a dive bar and it was totally fine. We had a couple of drinks, chatted, and he kissed me at the end before getting on the subway.
I was really trying to lean in to being A Fun And Normal Millennial On Apps, so I said yes when he asked me out again for the next week for dinner—he seemed like a normal basic dude. But I had accidentally double booked my night, so I asked, "Hey, can we do this on another night? Or maybe we should do it earlier? My bad, I wasn't looking in my calendar." He texted back something about high-maintenance girls that made it clear he thought I was making up the conflict. Like, "Oh yeah, I guess you're gonna be one of those girls who plays hard to get or something." But I had already put too much scheduling energy into it. Also, I figured maybe it was a joke that didn't translate over text.
So I show up at the bar fifteen minutes early with a book and snagged a table facing the door. And then I waited. And checked my texts. And read my book. Half an hour after the date was meant to start, I figured I'd been stood up, and proceeded to order wine and just hang out for another hour until my next thing started. I wasn't even going to send something passive-aggressive—I'd already written this thing off. In the end, I was there for nearly two hours, facing the door, and this dude and I had met the week before in a well-lit bar and hung out for an hour and a half. Pretty hard to miss me! I was one of the two black people in there, as well.
The next day I get a "?" text from him. So I responded with something like, "Hey, would have been nice to see you. Sorry last night didn't work out, but good luck out there!" He wrote back: "What the fuck? I was there the whole time." To which I responded that I had been by the door waiting for a good chunk of my evening. He said, "I waited there for a full fucking hour and you were too stuck up to show up." I was like..."No, I was there but that's okay, we'll just write this one off, good luck, happy dating!"
This is the crazy part. He immediately goes into a text vomit: "In the white sweater, right?" Which...what? Over a period of half an hour, he was like, "I was at the bar and I thought I saw someone who looked like you, but I figured you were just one of those stuck-up bitches who think they're too good to put in any effort for guys. Girls like you just think you can play around with guys and you're so privileged, and I knew that was how you'd be. I was at the bar fucking waiting and you never put in any effort, so fuck you. Don't tell me good luck out there, you're the one who'll need it if you can't recognize a good guy when you find one." Certain words changed to protect the guilty but what the hell.
I guess he thought I'd looked at him across the restaurant and was like, Nope, not gonna go over to him, he has to come over to me. Or it was like he'd been testing me. And instead of going up to a girl he suspected was me, he decided to instead hang out at the bar and seethe? I don't know. Half scary, half absurd. But 100 percent potentially psychotic.
