It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, which means that everyone’s mind is on love or sex or dating, despite the fact that it’s almost universally an awful cesspool of vomit, inappropriate come-ons, cheapskates, chair throwers, bail jumpers, crybabies and drunk assholes who’ll drop you off their bikes. OK fine, there might be some hope out there, but let’s take a moment to remember just how bad things can be in the dating world with these stories of the worst dates Team Brokelyn has ever been on.
Crepeing death
Once dated a girl while working at a crepe place, I thought it’d be a good idea for her to swing by the shop as I was closing, and I made her a few crepes to try. We continue out on the date, and by the end of it she’s got a pained look on her face and she looked like she wanted to throw up, and I ask why. Turns out, she’s got lyme disease and can’t eat gluten, so I effectively just poisoned her at the beginning of the date with crepes in an attempt to be nice. Worst part? We had gluten-free crepes too. Oh, well.
–Kenji-Magrann Wells
The Freeloader
I once went on a date with a guy that started with meeting at my job which was a bar/ restaurant, and I got him drinks. We decided to make it a pub crawl kinda night, so we go to the next bar, I see if he wants to get the next round because I got the last one. He rebuttled saying it didn’t count because that was my job and it free drinks was probably a perk. True, irrelevant but fine, whatever I let it go. Proceed to the 3rd bar which was actually the bar below my apt and cash only. He weaseled out again saying he only had enough cash for his drink. Instead of insisting he utilize the ATM located three feet away, I paid for my drinks and essentially walked out on, to go up to my apt. He follows me thinking that hes going to get the special invite to my crib, ended with a literal door in face moment.
-Anonymous Female Brokelyn member
Male Tears
I met up with this guy from the internet at a bar with boardgames. He wanted to play chess, but I don’t play chess, so he offered to teach me. I learned from magazines that boys feel manly when they teach you things so I was like, sure, why not. Well, I’m a quick study, and I ended up winning the second game. He got so upset that he cried a little bit. We did not checkmate.
–Madelyn Owens
All Aboard
I went on a date with this girl, we agreed to meet after work at a nearby bar on the Upper West side, and had a pretty good time getting absolutely hammered. I live far from the UWS so we took the hour-long train back to my place. Before I fell asleep on the train I told her what stop we had to get off, repeating it many times so she wouldn’t forget. Miraculously, she woke me up just in time to hop off the train. I took one step out of the doors and vomited all over the platform. It was a small station so my vom puddle covered nearly every available walking area, I remember people were jumping over it. She still went back to my place after that (if not just because she was far from home) and we ended up getting it on. I didn’t even brush my teeth.
-Will Widmaier
Ackward at Tinder
We exchanged a few jokes on the site; he seemed funny, I like funny guys, so we decided to meet up at Bushwick Country Club. I think it was a Tuesday. I got off work, went to the gym, and then planned to meet this guy at the dive – pretty lowkey. I was really tired but it was kind of an “Oh I should go out and not stay home” date. I met him inside the bar and he gave me a hug, so that was good sign to start the date. We each got a beer and a shot and sat down. Immediately he asked me, “So how long have you lived in Williamsburg? Oh wait, you’re not Jewish are you?” Two questions one after another, without skipping a beat. He was dead serious.
I’m not, but I had a problem with his anti-semitic “joke.” He asked me some more life questions. Within 5 minutes, I noticed his hand tickling my knee. Why would you – I mean, you either have your hand on my knee or you don’t and certainly not within the first 5 minutes of meeting me – what in his mind thought that creepy move was ok? It became clear to me then that I needed an exit plan.
Do I call a friend? Do I walk out? Do I excuse myself to the bathroom and run out the window like a spy? I felt trapped. I’m an honest woman, so I told him point blank that I wasn’t interested in his advances AKA I wasn’t sleeping with him. We casually talked for another 5-10 minutes until he excused himself to “buy a pack of cigarettes” and never came back. Then he texted me, “Sorry but you are by far the most ackward (sic) Tinder date. Tinder is not for you.”
–Julia Lipscomb
Short Ride
It was a nice evening, going about as well as I would have imagined. See a show at The Market Hotel and then wander down to Goodbye Blue Monday (R.I.P.) to hang out in the backyard and get close. There was a magic taco truck near my apartment further into Bushwick, so I suggested we head there. In order to there more quickly, I suggested to my date that we both ride my bike up there, with her on the seat and me standing and pedaling, not thinking about the physics of trying to carry a person who’s heavier than me when we’re both drunk and full of imbalance.
We made it maybe three or four blocks before toppling over, to the delight of some teens who were out at 3am just waiting for white people to pass by and fall down I guess. She fell hard on her knee when we hit the ground, but still wanted to limp to the taco truck, which was fine by me. We got the tacos and when we got back to my apartment, I thought trying to carry her up the stairs would help her knee for some reason, which immediately hurt her more. Upstairs, we ate the tacos while awkwardly talking, before she decided to go. Being a gentleman, I insisted I walk her to the train, and as I walked her out the door, she turned and asked “Don’t you need your shoes?” I mumbled something about no I didn’t need them, and that’s how I ended up in the Myrtle/Wyckoff stop with no shoes on watching my date’s train head back to Manhattan.
–David Colon
Look Out Ref, He’s Got A Chair
I was set up with Mike through a mutual friend and therefore mistakenly assumed he was a good guy. He showed up to our date already drunk and continued to drink heavily after arriving. He tried to lure me back to his apartment within a few minutes of arriving with the classic line, “I’ve got some really great music on my computer that I want you to listen to” and sulked when I declined his generous offer.
I tried to salvage the date, though I don’t know why, and he kept throwing back the cocktails. Eventually he came around to my side of the table and shoved his hand down the front of my shirt. At that point I lost it and made it clear that he needed to go. And so he did, but not before drunkenly throwing his chair at me, storming out, and leaving me with a bill for $70 of his drinks. I paid the tab and left… and before I even got home, had a text from Mike that said, “Had a great time tonight! Let’s do it again soon, babe.”
–Margaret Bortner
It’s Like Poetry
So in one of those funny twists of fate that life likes to throw at us from time to time, my ex-girlfriend’s ex-roommate from Boston since moved to Brooklyn and fancies himself a poet; he wrote a book of haiku for a one-eyed pigeon and held a reading from it last fall, so I obviously had to go to support him, the arts, monocular winged rats, etc. I thought I’d invite this girl I’d slept with once…and, at the last minute, thought I’d invite my [female] roommate as well. My roommate dragged her heels and nearly didn’t go but for the saving grace of our apartment’s portable radio so we could blast Obama’s speech about bombing the shit out of ISIL through the streets of Bushwick as we biked on over to the reading.
Of course, by the time we got there, the reading was over, and the girl I slept with once was wondering what took me so damn long…before realizing it was my roommate, and never forgiving me for bringing her along. Still, she and I went out for shots, I somehow got coerced into doing impromptu stand-up comedy in the dimly-lit back room of a bar–which, for the record, I’m terrible at–before getting dragged outside for a Heisenbergian “remember my name!” drunk rant from the girl before she stumbled into a taxi–and I along with her. The night ended up with us in her bed, too drunk to do anything, save for stammering outside in an elaborate, half-naked scheme involving using my own shirt to prop open doors while I puked in the streets (I believe the bathroom had a key and was locked). The next morning was me waking up with the sun, whispering to her, “Try this again sometime, perhaps with a little less alcohol?” before walking a mile and a half back to my bicycle, half the buttons missing from my shirt for some reason, and riding off to work on the other side of the borough. It was, after all, Thursday morning by then.
-Anonymous Male Team Brokelyn Member
Jesus Christ
I met a girl once at one of ye olde Brooklyn blogging meetups at the Bell House, maybe 5 years ago or so. We kept getting drunker and made out by the photobooth for a bit. We made plans to meet up again a few days later. She had cool, punky looking tattoos on her arms, so when I got drunk enough, I asked her what they were.
“This one is a moon” or some such astrology nonsense, I don’t remember the exact details. “And these ones,” she said, pointing to the puncture mark tattoos on both wrists, “are the stigmata.”
It took me a few seconds to realize she meant the stigmata, you know, the famous one. Turned out she was quite religious and worked for a church (“I organize their parties,” is how she described her job).Not wanting to see religiously intolerant or considering faith a disqualifying factor, the date continued on anyway.
Many, many drinks later, she casually mentioned the fact that she was celibate — as in had never had sex, and was not inclined to start doing so now. Yet somehow, we still ended up back at her place, semi naked on a bed, doing all sorts of things I’m not quite sure would be kosher by Jesus’ standards, but still stopping short of actual sex. I started to debate the arbitrary semantic difference between various semi sex acts and actual sex, but then realized arguing logic with a deeply religious person was like arguing about the value of twitter hashtag games with my 84 year old grandmother. Also, I wasn’t sure where astrology fit into the bible, but it was too late and drunk to ask.
That was our only date; it wasn’t even a bad one really, just odd. The lesson: beware the social stigma(ta) of dating bloggers.
–Tim Donnelly
What Is It With These Cheap Dudes
A good-looking new bartender at one of my neighborhood spots asked me out for a beer. I was leaving the country but I said what the heck, sure. On the night of our date, things started out normal: he bought a round, I bought a round, etc. We talked a lot even though there was zero chemistry, but I was drinking furiously to forget that (#singlesummer). Anyway, by the fourth bar I was getting restless/tired. He asked if I wanted to end off the night at his bar, where—and here’s where things got weird—he could get us “half-off drinks.” I heard this and our chemistry went into the negatives. But I was drunk, so I acquiesced. At his bar, it was utterly dead.
1am, just the owner tending to NO ONE. And it gets worse: he opens us SEPARATE TABS, and spends the next fifteen minutes talking about his job with the owner and ignoring me. The owner then says he’s going to go down and change a keg, that we can just stay up there and man the front. But—and here’s where I wish I had the self-respect to leave—my date offers to help him change it and goes downstairs, leaving me alone in the bar for the next ten minutes of awkward silence (Oh, the music was definitely off by that point in the night). Unfortunately I was still there when he got back. We paid our tabs (yes, the sad pathetic ‘friends and family discount’ was on it) and called it a night. Neither of us texted the other after that, but I like to think his own silence was out of shame for what he had done. WORST. DATE. EVER.
–Sam Corbin
OK, we’ll give you one kind of nice one:
Prisoners of Love
Halfway through a first OKCupid date a guy told me he was out on bail and legally wasn’t supposed to be in New York State but did it since I seemed cool. It’s honestly one of the smaller red flags I’ve encountered and easily the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me. That was the only time we went out, but more since we generally didn’t click than because of his arrest record. He was attractive and it wasn’t a sex or hate crime so who am I to judge? The prison industrial complex has cut down on my prospects enough already
–Camille Lawhead
Happy Valentine’s Day (and please, share your horror stories in the comments)!