What's the worst bomb you've ever dropped on a first date?

published 30 April 09

Hello, my peeps.

So, perhaps I should've mentioned this earlier but: I had a first date with someone on Saturday afternoon. (Perhaps the fact that I have NOT mentioned it sooner tells you something about the date.) We'd "found each other" a few weeks ago, after I searched Craig's List to see if anyone had extra ticket for the Of Montreal* indie-rock show in Williamsburg. This dude (who, coincidentally, was from Canada) did--although by the time I'd emailed him, it was gone. One thing later to another--we had some musical tastes in common, he worked in the film biz, I'm "artsy" too, we live pretty close to each other--so we decided to get together for a hang in the Park.

I biked up and took off my helmet to reveal my sun orange hat--as well as some posh Gucci shades I'd gotten on the way over, at a yard sale. And he was like, "Oh ... heeeey." All smiles. I got the distinct feeling he thought I was kinda cute.

And yet, despite the fact that I had my hands full of my bike, he said, "Do you want grab yourself a coffee before we find a place in the park?" (I'd gotten there a little late--the yard sale slowed me down--so he already had himself a latte.) Now, maybe I'm just being a little capacious; maybe he didn't actually mean that I was going to have to go off and purchase the coffee myself and try to manage maneuvering my wallet and the coffee as well as my bike. But that's how it sounded. So right off, I was like, Hmmm. Meh.

I decided to forego the coffee--I didn't want to give him another chance to be marked down so early on--so we strolled off and found a nice bench in the shade. We chatted for a while, and I realized he was smart, funny, fairly successful ... But by about T minus 15, I'd also figured out he was rather negative. One of the first things he said, after pointing to an admittedly translucent man with his shirt off, was: "That guy is going to get melanoma. And he's giving me eye cancer." Which was pretty hilarious, although it seemed unncessarily mean. Then he complained about some (admittedly obnoxious) people going by, blasting a boom box. Then he mentioned that he though Pomerians looked stupid, after a woman walked by with one on a leash, and should only be owned by queen-y gay men. Then it went on to how his downstairs neighbors had a dog that was too loud ... and the woman upstairs clomped around back and forth in her heels too loudly. "What do you women do in the mornings?"--and I informed him that our ablutions were much more complicated than those of the mens.

Now, with the exception of the doggy prejudice, I will admit that I could empathize with all the stuff he was griping about. BUT ... did he need to gripe quite so much? On a first date? And on such a lovely day, with all sorts of pink blossoms in bloom around, and the grass as verdant as could be? It seemed like a harbinger of overwhelming negativity to come. In other words, I just wasn't that into him.

The far more terrible thing, though, is I'd also started to get the feeling he just wasn't that into me! Talk about adding insult to injury.

So what did I do? I decided I might as well derive something beneficial from the whole interaction. So I told him I'm a dating blogger. And I told him one of the things I'd recently blogged about was the whole Jonas Singer thing--right down to the part where he said he didn't respect me!

Why, oh why, did I say that? Great question. Well, partly because I hadn't "processed" it with any of my male friends yet--wanting to save them from the burden of hearing me cry--but I did want a dude's take on it. More significantly, though, I very deliberately wanted to totally sabotage the date. If this guy never followed up to ask me for a second date, I wanted to be sure that I knew the reason why--and that the reason was because I'd acted like a bit of a maniac.

Anyway ... after I dropped the Jonas bomb, Mr. Formerly Canadian was actually quite congenial and sympathetic--supportively called Jonas a douchebag, etc. (Even though, I hate to tell you, but Jonas really isn't a douchebag. He's a little mixed up, sure, but he's just a human being with messy emotions just like me.) What Mr. Formerly Canadian didn't do, however, was spontaneously back up my theory that Jonas actually had some self-respect problems. But c'est la vie.

The good-bye was super-awkward. Formerly Canadian made a funny face, and was like, "Hey, we should do this again ... ?" And I was like, "I know I just made it really awkward. We probably shouldn't. Right? It's way too awkward now." And he was like, "No, no. We should ... maybe? Like, brunch next weekend?" And I was like, "It's all right. I know you don't want to."