I started talking to a guy from my current dating website, and we set a tentative date for Sunday night. His profile seemed okay, and his pictures were a little blurry, but not terrible - why not? The only red flag I had seen so far was his aversion to capitalizing letters at the beginning of sentences. Not a big deal, right?
So, we started texting that morning to schedule a time to get together. The conversation was pretty normal, aside from the fact that he was texting me from an oyster-eating contest. I jokingly told him that if he survived the contest, I'd love to meet up with him, and his response, a.k.a. Red Flag #2 was:
"hahaha ya I hope I do too ;) will down a couple shots after just in case and txt you around 5 or 6 if I'm still upright."I relayed this to Nostrand, and we puzzled for a while over how taking shots after eating oysters could possibly help matters. I then had to make a decision: either he was trying to be funny, or he was planning on being drunk when we met up that night. Things were starting to go downhill.
At 6:45, he let me know that he was finished with the contest and feeling good, and asked if I was still available. I told him yes, but it would take me about 30-40 min. to get to the bar we were meeting at in the East Village. In response to this tidbit of valuable information and my question of "What time do you want to meet up?" his answer was:
"sure, I'm in wburg now heading to union"I stared at my phone in confusion for a minute before realizing, shit! He's on his way there right now! I was wearing sweatpants and my hair was a mess. I managed to put myself together in a presentable package, and headed toward the train, sorting through my brain-files for a valid excuse for being late on a first date without sounding totally lame.
I got off the subway and found the bar, but the door was locked. I texted him, letting him know I was outside, and this time, he called me. He was at his apartment in Gramercy. At this point, it was 8:30 on a Sunday night. We laughed about the miscommunication, and I made up some bullshit excuse about how I'd had to drop off some books with a friend in the neighborhood, so it was no big deal… I realized it had been entirely my mistake for not clearing things up right away instead of jumping to conclusions, but my assumptions were totally valid. We had planned on meeting for a drink and then catching a 9:00 show at a comedy club. Nothing would have led me to believe that we would be meeting later.
In the end, it was a small, laughable miscommunication. I stopped for a slice of pizza while I waited, and when he walked in, my metaphorical jaw hit the floor. This man was completely gorgeous. Tall. Lean. Well-dressed. Amazing bone structure. His pictures had done him absolutely no justice. I found myself so entirely distracted that I couldn't concentrate on calculating a tip for my beer and pizza, or on understanding the words he was saying. All I could see were his eyes, and his lips, and the dimples that appeared on his cheeks when he smiled. (Is it emasculating to say that a man is beautiful because of his dimples? I don't really care.)
We walked a few blocks to a wine bar he had found on Yelp and were seated at a small table, elbow-to-elbow with the couples on either side of us, which was cozy and slightly romantic. He handed me the wine list, and said "Now, this is the true test for a first date - you get to choose the wine." I started to panic when I realized the wine list was entirely in French. I was honest with him and said I didn't have the slightest clue what to choose, and asked him what he liked. This turned into a twenty minute "conversation" about how he had been to twelve countries in the past four months for work. I had no idea what he did for a living, but I knew I couldn't ask, because he had explained his job while I'd been drooling over his dimples at the previous restaurant. We ordered a bottle of wine and some appetizers, and he went on to several other sophisticated topics - his extensive knowledge of wine, his "stardom" as a child who grew up attending a music conservatory and traveling to Greece to perform as a solo boy soprano, his travels across Europe and pictures from the top of some huge mountain. I like to think of myself as fairly educated for being twenty-five, but the combination of the wine and his eyes turned my brain to mush. I found myself telling a stupid story about a box of wine in my fridge that was simply labeled "white wine." I drew a blank when he asked if I had heard of any operas or classical music happenings going on in the city. Classical music is my job. My career. My life. And I was unintentionally playing the dumb blonde.
All of these things set aside, at the end of the night, I felt good. I was boozed up and happy, walking to the train with a gorgeous man, joking about dating websites and miscommunications. He then divulged to me that he still had to work that night (at this point I had figured out that he did some type of web-online-tech-ish but more complicated job), and that he'd been planning on asking for a rain check, but he was glad that we'd ended up going out. We hugged and said goodnight, and when I glanced back to the street where he was hailing a taxi, I could see he was smiling. (Oh! Those dimples.) I floated on a gorgeous man-high back to Brooklyn, and settled into my bed dreaming of our beautiful dimpled babies.
In the morning, as I told a friend at work of my date with the handsome man, it all started to dawn on me. The Red Flags started to pop up - he was totally self-centered. He was horrible at communicating, at least via the written word. He was arrogant. He really didn't get my sense of humor, and I couldn't recall him having much of one. And the winner of the Red Flag Award: I couldn't remember a single thing I had told him about myself. At one point in the night, he had asked if I liked my job, but as I elaborated a bit, we were interrupted by our waiter, and we had never come back to the subject. I'm not the type of girl to just let someone else take over in a conversation, but it had somehow slipped past me this time.
So, in the end, I realized that under that gorgeous facade, the date had been a bust. Not all was lost - I did gain some valuable take-aways:
- It's sometimes good to pick out the flaws in a first date before the date has happened. You'll either be pleasantly surprised, or not-so-disappointed.
- Keep the conversation in check.
- Beautiful men are likely to be full of themselves or gay. Either way, they're nice to look at.
I'd probably go on another date with him, out of curiosity…
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