The per­ils and mis­ad­ven­tures of online dat­ing.

I get an OKCupid message from someone who is in town visiting family for a few weeks. Even though I know nothing can really happen long-term, I agree to meet him for a coffee. He’s from New York, he’s a photographer-slash-musician, how bad could it be? Even though he’s not the most handsome guy, he’s funny and getting cuter as the date progresses. We decide to go for another drink and end up seeing a movie. We sit in the back row and somewhere after the credits but before the bottom of the popcorn we start making out like teenagers. A middle-aged woman sitting alone two seats away shoots daggers at us.

I know lady, I’ve been there, we’ve all been there. You’re alone and there’s some gouge-your-eyes-out couple making googley eyes at each other and you just want to vomit directly in their faces. As much as I’m sympathetic, I feel the need to seize this spit swapping opportunity.

After the movie, he takes my hand while he walks me home. He seems very comfortable with me for how long we’ve known each other (a whole three hours), but I have to assume it’s because he’s a limited-time offer, right? If we were in NYC he’d probably stress about this small gesture of hand holding instead of flaunting me around the block like he won me at a carnival.

That weekend, he comes over to my place for dinner, but since I’m in a no-cooking phase I suggest BBQ takeout. It’s hard to take dainty bites of something as sloppy as a pulled pork sandwich, but what do I care? This guy will be gone in a week and I have a craving. I devour my sammie in a grotesque five minutes, hardly coming up for air. Somehow I’ve got BBQ sauce on my neck and I’m starting to get the meat sweats. I’m a charmer.

He mentions after we finish our sandwiches that maybe eating them was a mistake because he’s gluten-intolerant. I don’t usually buy the whole “gluten intolerance” thing and I ignore his comment. He holds his shit together (pun intended) and we continue drinking wine and chatting.

He notices my guitar and asks if he can sing me a song. My eyes widen, frightened of what I’m about to hear. He probably has a specific song queued up for this very occasion. God help me if it’s awful, because I know it will show on my face. He begins playing and it’s actually a bit of a downer tune. I’m glad it’s not some schmaltzy love ballad and I’m reluctantly impressed. A sad song is more manipulative though. This guy must get a lot of sympathy action.

After a little making out he insists that I play him a song. I go with the ukulele instead of the guitar and play the only song I know, one I learned at the request of another online dating prospect. Maybe that song will finally do what it was supposed to and get me laid, after which it will become my secret serenading weapon. My performance secures another half hour of making out before we leave for a friend’s party, where we get drunk and handsy before stumbling back to my place.

We proceed to have clumsy sex.

This guy is all over the place in bed. He seems to be speeding through a set routine where only at the end will he get to do what he wants. He’s moving from one part of my body to the next so fast I have to tell him that we’re not under any time restrictions.

He loses his boner. Boners are so fucking sensitive. I’m left unsatisfied. But I can’t say he didn’t try, he was just so…sloppy. And yes, we were drinking, but something about his sweaty, lumbering body really repulsed me. It just wasn’t going
to happen.

We fall asleep, but throughout the night I repeatedly wake up to him apologizing for getting up to go to the washroom.

Finally I get up to use the bathroom myself and as I put my feet on the floor I feel something squishy. It’s the condom. For the record, my trashcan is literally a foot away. As I enter the bathroom I see a balled-up bath towel, sopping wet on the floor, and the remnants of what appears to be an overflowing toilet. Perhaps I was too hasty in disregarding his gluten intolerance. But if you’re on a date, how about not eating something that makes you shit your pants uncontrollably? Or maybe he clogged it from hurling? I’m left to choose from the buffet of gross things that could have happened here. Puzzled still, I go back to bed, teetering on the edge of the mattress so as to not touch him.

I wake up relieved that he isn’t beside me. Did he leave? Am I free to disinfect the bathroom and burn my sheets now? Nope. He’s in my kitchen, helping himself to some coffee after drawing the world’s largest cock on my chalkboard. I laugh at the irony of this massive dick with the memory of his less than stellar performance fresh in my mind. I get into sweatpants and make no effort in my appearance as we sip our coffee in awkward silence.

The next two days he keeps texting me and I reply with short go-nowhere answers while deliberating how to get out of this mess. How am I supposed to explain my hot and cold demeanor when I don’t understand it myself? Sure he was gross, but we’re all gross sometimes. And even though this is what I say in my recurring don’t-be-an-asshole-have-some-sympathy pep talk to myself, I’m still disgusted by the thought of him. And finally I do something that feels completely out of character for me: I lie. I say I don’t want to see him again because he’s leaving soon. He sees through this and pressures me further. I dig myself deeper saying I shouldn’t have slept with him so quickly and I’m not that kind of girl.

At the time I thought this was a lie as well, a way to wriggle out of any real confrontation, but the more I think about it the more I realize it’s all kind of true: the person I am so disgusted by isn’t him at all, it’s me. I thought I wanted a relationship, but I keep setting myself up to fail dating people who are unavailable: geographically, emotionally, gastronomically…

I feel terrible. But then I realize that all the things I was doing to repel him, like not caring about what I ate in front of him and what I looked like, not reaching out to him and keeping my texting brief, were the exact things that kept him interested. I was elusive. Independent. Confident. I was behaving like a guy would, a guy I would be frustrated with and probably attracted to. This is a learning moment cocooned in an awful experience. All of the sudden I feel empowered. This could define all future relationships where I treat men poorly only to leave them wanting more!

Or, I could just find someone nice, who lives in this city and who can handle his pulled pork.

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