Instantly, I know the date will be a disaster when...

In My Humble Opinion
41

When the BIG topic of conversation from her is her ex. (Ladies- an occasional mention is OK, but no more than one line on the 1st date, and not as a continual topic after).

When, for a dinner date- she shows up in sweats or something, unless she is clearly very athletic, and came “straight from the gym”.

When, for the 1st- Meeting- date- she suggests a very expensive restaurant. (Personally I like one of those places where we can meet for an early dinner- split some appetisers & a drink or 2. Then, if we can tell it’s a “NOGO” real fast, we are not stuck there for a couple of hours)

When she mentions she is still married- AND still lives with her “soon-to-be-ex”. Ok- it takes a LOOONG time for that divorce to become final. But if you are still living with him- it ain’t over.

When she has more than 20 cats. I love cats- have 3 of them. But when you get into double-digits- watchout! Note- if she has a small dog, and takes it along- forget it.

When she INSISTS on going 'dutch". An “offer” to pay half- YES! I love this woman. A “I’ll get the drinks (or the tip), as you got the dinner”- great. A “well, can I get the next one?”- fine. But if she INSISTs- that means she does not want to “owe” you anything, and you’ll “just be friends”.

42

I’m all over that. I saw an interview with Oasis years ago. At least I think it was Oasis. This is the sad part. I’m not even sure. But the lead singer said they hated to read. To this day I really can’t stand Oasis because of that, and I’m not even sure it was them in the interview! Just the fact that it might have been them is enough.

43

You should have told her you were a Necromancer, and like to raise yours from the dead.

44

Ahh, yes…bad dates. Try this http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=29985 to hear about my really bad date.

45

I. Mentioning the ex too early and too often is absolutely a dating disaster for me. It’s a total red flag.

I was recently out with a guy who mentioned his ex during the phone call to decide on the movie, at the movie, in the car after the movie, and when we went to get dinner. No, no, no, no, no!

I just started getting to know another gentleman. When I emailed him this a.m. to say “how are you feeling?” (he’d had a cold) his reponse was “Much better, thanks. Probably because the ex isn’t in town, so I don’t have to run into her.” Ack! I’ve talked to this guy exactly twice. We haven’t even gone out yet. It’s like when people talk to my boobs instead of my face, I want to say “hey, I’m up here! You are talking to me!”

So, an open letter to these types:

Listen, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I don’t care. Look, you’ve been burned. I get it. I’ve got my own hair-raising stories of heartbreak to tell. Over time, if we get to know each other, we’ll find out about all the adventures and missteps who have made us into fine people we are today. Please, let’s, for this brief shining evening, pretend that we haven’t been charred by the flames of heartbreak and tonight is just about getting to know each other.

Maybe you are just out of a relationship and the sound of “ex” is new to you. You like saying it, because it means that you are newly single. But to me it means “yes, he’s technically single, but so very not over her.”

Maybe you are looking for sympathy. You want my mother hen instincts to kick in and say “I would never treat this dear sweet man the way that bitch treated him, and I will start making up for everything she did right now, starting with a nice blow job.”

No. It just tells me “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!”

II. Talking about your job too much. Maybe it’s living in D.C. for so long that did it to me. When we have that inevitable “so, what do you do” conversation, keep it short and sweet. Funny anecdotes are okay. I don’t want to hear every detail of your morning meeting or how the spreadsheet kept messing up on you or how much you hate your boss.

46

A quick goodbye to any guy who:

~bashes books, the internet, religion, or any music that I really like. If the guy hates reading and the internet, and has totally different religious views than me, I don’t see how we would get along very well. I remember having a boyfriend who made fun of his ex, calling her an “innocent little church girl.” This made me upset, because that’s what a lot of people called me, also…I knew it wouldn’t work out after that. Then again, I really don’t care about this guy anyway; last I heard he dropped out of school and is in jail or something for drug and weapon possession (NOTE: All my other boyfriends and dates have been fine, upstanding young men–my first boyfriend was just a big mistake to begin with).

~flirts with other girls while he’s with me. This story goes along with the not liking the same music. One time I was out with my boyfriend at a bookstore. We were sitting on the floor reading when a girl walked up and told him that we shouldn’t sit on the floor. We all exchanged a few more words and she walked away. “She was obviously hitting on me,” boyfriend said, all smug. I rolled my eyes, but I got him back at a cd store. I was looking at Smashing Pumpkins cds when boyfriend said loudly, “Oh man, the Smashing Pumpkins SUCK! Don’t you think so?” to this attractive guy who was nearby. He turned around and said, “Actually, no, they don’t suck. They’re my favorite band!” My eyes lit up and I smiled at the guy. “Really? They’re my favorite band, too!!” and we carried on a pleasant conversation about the band before I had to leave with a miffed boyfriend. hehehe

~If they don’t treat animals, children, and elderly people right. Any guy who gets a kick out of hurting or killing animals for fun deserves a kick in the head. And since I want to have a family someday, I wouldn’t want to end up with a guy who wouldn’t like children. Elderly people deserve respect. This goes along with parents, too. I like it when a man gets along with his parents.

For you other posters, here’s a big hug ((((dopers)))) for your terrible dates.

47

If she wants to turn it on, that’s ok, and I’ll admit to the stations on the pre-sets, but mostly they ignore the radio if I do.

One time a date died because of music.
We were at the fairgrounds and she said “Can you hear that? I can’t quite make it out, but it sounds like it’s Dixieland. Can you tell which direction it’s coming from?”

I looked about and said “I think the noise is coming from behind this building.” I just meant noise as “sound” but she thought it meant I hated it, she demanded an explanation, and the date was over.

48

…when, at the end of the movie, he tenderly takes my hand and casually directs it into his lap, or to be more precise, onto his crotch.

or, different guy

…when I offer him a french fry and he looks at me as if I’d just volunteered to drown a sack full of infants, and says “I’ve cut ALL the FAT out of MY diet!”

or, going back to my college years

…when he invites the girl he’s really interested in over while I’m hanging out in his dorm room, making it clear that he’s only gone out with me that night because I asked and he wanted to be nice.

49

I’m pretty easy-going about a lot of things, but I have had two date-ending incidents.

  1. Handing me a Campus Crusade for Christ pamphlet and asking me if I’d accepted Jesus into my life. We stayed on good terms and are still friends today, but the “date” part of our evening ended right there.

  2. Spending 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner talking on her portable phone with six different people, half of whom she called. I found out pretty quickly that she was just using me as a fashion accessory, and was less interested in being with me than in being seen with me. Never saw her again.

–sublight.

50

  1. When I arrived at her house, she introduced me to her sister. “This is my sister, Mary. She’s back in the States after spending a semester in Spain. She’s gonna’ come along with us, okay?”

  2. When, halfway through lunch, she gave me some Jack Chick tracts, and started to ask about whether Jesus Christ was my personal savior.

  3. When I arrived at her house, she tool me into the living room to meet her parents. The walls were filled with IRA and Sinn Fein posters. I’m Lutheran. (Realize that this was in Buffalo, New York.)

  4. When she admitted that in her entire 25 year life, she has never travelled outside of the Las Cruces/El Paso/Juarez area. Not even to Albuquerque.

  5. When she got in the car, and immediately turned on the radio and started tuning through the band. She stopped on a country-western station.

51

A guy I knew casually asked me out. He came to my house, and picked me up. I asked where we were going, and he said that we were going horseback riding, and then out to dinner at a nice resturant. Great, I thought. We get to the stable, ask for two horses, and when it’s time to pay, he says casually, “Oh, I don’t have any money.” Fuming silently, I paid, and I also had to pay at the resturant as well. Most expensive date I ever had. I don’t mind going dutch, as long as it’s mentioned beforehand, but I don’t think I should have had to pay for the two of us!

On a date with a different guy, we got into a car accident. (He was driving, and hit a patch of gravel on a curve, and slid off the road into a tree.) He didn’t even ask me if I was okay. He started crying, saying that it was his father’s car, which he had taken without permission. All of this was news to me. He begged me to tell the police officer that a crazy drunk had run us off the road. Later that week, I got an angry call from his father, who had been told that it was I who had insisted that we “steal” the car, and that I had been “pawing” his son, causing him to lose control of the car while trying to “fight me off.”

My best friend had a date who actually picked his nose in a resturant and wiped it on the tablecloth.

52

Friend of mine set me up on a blind date once. She set me up with a girl in the office who she said “needs to get out more.” (In case you’re wondering why I say “girl” instead of “woman,” it’ll be clear in a minute.) The girl had been complaining about not having more friends in town, about being lonely, etc. “You’re smart, funny, good-looking,” my friend said, “she’ll love you.”

So I call this girl and set up a time and place to meet. By her voice, she sounds normal and fine, but she “hates talking on the phone,” so no pre-getting-to-know-you chat before we meet. Sure, okay.

I’m at the designated spot. She shows up ten minutes late. She’s eighteen (I was mid-20’s), carrying one of those pastel sparkly plastic mini-purses; think an arrested-development Britney Spears fan.

The first words out of her gum-chewing mouth: “Hi. How long is this going to take?”

Great.

I went through the motions, and cut the date’s activities short. Then, the next day, I tongue-in-cheek chastised the friend who had set us up: “What the hell were you thinking?” She apologized, but said the girl had been bugging her to set her up with “anyone” for weeks, and I was the most forgiving of her single male friends.

“How long is this going to take.” You’ve got to be kidding. :rolleyes: No wonder you don’t have many friends…

53

Alright this is going to be a long one because of how pathetic I am.

Answered this personal ad in the paper. We hit it off over the phone and talked for a few weeks. I drive up to her parent’s house meet her take her to the beach and I think we have a good time. She seemed very nice. Next day I pick her up again and we go to an amusement park. She trips in the parking lot and hurts her foot so I take her back home. That night she calls me up and says she doesn’t think it will work because I live in the same town as her ex. I ask her to give me a chance and she agrees to. Next weekend I pick her up and we were going to go to the movies. We go there and she introduces me to her “boyfriend” that she met last night. At that point I should have left her there. I didn’t and ended up driving them to the beach. I should have left them there but I didn’t and I ended up taking each of them home and I told her never to call me again and I went home

Another personal ad out of the paper. I take the day off work (was working nights at the time) to meet her where she works. We had spoken on the phone a few times and had gotten to know each other first. She told me she gets off at 4 so I got there at 3:30. 4:30 rolls around I don’t see her, 5:00 rolls around she still didn’t come out. I go inside and ask for her and they tell me she left at 4. I call her at home get her mother and she tells me never to call again

Yet another personal ad. This one was off the Internet. We sent a few E-mails to each other, and talked on the phone. I drove up to meet her at a diner near where she lived. About 20 minutes after the time we were supposed to meet passes this pickup truck pulls up. They ask me if I’m Manny I tell them yes and they tell me that she was in an accident and is in the hospital. I ask if she is OK and they say yea she will be. It sounded a bit fishy to me so I had my friend call her house a half hour later and she picked up the phone.
I guess this is why I am still single

54

This may seem very minor in comparison to most of the other replies in this, but I’ve always had one major pet peeve about dating. I’m a good, well-mannered southern boy, who was taught early in life that you always open the door for a lady, especially the car door. If I take the time to open the door and let her in, I expect that my door will be unlocked by the time I get around the car. It sounds like a minor thing, but to me it says a lot about a person’s personality. It only takes just a moment to reach across and do that. If they’re too lazy or unappreciative to do it, I know I’m in for a long night.

55

My best friends’s non-english speaking Japanese mother told me the exact same thing! (With my best-friend acting as a translator.)

If the girl’s just sitting and looking pretty after you let her in then she’s not the thoughtful type. It’s the sum total of all the cute little things she does that really matters. In my experience, it’s a really good test.

56

I have an idea. Print out the “How would you resond to this” thread and mail it to her.

I think she should know how any sane person would view her actions. It wouldn’t be all too justified revenge. It would be doing her a service. It would be for her moral betterment. Some day she’ll thank you for it. ;).

57

…when I show up.