I just went on my first actual date in several moths, and right now I’m remembering why I hate dating. It was a blind date, from my Reader ad; the guy seemed perfectly nice and articulate on the phone, educated, multicultural, a music lover, all sorts of things that I really like in a person. We had a nice and rather extensive chat on the phone on Sunday, and so I agreed to have dinner with him tonight.
Well, he was nice, but I won’t be going out with him again, because:
he showed up late
he was in desperate need of a shave and a clean shirt
he spent a large part of dinner telling me about his parents’ acrimonious divorce, complete with his mother’s lesbian affair, which I simply do not consider appropriate first-date conversation
he REEKED! I don’t have a particularly sensitive nose, but geez, it was all I could do to keep my food down.
I’m not attracted to him, to put it mildly; I’m not one of those elitist chicks who only dates GQ-type guys, but I found him physically repulsive. Sorry, but I don’t see the point in dating someone if the thought of him touching me makes me want to puke.
OK, call me shallow, but 4 of those 5 items were pretty much entirely under his control, so either he is’t well-socialized enough to realize that other people appreciate hygiene in their social interactions, or he didn’t care.
I thought finding a guy with brains and similar interests was the hard part, but apparently there’s a whole other layer of questions I should be asking first. ICK!
I remember, when I was younger, being totally hot for this gorgeous boy I knew. We finally got to the point of fooling around (I believe we were watching the finale of DS9), he took off his clothes, I got close up, and had to control myself very hard not to recoil.
I hate having my illusions shattered. We watched the rest of the episode chastely.
I had a friend who went on a blind date with a guy who spent the entire evening telling her of ALL the details of his six-figure-plus custody battle for his daughter. Ugh. Talk about obsessive.
I’m so glad I’ve never done the blind date thing. Sounds like maybe you’d better rethink your ad – “Personal hygiene a must!”
How could you go on a first date with someone without having the pre-requisite first date scrub up? I dont know if anyone else is the same but I shower for hours before a first date, have a shave and brush my teeth about 5 times…the thought of someone i’ve never really met before getting a whiff of B.O from me scares the bejeesus out of me. I’ve been with my g/f for a year now so luckily showers are a lot quicker but I still would have thought that a normal length shower once or twice a day will keep anyone from smelling or looking like a tramp so this guy must be a really big slob, I mean if he turned up like that then, what would he be like in a few years?
I was going to say something about the mediocre date I had on Wednesday, the first one I’ve had in 13 months…
…but on second thought, I’m going to pass. I mean, my date was rather well-dressed, and she didn’t REEK! How awful!
On behalf of the heterosexual male contingent of internet daters, please accept my apologies for those of our number who do not understand what soap and water are. Or don’t know what appropriate first-date conversation is. Or–ah, heck with it. I ain’t apologizing for him. He’s a dork.
My god, woman! Would you have him catch his death of the ague or bloody flux, just to suit your peculiar upper-class sensibilities? Plenty of time to bath when the annual rains come again.
I second that emotion. Man, that’s astonishing. Maybe he’s got bizarre romantic illusions of being “loved for Who He Is,” without realizing that Who He Is can easily be cleaned up with some soap and a wire brush.
Anyway, please don’t let this make you cynical; there really are good, smart, clean, single guys out there.
One of my ex-boyfriends (not ex because of this) only took showers every couple days. Guess he just didn’t like taking showers or something. It was fine in the winter, but in the summer he got a little…ripe smelling. At one point he came to my parents’ house for dinner (not the first time he’d met them) and I basically lent him a shirt and showed him where the shower was. Ugh.
Oh, and this reek was well beyond simple I-showered-this-morning-but-had-a-long-hot-day reek (and it wasn’t even hot here yesterday). This took me back to packed-like-sardines-on-a-bus-in-Leningrad-during-a-period-of-soap-and-detergent-rationing-at-short-person-armpit-height-to-tall-Slavs reek.
Yuk! I try hard not to judge on physical beauty (I’m no prize-winner myself, although hubby swears his first opinion of me was that I was cute), but I’m big on the hygiene thing. At least in America, just about anyone who wants access to soap and water can have it, and at the very least, we can be clean! The reek would be a definite deal-breaker for me.
Hubby sweats bad in the summertime, and he showers every morning, but frequently, before bedtime, I’ll tell him “Honey, I love you. Shower before you come to bed”. And he does, and all is well!
See, I can’t understand not bathing, either. If I don’t get a shower every 24 hours, I want to start climbing the walls-I can FEEL my hair getting clumpy and greasy (I have extremely oily, very fine hair, and it must be washed every night), and my skin just feels gross.
Maybe it’s because I’m OCD, but there’s just something about a nice, warm shower (Or tepid one in the summer time), when your skin feels all nice and smooth and smells good, and you feel all squeaky clean, and your hair drips down your neck.
I love that “just out of the shower” feeling. I remember back in October when the water was shut off for two days while we were having a new tub/shower put in, and THEN the next day the hot water heater was on the fritz so no matter how long you ran it, the water was boiling hot-even with the cold nob.
I wanted to jump out of my skin. Yech. (and I had the Sinus Infection of Death too. Not fun).
I always hated waiting on funky people. They’d get right up in your face and BREATH all over you and I had to hold my breath or I’d start gagging.
Another problem that my mother often has mentioned is when people bathe regularly, but don’t wash their clothes-and you get that musty, sweaty smell. Clean clothes, clean underwear, toothpaste, soap, water, it’s not that hard, folks!
Well, Eva Luna, I had a date with a guy who I’d really hit it off with over the phone. He was smart, funny, great voice. When I arrived to pick him up for our date I knew he’d showered–he showed up at the door wearing nothing but a towel. I left. Sometimes you just can’t win
