Lesson Learning

The nice thing about dating is that when it goes right, everyone is happy, and when it goes wrong, there’s always a lesson to be learned. Here are few lessons we can learn from…

…the guy who spat at a man wearing a “free Palestine” t-shirt in Times Square. When the man whirled around, the guy took off running in the opposite direction, where he found a cop and complained about being harassed. Obviously, this guy didn’t realize that politics is taboo on a first date. Or, for that matter, acting like a complete sniveling coward.

…the guy who will forever live on in his date’s mind as “Drunken Vomit Boy.” This is because he thought it was cute on the first date to tell about the time he went drinking with a coworker and woke up three hours later in the hospital with vomit on his shirt and bruises around his head. Granted, you’re supposed to be honest on a date. But there’s a difference between “honest” and “tell-all.” Note for guys: girls tend to be less than amused by tales of inebriated escapades, no matter how funny they seemed at the time.

…the guy who, well… Let’s try it this way: One friend was a bit put out when her date took her to a nice restaurant on their third date, and his parents just “happened” to be there already. “He could have passed it off as an accident if he knew how to act, but he didn’t,” she said. “But, you know, it would have been more considerate if he’d at least been a man and said he wanted to introduce me to his parents. Or even introduced me. Because he didn’t. So I just got the feeling that they wanted to look at me. Totally gross.” The moral is, don’t play games.

In the same vein, there was the girl who googled her guy’s name, only to find… his modeling webpage. It included his portfolio, complete with shots of him with his arms around the waists of pretty women. When she called and asked him about it, he flatly denied it. When she said she had the webpage open and the guy looked exactly like him and also shared his name (what a coincidence), he got sulky and lashed out, saying that “not everyone can live at home until they’re 25; some people need to do something called ‘getting a job.’” Though the obvious moral is “don’t act like an immature jerk,” I think she got lucky here. So if you are an immature jerk, do us a favor and make it obvious from the start.

…the guy who freaked his date out with his choice of conversation. It has always been the male way to attract a mate by showing off. What was formerly hunting skills and brute strength now manifests as wealth and knowledge. But still, not all knowledge is equal. For example, on a first date, while sitting and sipping drinks, the girl does not want the benefit of your encyclopedic knowledge of date rape techniques. It will make her clutch her drink more tightly, sip more slowly, and wonder why, oh why, do you know all this?

Also, while wealth is indeed attractive, obsession with it is not. For example, by telling  a gal who loves writing that bestselling authors should stop writing the better to live it up with their wealth. Nor should you then wax on about how in general you think that people with too much money should just stop working and live a profligate, hedonistic lifestyle, because after all, isn’t that the point? Just an aside: it isn’t the point. Writers generally enjoy writing, and don’t care as much about the money. Indeed, writing happens to be the one profession where you can have zero income and nobody thinks you’re a total failure or weirdo. In the broader view, many people work because they enjoy being productive. Money is not the only thing they think about.  Women comprise a huge proportion of the workforce who do things because they love it (this is why they tend to group in the services industries), so revealing to a woman that you think work is solely about money is not a winning strategy.

While we’re at it, not all women are impressed when you do 60 in a 30mph zone, or wonder aloud who on earth actually stops at stop signs, as you zip past at full throttle. Although all that stuff about treating women as delicate creatures who require extra courtesy is outdated, the stuff about pretending to be civilized and leaving the rough talk and behavior for after the ladies have retired to the drawing room does still hold. Of course, playing the courteous and manly character is always appreciated:

For example, the guy who showed up to a fourth date to find the young lady feeling ill.  “If we’re just gonna go to a lounge,” she suggested, “How about we stay right here instead?” So they sat on a couch in her basement and had diet cokes, and it was just the same as a lounge date would have been, except that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and had been planning to take her to a restaurant, not a lounge. He didn’t tell her that until after the wedding, though. So you see, being a gentleman never hurts.