Unfiltered Story #259982

I once agreed to go out on a date with someone I met online. He seemed like a pretty decent guy, if not somewhat socially awkward. We had a lot of the same nerdy interests and he worked at a used bookstore that was quite popular in our town. He claimed to be a manager, but I could never confirm if that was true. I love books and can spend hours in a bookstore just browsing and reading. I figured, if anything, I got someone to talk books about.

There were many red flags about him that I didn’t notice until I thought about this story years later. The biggest was that his pictures were a few years old and he had clearly gained some weight (I’m not a super model myself, but still if I use recent pictures, so should you), and in real life he suddenly wasn’t very talkative anymore. He just kept staring at me, as if he was trying to see if I was real. The little tick in the back of my head that screams “DON’T DO IT!” kept going off. But I decide to at least give him a chance and see where this goes. Maybe I’ll get swept off my feet and we’ll have a great time; maybe it’ll be a bust but at least I gave it a chance.

We go to dinner, and I’m about as optimistic as I can be. As I said before, he’s not much of a talker tonight and answers all my questions with “Yes” or “No” or a soft nodding motion. Any conversation I attempt to start usually ends after a sentence or two. I got more conversation out of the waiter. He feels like a completely different person than the one I was talking to online.

After spending an hour getting maybe ten minutes worth of conversation out of him, I decide internally that this wasn’t going to work. I figure I better cut my losses here and at least end the date on a neutral note. He insists on getting coffee afterward. I wanted to go home and call it a night, but he insisted. It was probably the most vocal he had been all night. I shrug, thinking maybe he wants to keep trying to make this date work. But you can only beat a dead horse for so long before you realize it isn’t getting back up.

The bookstore I frequent has a cafe so we go and get coffee. I figure, if anything, I’ll at least make a new friend. It’s important to note that he picked me up for our date. I offered to meet him, but he insisted on picking me up “like a gentleman” (another red flag I ignored). As we wait for our coffees, I try to engage him in more conversation. If not for the ambient conversations from other patrons and the cashier yelling out orders, there would have been dead silence.

After another ten minutes of talking and getting barely a sentence out of him, he excuses himself to use the bathroom and I proceed to wait for him.

Five minutes becomes ten, ten becomes fifteen, fifteen becomes twenty, until eventually I’ve been sitting there for a half hour. Next thing I know, the manager gets on the intercom and says the store will be closing in fifteen minutes. I’m getting worried, thinking maybe something from dinner didn’t sit well with him. I walk towards the bathrooms, which are all the way in the back of the store, and proceed to wait. I walk around, thinking maybe he started browsing or maybe he’s back at the table, but no dice. I ask a male worker to check the bathroom for me and he comes out, saying no one is in there and the cleaning crew has already started their nightly clean up.

I run out to the parking lot and don’t see his car. I have been ditched with no way home. This was years before Uber and Lyft were around and my parents were out of town, so I run my options through my head. There was no way I was walking all the way home when home is 20 minutes away by car. I end up calling my ex to come pick me up (it was a mutual break up, and we remained friends until we lost touch a while ago).

To this day, I’m not sure what happened. Other than the one-sided conversation, I thought things were going well up until the actual date itself. I replay the date sometimes in my head, just to see what happened that might have made him think stranding a girl with no way to get home in the middle of the city was a good idea.

I didn’t go to the used bookstore he claimed to manage after that.

It took me months to realize that it wasn’t my fault the date was a bust. If he didn’t feel the connection, he could have just taken me home. He didn’t have to ditch me with no way home at almost midnight.

And that, my friends, is why you always agree to meet somewhere at the designated date spot.