That Escalated Awkwardly
This story goes back many years before I met my wife and I was still in the dating game, and it summarises what was probably the worst date of my life. I think the young lady probably didn’t do too well out of it, either, but I’m sure she at least got a story to tell.
I met a girl online. We seemed to share a lot of interests and chatted for a few hours on an almost daily basis for a few weeks, so I asked her out, but on the day of our date, it was almost like she had been possessed. I don’t know if it was nerves, anxiety, or disappointment even, but she hardly said a thing. The only way I could get any words out of her was by asking direct and open questions.
Evidently, this annoyed her; at one point, she asked me why I was asking her so many questions. Now that I’m older and wiser, I would probably have made my excuses and left, but in my youthful days, I felt that I had to stick it out to the bitter end, which leads us to the part of the evening where a discovery gave her a bit of a fright.
We had gone to a pub that played the type of music she was into and, having given up on meaningful conversation, I asked her if she wanted to shoot some pool on one of their tables. The table was coin-operated and released the balls after a coin was inserted into a drawer which was then pushed into the table. At one point, I tried to insert a coin into the drawer, but it must have been at an angle because it popped out and fell down the side of the mechanism.
I got down on one knee to fish around for the coin, and as I was rooting around, I found a ring that someone must have left there! I looked at it in puzzlement and, without thinking about the optics, I swiveled around on my knee to face her and I lifted the ring up to show her. Yes, that’s right. On an absolute disaster of a first date, I just got down on one knee and presented her with a ring.
As you might expect, there was a look of absolute panic on her face. After a moment she stammered out, “Um, that looks nice.” Her reaction puzzled me for a moment because I was expecting something more in the vein of, “Huh, that’s weird. Where did you find that?”
Then, the reality of what I had just done sank in. I blurted out a very quick explanation to her about having just found it and that I was just showing it to her. I think she believed me, but I’m not sure because my going over to hand it to the barman was pretty much the end of that date.
It might be one of the very few instances of someone ending an absolutely terrible date by accidentally proposing, though!