“I matched with a guy online who seemed great on paper. He was an engineer, trilingual, and a mountain biker. He checked off a lot of boxes for me. Little did I know that I was headed for one of the worst dates of my life.
He called me for directions help to the bar we arranged to meet at, but as we were talking on the phone, he started swearing like crazy. He walked up to the married couple playing pool (who I am sure didn’t speak English), and shouted to the man that he’s awful at pool, and that his wife was clearly kicking his butt. He had never met these people before.
We started playing a 20 Questions type of game on his phone, and he only handed me the extremely personal questions to answer- whether I swallowed, my favorite position, and got mad when I didn’t want to answer. When I asked about his job, he told me that he would, ‘Try to explain it to you, but it would be too complicated and you wouldn’t understand me,’ followed up by, ‘Even if we were married for 10 years, you still wouldn’t understand what I did.’
We were discussing healthcare policy (I double majored in neuroscience and healthcare policy/management, and I did a few classes on the Affordable Care Act), and he actually started yelling when I tried to explain a part of the bill to him. ‘I didn’t ASK you to EXPLAIN it, I wanted to you TELL ME HOW YOU WOULD SOLVE THAT PROBLEM !’
He kept interrupting me whenever I was answering a question. He asked to say something random about himself and how he was good at something, or he would interrupt me to invite me to international work trips. He also made constant perverted comments about my body.
The final kicker was when he interrupted me to tell me that I wasn’t maintaining enough eye contact with him. This is nearly verbatim, ‘Eye contact is very important to me and you aren’t being respectful if you look away. So from now on, when you look away, I am going to snap my fingers at you until you look back at me. This is how you learn.’ And he did. He actually snapped at me like he was talking to a dog.
I got up, paid for both of our drinks, and tried to walk out. He walked out with me and onto the elevator, where he made me hold hands with him. I ran to my car and deleted his number as soon as I was inside.”
