My Worst Date

Reading through worst date stories, I’ve found that there are some common themes:

“My blind date showed up with far more acne and weight than their Tinder profile let on.”

“I’d been waiting for months for him to ask me out, and he turned out to be a total narcissist.”

“She was picking things out of her teeth all through dinner.”

“He lasted about three minutes.”

... The list goes on and on.

My worst date, however, was entirely my own doing.

We first met before a high school graduation party for our friends, who were a year ahead of us. Our mutual friend and his neighbor, Brit, had me over before the graduation ceremony to help set up her house for the party. When she was straightening up her bathroom, she found a massive spider in her bathtub.

I’ll insert here that we were both pretty tough 17-year-old girls, but we were also extremely interested in the male sex and I happened to know that she had an incredibly good-looking neighbor named Jake, as well as his phone number.

“Wait, don’t kill it. Think Jake’s home?”

This was creepy on my part because I’d never met him, but Brit knew that I’d been checking him out and immediately caught my drift.

“Okay,” she laughed, “I’ll call him.”

He was over in about 15 minutes. He was wearing jeans, some old kicks, and a flannel. His beard was thicker than many 17-year-olds could dream of, and he was about 6' tall, towering over my 5'5".

I happened to be holding a box of Coco Puffs when he came in. Brittany and I watched him kill the spider— totally anticlimactic— and we ended up all standing in the kitchen.

“Are you guys going to graduation?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Brit said. “We have a couple of friends walking tonight.”

“You’re dating Derek, right? He’s a buddy of mine.”

“Yeah,” she answered.

I realized I was being silent in the conversation and searched for something to add. I could have mentioned that I wasn’t dating anyone.

“Do you want some Coco Puffs?” Shit.

“Hell yeah. Thanks.” That went better than I expected.

I poured him a handful and we were contented to stand in the kitchen all munching on Coco Puffs for a bit. Brittany invited him to the party later that night and we left for graduation.

We sat through dozens of speeches and finally cheered as our friends Beth, Anderson, Tay, and others walked the stage. It was a happy occasion, but we knew we had one more year of walking the halls of A-High before we had any chance at the freedom they were about to taste. Most of them were going to the university in our town.

Then the party got started. We changed out of what we were okay with our parents seeing us in and pulled on tighter and less clothes, dragged on a little more eyeliner, and took a couple of vodka shots before people started showing up.

Ah, high school parties.

Before long, the house was packed. All of our friends and some of our friends’ friends were there. Jake was there. We started talking in the kitchen, drinking PBR and cracking jokes about the teachers we’d both had and people that we both knew. It came up that I’d recently broken up with someone he knew of, and he told me that he and his girlfriend had broken up recently as well. We were both pretty buzzed and got to talking about some deeper things— he’d lost his mom the previous year. I’d lost my brother in recent months.

That was when I realized that one of the things that made him so attractive to me— even at a distance— was that he had the same thing in his eyes that I couldn’t get out of mine. A certain kind of tiredness that insisted on pushing through into the late hours of the night. A look that disclosed pain and a strange hope at the same time.

We talked all night. We kissed and in the morning he left to pack for a two week trip with his dad to see some things in the country.

A little over a year later, we’d graduated, I’d started at university, and Jake was working at a classy restaurant downtown. I called him one night and he came to my dorm room and we talked again.

At this time in my life, I was totally uncertain of who I wanted to be. I was a theatre major with a liking for directing, I was seriously plugged into my community, and since I didn’t want to knock it 'til I tried it, I was in a sorority.

A couple weeks later, we got coffee. We started to see each other a lot. We were in love quickly and not hesitant to say it.

My dad criticized me for flying into it too quickly. He always meant well, without a doubt, but he came down on me really hard for this budding romance in my life blossoming as quickly as it was. He began to encourage me to “make level paths for myself.” He showed me places in the Bible where patience and virtue were highlighted and even emailed me a list of scriptures that encouraged the reader to use wisdom and discernment in decisions. I didn’t really question this at the time; my dad knew what was good for me, right?

Here’s where my worst date comes in.

Hearing all of this from my dad, being unsure of where I really wanted to go in life, and not having a grasp on all of the things I was involved in led me to feeling a little disjointed in my life. I was asking myself questions about whether I still held the same beliefs I did in high school, if I really wanted to be around “theatre people” for an entire career’s length, and if I actually had room in my life at the time for romance.

I decided that I couldn’t juggle it all. I asked Jake to coffee and broke up with him. In the months that followed, I chopped off most of my long hair, dropped my major without knowing which one to actually pursue, and decided to take a semester off of school when Fall came back around, all the while thinking about Jake, wondering about him, seeing him occasionally but avoiding him at all costs— in my head, avoiding him meant I could avoid the pain of not having him.

So, that was my worst date. Making the decision to break up with the person I truly wanted and who truly wanted me based on my own inability to find balance in my life.

I hold onto this memory because though this was my worst date and, for a time, I lost the one I love, I did manage to find that balance in the time we were apart. I took the time to discover who I am, what I love to do, and what actually fits into my life. Unsurprisingly, sorority life is not one of those things. I found a love for cooking, rekindled my love for my best friends, and invested deeply in the communities that I love. In the semester I took away from school, I came to know myself in spirit and body overseas, traveling and seeing things I never imagined I would.

There’s no dramatic turnaround with Jake for quite a while. We are actually back together now and we’re incredibly happy—I may write our story sometime.

Love is the highest goal. But as Brené Brown says, you can only love others as much as you love yourself. I say, how can you love someone you don’t know? How can I love myself if I don’t create space in my life to do so?

Maybe that date wasn’t so bad, after all.

#MyWorstDate