Dating Fails : Revenge & Dating — Part 1

I was going to write this when it happened early last summer, but I didn’t get to it then. Such is life. It gets in the way. So forgive me for some inaccuracies in the details.  Not that it is going to matter to the story nor its overall message. I want to stress here again that I will be changing personal details about the person I am writing about. You will not be able to deduct who it is. If he reads this, he might guess that I’m writing about him. 

Over the years, I’ve found that men are a lot more sensitive and vulnerable to rejection than women. Men are actually a lot more sensitive and insecure. And they take things much more personally and have much bigger egos. AND they are a lot more likely to seek revenge. 

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t take any shit personally. Yeah sure, sometimes things do get very personal and should be dealt with accordingly, however more often than not, we just don’t know why someone is turning us down. Who knows what life crises they might be dealing with at any given moment. Maybe the timing that is off and that’s it. Maybe it’s something else. It’s nothing personal.

I’m sure that I’m guilty of unwillingly, unknowingly, and unintentionally hurting some people’s feelings in the past.  Especially, when I was going through crazy custody evaluations and depositions in court. It was hard to pay attention to anything else at the time. So please forgive me. 

But this story is not about that. 

This story didn’t actually just happen early last summer. This story began when I found myself in an unsettling predicament about 11 years ago. I really liked this one guy, but I was too chickenshit to ask him out directly, so I invited him to my pool party. He wasn’t getting back to me with an answer for days and I thought that he surely blew me off and wasn’t going to come. 

As disappointing as it felt at that moment, I wasn’t going to cancel the party because too much production was already underway.  It was at a time when I used to host a lot of parties and a lot of pool parties despite the fact that most of them would leave me very disappointed and frustrated. When I was younger, I could never fully relax at my own events. I had to be that hostess with the mostest. Being a perfectionist at heart, I had to make sure that my party was always the best party. 

The most frustrating thing about those pool parties was me inviting guys who I considered to be “eligible”  and them showing up with their “dates” without any prior notice. They would just show up at my house with other girls. Some of them even went as far as bringing random sex workers just to make it some point in front of me. Boy, do I have some fun stories there. But that is for another blog post. 

In any case, I oftentimes found myself alone, serving everyone else and flipping burgers on the grill in a 100 degree heat while everyone else was coupled up and having a great time by the pool.  And this time, I wasn’t going to let this happen again. If this guy was not coming, I was going to have a plan B. 

My plan B turned out to be a big mistake that I will never forget. I had friends who wanted to set me up with one of their childhood friends.  He looked perfect on paper. “Nice” Jewish boy with a top tier MBA and an already impressive professional career. He was also my age, had similar cultural background, and was once married and divorced. Just like me. It seemed like a great fit. 

So I invited my friends who would bring this guy along with them. I now realize that this was a big production on their end. This meeting must have been pitched to the guy as a very serious and big deal and he wasn’t merely coming to take a look at me. He was coming as if this was already a “done deal” with the most serious intentions. 

You can only imagine my big surprise when the morning of, the first guy finally messages me back, apologizes for not confirming sooner, and tells me that he is indeed coming with a couple of his friends because he will already be in the area with them after some wine tasting. (My house is in the  heart of the Wine Country). 

He must have taken this long to get back to me because he probably didn’t have enough balls to just show up and he had to organize a whole wine trip around my pool party with his friends to make it seem like he stopped by on a whim just because he was already in the area. Never mind that everyone was already in their 30s. Obviously, this guy was still in kindergarten. 

How silly and how unfortunate. Right away, my heart sank and I knew that I fucked up. And I knew that it was going to be a fuck up of epic proportions. I couldn’t disinvite anyone at that point. I couldn’t cancel the party either. Too many people were already coming. 

It was a very hard lesson for me to learn: NEVER EVER  invite 2 potential suitors to the same event. 

You can guess how it went from there. Both guys showed up and I was inevitably forced to make a choice between the two. The guy who I was crushing on was the more gentle and sensitive one (and that was probably the biggest reason why I was so into him in the first place) and he was not the kind to engage in an unexpected battle with another dude, who was on the contrary quite aggressive. The other guy who was a Harvard MBA and naturally quite comfortably competitive turned my pool party into a pissing contest. 

It felt like he already marked his territory. He arrived much earlier and by the time the other guy came after his stupid wine tasting, the first dude had already made himself comfortable, seized control of the grill, and even went as far as handing out towels to show everyone and especially the other guy that he was the most special and intimate guest at that party.

I felt like I wanted to disappear off the face of the earth at that moment. It was so awkward. On one hand I had this guy who I’ve been crushing on for a long time and who finally reciprocated and drove 60 miles to see me. And on the other hand, I had this other guy who also drove 60 miles together with my really good friends and they are still some of my closest friends and I wasn’t going to cut ties with them at that stupid pool party.

I had to make a choice. I had to let one guy go home humiliated and disappointed. As much as I liked my crush, I was also under immense pressure and guilt-tripping from my friends. I could not reject “their” guy. At least, not at that moment.

My crush came late and left the party early, very humiliated. It must have been especially humiliating since he also brought his friends with him. He never spoke to me again after that despite my several attempts to make amends. I don’t blame him. He’s happily married with kids now. This story is not about him.

This story is about the other guy. I’m going to call him Mike.

Once the other guy left the party, Mike felt an unbeatable winner and he remained in his best disposition for the rest of the party. In fact, he felt so victorious that he seemed to be doing the Saltburn dance floor scene and along the way, Mike got progressively more and more annoying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcPT9jhOQw

It felt like he was walking around my house (actually, my parents’s) and already imagining how he’s going to move in and rearrange the furniture. Especially for someone like me, who’s already been through one such major trauma (you’d have to read my first blog series there), I found his behavior to be extremely off-putting. He was certainly not very subtle about any of it. Mike thought that through our mutual friends he already sealed the deal with me.

Well…he was wrong. The last drop which completely pushed me over the edge and into a state of complete repulsion with this individual happened at the very end of the party. When most people were already gone and I found myself sitting alone with Mike on the deck overlooking a romantic sunset over the Mayacamas Mountains. He wanted to lean in to kiss me, but one of my beloved Frenchies was in the way. Mike must have thought that I wasn’t looking and paying attention when he viciously kicked the poor dog off the bench when he finally leaned in for that kiss.

I didn’t make a scene then, but this guy instantly died for me as a prospect and I couldn’t wait to bid him farewell. People don’t realize that it’s those oftentimes overlooked littlest details and smallest gestures that instantly expose their true colors no matter how seemingly agreeable and amenable they present themselves.

When Mike was driving off into the distance that night, he had no idea just how badly he ruined his chances with me.

I don’t quite remember how I got out of having to see him again and what I must have said to him. I certainly never told him anything upfront and he’s still clueless about what made me turn him down that summer. In the fall, I moved to New York where I stayed for many years and I never really got to see Mike again except for a handful of big celebrations and friends gatherings at which we always exchanged pleasant courtesies.

Fast forward to last summer. To be continued …