First Date Hell - Being Frank

I once had a blind date with a man who led me to believe for an entire month via email that his name was Steve Warner. Then he called me and said, "This is Frank." When I questioned him about the name change, he said his middle name was Steve but his real name is Frank.

It wasn't the most charming first phone call, but considering that my online dating name is "LovelyBrunette" and I had only given him my first name and my cell number at that point, I didn't think I could make a big deal about it. After all, the guy seemed nice and he was being honest, or should I say--FRANK--with me, so who wasI to judge? We online daters must be careful, if nothing else.

After the date, which was fine, and in which he seemed reasonably normal, he sent me an email saying his name was neither Frank nor Steve, and in fact, his last name was not even Warner, but this was only because he is a "fiction writer" (he'd told me he was a nurse) and as a fiction writer, he uses several pen names for dating and writing. He signed the last email "S.F. Barack" and told me that I could now tell everyone that I'd been on a date with a guy named Barack.

While I am in no way opposed to fiction writing (it was my major in undergradl) I do require actual identities of my dates to not be fictional.

The irony (is it really irony?) is that I've now posted a real story about a guy using multiple fake names but I can't actually use the REAL fake names he has given me, because what if one of them is partially real? I have no way of knowing what was true and what was not. So I've changed all names (including mine) for anonymity purposes, but I kept the two that seemed important: Frank, and Barack.

Those names are the real fakes. I think.

We Are Not Alone

In setting up this blog, we discovered that there are a lot of people out there going through "dating hell" and writing about it. It was tough going to find a URL and email address with those words in it (and I'm pretty sure it only worked out in the end because no one wanted to spell out "anonymous" in a URL). Apparently, there's a lot of dating angst out there (which we're hoping you'll share with us as you experience it!) But there are a lot of other stories out there already, some funny, some frightening, and some the obvious product of a person who needed to vent just a little too much.

Here are a few that might be of interest to you if you've stumbled upon this site:

http://www.datingishell.net/

http://www.internetdatingstories.com/stories/index.php?category=3

http://www.trap17.com/index.php/Dating-Stories_f197.html

http://dating.about.com/od/datingissues/ss/datingdisasters.htm

Got more? Feel free to add in the comments. Relevant and reasonably tasteful links will not be deleted.

The Fine Line Between Working and Stalking

After a night of underage drinking in a dive bar in the city and crashing on a friend of a friend’s couch, I hopped a commuter train back home in the morning and called a cab to meet me at the train station. That’s the safe way to get smashed in your late teens, right? Maybe if you call the right cab.

The wild-haired driver invited me to sit in the front seat. Never having been in a cab alone before, I thought maybe that was normal procedure if there was only one passenger. At least, that’s what I thought for the first half mile or so. I started to doubt it when the driver said, “Do you mind if I just stare at you until I drop you off?”

I told him I’d rather he kept his eyes on the road, but apparently I’d been worried about nothing. He let me know that he was a very safe driver, and even reassured me that he wasn’t on any drugs. Seems he’d seen “too many drugs go through the streets and through his system” and that was why he “didn’t mess around with that many drugs anymore.”

It’s only a few miles from the train station to my house, but the ride seemed to take forever, and as the end neared he asked if he could call me some time. I told him that I thought he was too old for me (he’d shared that he was 28). “Hell,” he said, “age don’t mean nothing. My ex-wife was a lot younger than me.”

I’m sure it was just a coincidence that for weeks afterward, I’d see a cab parked across the street from my house late at night.