First eHarmony Date

One-word summary: lame.

I bought a new red sweater just for the occasion and looked rather spiffy, if I do say so myself. He showed up in baggy jeans and and old sweatshirt. We'd decided ahead of time that we would grab a bite to eat and then see Bee Movie. I left it to him to settle on the details. He had me meet him in front of his apartment. Twenty minute drive for me, zero for him. Granted, he lives in North Hills, which is convenient to restaurants and a theater, so I'll overlook this inequity.

He listed the nearby places to eat, and asked me to choose. I narrowed it down to two and left it up to him. He chose Panera. We walked over there, ordered, and sat down. The conversation didn't exactly flow smoothly, but that is not abnormal for a first date. He kept bringing up topics we had already gone over thoroughly in our email exchanges, though, so I felt like I was repeating myself. He went over his previous eHarmony date experiences: married, 68, stalker, bitter. He said he's not going to renew when his membership is up in two weeks, because it's just "too much work." His words: "I get like, 10 matches a day, about 5 of them communicate with me, it's just exhausting. I've got about 25 in open communication now." Holy crap. I have two in open communication. Something is wrong here, because he is NOT the catch of the decade, so why all the interest? I think there must be way more women than men in the system. No wonder all the guys are so picky--they have scores of women to choose from!

He asked about my job, which we had not discussed. My profile says I'm a software trainer. "How did you get to THAT from teaching?" Um, it's not exactly that big of a stretch to go from teaching kids to training adults, but he made it sound as if I switched from teacher to streetsweeper or something. So I explained what I do, and he seemed thoroughly bored. It was at this point that I noticed he had yet to smile since we met, and he did not seem particularly engaged in our conversation or interested in what I was saying. He kept nodding his head ever so slightly, accompanied by the slow blink, as if to say, "Yeah, yeah, I get it, who cares, move on already." I really don't think this was me being ultra sensitive, either. I already knew all about his job (he's a high school social studies teacher), but we talked about it nonetheless. He'd stayed up all night Sunday grading papers, and then took Friday off as a "mental health day" to catch up on his sleep. I asked why the all-nighter was necessary, when he had a four-day weekend previous. He got defensive, and then asked if I knew what kind of school he taught at. I knew it was kind of like a magnet school, but he launched into this diatribe about how it's ranked in the top 5 nationally (B.S., by the way), there are thousands of applications every year for 800 spots, etc. He brought up why I left teaching, which, again, we'd already discussed, and when I explained my frustration with student behavior, he said (rather haughtily), "I never had those types of problems, even when I taught low-achievers." Okay then.

He only ate about half of his Caesar salad, because he said it tasted awful. I kept eating my sandwich, and had about two bites left when he said, "Shall we walk around?" Um, how about you let me finish first? So we went outside and walked around all the little shops there in North Hills. I tried my best to make conversation, keep things upbeat and moving. We passed by Wolf Camera, so I asked him about the camera he's planning to buy, but he seemed completely uninterested in hearing my opinion, even though he'd been impressed before by my knowledge in this area. We had pretty much reached the theater when he said he wanted to go back because he wasn't feeling well. He walked me to my car and apologized for cutting things short, but he felt like he was going to throw up. At that point, the date officially entered the Hall of Shame. Less than an hour after I arrived, I was heading home. That was Friday--haven't heard from him since, which is probably just as well.

Back to square one!