My Prerogative

Welcome to Choose Your Own Date, a fun new way to experience dating without leaving the comfort of your computer. No need to put on pants, no need to plot an exit strategy and no need to feel guilty if you eschew all further communication with the other party after the event. Throughout this post I will be offering a series of multiple choice questions so you can feel as though you were right there with me. C’mon, live a little… Vicariously!

On this occasion I was meeting R. and I had high hopes for him. He looked like the love child of Jude Law and Ewan McGregor and we’d exchanged some good emails, even gotten a little adult, shared some of our likes, and it seemed as though we were rather compatible.

R. was Irish-Welsh with an accent which was surprisingly pleasant. He'd recently arrived from the UK and was staying in a place with eight other expats, four of them in one room, five in another. This meant that if the night went well, the ‘my place or yours?’ negotiation would be over relatively quickly.

During our first beer, his phone rang. It was on silent, but I could feel the table vibrating. If you were in my position would you have:

A) Ignored it and hoped he did too, it’s rude to answer your phone on a date.

B) Told him to go ahead and answer it; you want to seem easy-going and this is just a casual meeting.

C) Told him to go ahead and answer it and then listened in on the conversation.

I went with C). R. apologised and answered it and even though he walked a little away from our table, I could still hear his end of the discussion. It went something along the lines of:

‘Hey man, where are you?... OK, I’ll tell him you’re there… OK, OK, sweet, see ya later.’

Then, apologising again, he told me he had to call another of his mates. That conversation went something like:

‘Hey, yeah, he said he’s there… Where are you?... No, he’s at the '...' Hotel. I just spoke to him. Just go in and see him. He’s there. OK, OK. See ya.’

And then there was a third call:

‘Alright, he’s on his way in. He’ll be there in a sec. He said he was there now. See ya.’

He apologised once more and that seemed to be the end of it. Until his phone rang again. To save me transcribing the conversations that followed, please re-read the previous three paragraphs.

The only difference in the exchanges was that the names of the establishments his mates were meeting at changed. Would this have made you:

A) Suspicious, though perhaps you couldn’t quite say why.

B) Think he had friends who couldn’t organise their way out of their socks.

C) Wonder if he was a drug dealer.

The second series of calls raised my suspicions. After it all happened a third time I voiced them.

 

Would you have:

A) Ignored it all; there’s plenty you don’t know about this guy, it could be anything.

B) Asked what the calls were about and let him explain.

C) Come right out and asked him if he was dealing.

Guess which option I chose.

‘So, who’s dealing what where?’

‘Huh?’ He replied unconvincingly.

‘You’re obviously facilitating some kind of a deal, I’m not an idiot.’

‘Oh. I thought I was being subtle.’

Uh I think everyone within earshot in the pub knew what was going on. When I pressed him for details he remained tight lipped, but he did admit that it was nice that he could now drop the charade. Yeah, must have been exhausting for him keeping up that act. If his fabrication had been any thinner it would have given the emperor’s weaver a run for his money.

At this point in the evening, knowing you were sitting across from a broker of illicit substances would you have:

A) Told him you received a call yourself while he was at the bar and that you had to leave because your friend/grandmother/brother was in labour/hospital/gaol.

B) Been honest and told him you weren’t interested.

C) Stayed because now things were really getting interesting.   

I stayed. I stayed for couple of reasons. First off, I love being right and since I’m not usually the kind of person who can pick the killer in a murder mystery, I was feeling pretty canny. Also, I had now met up with two men from the internet; one had biceps, the other was a backpacker drug dealer and strangely enough I was leaning towards sleeping with the latter. I think it’s because I’m a fan of the novelty factor (and wouldn’t that just be a much more interesting show than The X Factor?) and I’d been with biceps before, years ago, when I’d dated my gym instructor for a bit.

In retrospect though, I shouldn’t have asked him to come home with me.

Along with assuming I was incredibly dim, my date also misjudged me when he decided I was into being a bad girl. By bad girl I don’t mean a 90s film stereotype with long dark hair, a nose ring, maroon lipstick and ill-fitting leather. I mean the kind of girl who can look around her local and on the fingers of one hand count the guys she hasn’t slept with. The kind who has a signature move that her lovers remember better than her name. The kind of girl who actually has lovers, not just the occasional friend with benefits.

Now sometimes I get a little bawdy and raise my eyebrows in a manner that implies ‘Oh I KNOW all those ins and outs’ but in truth I think I’ve been fairly sheltered. I’m also not really one for talking dirty so when we things started to  heat up it took me a while to realise what was going on.

R: (breathy sexy voice) I bet you have sex all the time.

Me: (conversationally) Uuummm well, it’s been a while.

R: (while grabbing my arse) I bet you’ve been fucked by hundreds of guys.

M: (counting in my head) No… To tell the truth-

R: (running his hands over my breasts) You must fuck around.

M: (trying to be realistic) I’m probably pretty innocent.

R: (tongue in my ear) I bet you’re not at ALL innocent.

That's when I realised he wanted to have sex with a woman who saw more traffic than the Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

If you found yourself in this situation would you have:

A) Gone with it, 2011 is the year moving beyond your comfort zone.

B) Told him to stop talking and tried to do some of the things you’d been emailing about.

C) Pointed to the door and hoped that was one social cue he could understand.

I tried to go with it, I really wanted to just be able to enjoy the sex, but I couldn’t turn off the whiny needy teenage girl part of my brain that has to actually like the other person. I wasn’t enjoying myself and suddenly I wanted him off my sheets, out of my room and back on the street making obvious deals with his little gang of expats. Unfortunately, that meant I had some not sexy talking to do. 

I apologised, explained that I'd thought things would go differently, but R. did not take this well at all. He started sulking and asking what he’d done wrong and I actually felt so bad that I told him I really liked him and I wasn’t going to kick him out in to the... And as I gestured to the window, searching for a noun along the lines of cold, dark, night the sound of seriously hard summer rain came through the window, making the end of my sentence redundant.

And so R. left, slamming the door on his way out, leaving me to think about the choices I'd made and with a chorus of Brittney Spears via Bobby Brown in my head.

I don't need permission, make my own decisions

That's my prerogative