My friend S, newly single and too busy with nursing school to meet people, asked me how to meet people outside of school. I told her other than through friends, I usually or people, would just strike up random conversations. She said that she wasn’t the type to randomly talk to people and I told her to join a dating website. She agreed but begged me to join as well so that ‘she wouldn’t be joining alone’. I wasn’t really interested in meeting anyone or anything but agreed.
I joined and got a hundred or so messages a day but would leave a lot unread, usually from really generic subject and messages you could see on preview. Every now and then I would talk to a guy or two but rarely go on dates.
There was a guy I started talking to and he seemed normal enough. We talked on the phone and agreed to meet up after about 3 weeks of communication. We met up at a Starbucks because people. We talked for a bit and right when we got up he asked me if I could drive us to the restaurant. I said sure and as soon as I said that he grabbed his rucksack from the floor, which I thought belonged to the person besides us, and said lead the way.
I didn’t ask about the bag but I did ask, when we got into my car, why he wanted me to drive. He said he didn’t have a car. Cool I thought. I drove us to the restaurant. At the restaurant, before I could open the menu he asked ‘Are you paying for this or am I?’ I managed to reply that we would split the check.
After dinner, he says he had about an hour and a half until his train and that we should walk around the mall since the restaurant was near the mall. I kinda of wanted to leave but he gave off the impression that he would chase after me if I ran so I went along with it.
While at the mall he kept touching me. My back, my arms, my neck, my hands, my legs. He also started to dump his emotional luggage onto me. Like— when he found out his fiancee-at-the-time cheated on him with his best friend, he broke up with her. She then told him she was pregnant with his child. His family was furious at him for leaving her, thinking she was pregnant, but he was convinced she was faking it. The whole betrayal left him unable to cope so he turned to alcohol and he became a MASSIVE alcoholic and started sleeping around with hundreds of girls at the two campuses near by. But that was all behind him and he was one year sober and showed me his sobriety coin— emotional baggage.
One the way back to the car, to get his bag, he mentioned that he liked me a lot and if I didn’t mind, if I could drop him off at the train station. I dropped him off and never talked to or saw him again.
