[imagesource: Mahesh Kumar A./AP]

Dating can be a whole lot of fun or a whole lot of “no thanks, never again”, with plenty wedged in between.

You get first dates, second dates, hookups, “date night”, Tinder dates, and Hinge dates, which all have similar vibes but with slightly varying tones.

VICE has pointed out that, shockingly, finding someone and having a rollicking good time right off the bat is actually quite a challenge.

Thus, it didn’t take much to pry open people’s dating histories to uncover some of the most awful, cringy, and downright weird encounters known to mankind.

Let’s get into it.

This one from Emmi will make you wonder if the date had an unmentionable kink or unchecked trauma:

I had a guy over at my place for the night and had a relatively okay time, besides the fact that he had PISSED THE BED and all over me during the night. I thought I had been sweating through the night until I realised what had happened, when I asked him if he had pissed the bed or not.

He didn’t even act surprised, all he said was ‘oh fuck….’ we had to strip the bed and wash it all but I had to throw out my expensive mattress topper.

Later, Emmi found out that she wasn’t the first woman to wake up in a wet bed. Mutual friends told her this had happened at least twice before.

Trinity made a list of the red flags she had missed on “the WORST date ever”:

• We ran into some of his friends and he didn’t introduce them to me and proceeded to ignore me for two hours while they spoke and talked about real heavy shit that I couldn’t partake in the conversation about.
• He invited me back to do ketamine at his house. I said yes because at this point I NEEDED to as the date was going so poorly.
• When I turned down his request for sex he said ‘oh that’s ok I’ll just wank then’.
• He wanked while I just sat there in a K-hole.
• He fell asleep straight after he came and let out the biggest, grossest fart.

When she eventually left, Trinity said she was disgusted with her date but “mostly disgusted in myself for not leaving sooner”.

Then there are the singles who have to deal with actual children, which is always a trip.

Lena’s date was an odd one:

I met up with a dude from Hinge who I’d been talking to for ages during the winter lockdown for a bike ride. We had a mild disagreement over whether we should ride to the beach or the park.

He got really worked up about the conflict and suddenly rode away leaving me on my bike in the middle of the deserted south eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It was nighttime.

Jas also had to conclude a date with the promise to never see “this man (child?)” again as he became frustrated with the order of tamarind sticky lamb ribs, only to get so full of meat juices – and not in a sexy way – that she was thoroughly put off:

I asked him what was wrong, and he began to go on a rant about how he’s on a keto diet at the moment and marinades like this have way too much sugar in them. He continued to tell me about his entire keto diet, including how much mayonnaise he had stockpiled in his fridge and how four years ago he had done the same thing and ‘gotten so shredded’.

So here I was, sitting across a fully grown 27-year-old man with sauce smattered across his mouth and fingers – MORTIFIED. He insisted he continue eating it even though, in his own words, he complained about how the marinade was ‘so full of sugar’. I watched as he would wipe the marinade off each rib, tear at it with his teeth, get MORE marinade on his face and then try to wipe it and his grubby fingers off with an already sauce-soaked napkin, scrunch it up and drop it onto the table. It was giving George Costanza eating a chocolate sundae.

The lecture about mayonnaise making you ripped would have been the end for me.

Spare a thought for Jade, who had possibly the most confusing and potentially threatening date with a Tinder dude who just wouldn’t leave her house for two whole weeks.

She says she realised in retrospect that he was homeless and not actually avoiding the Russian mafia as he seemed to suggest.

No matter how bad it gets, at least there’s always the story, right?

[source:vice]