Dating Disasters: ‘His mission to wrap this up neatly failed completely’

In Dating Disasters, anonymous readers share their most embarrassing, cringeworthy, and dramatic dates. This week: the gold digger.

After a turbulent time at work and enduring lockdown after lockdown, I felt it was time for a nice man in my life. Now I know better than to expect that there are still really nice men to be found on Tinder these days, but I was quite charmed by Stefan's profile. He had green eyes, dark curls, and a friendly smile. Usually, I'm not one to jump at the chance to meet someone right away, but something inside me said I wanted to meet Stefan quickly. So I immediately accepted his suggestion to take a coffee walk in the park at 10:00 AM. Practically the middle of the night for me, but for a new potential romance, I was willing to make the effort.

The date was incredibly fun. We chatted non-stop, had the same sense of humor, and discovered many similarities. Positively surprised and cautiously enthusiastic, I came home. Not long after, more dates followed, and we saw and spoke to each other more often. He turned out to be a real gentleman. I didn't have to touch a door myself; he pulled my chair out for me and held my coat up when we left somewhere. I felt like a princess in his presence. Additionally, he had a habit of calling me between our dates, and even then, we easily chatted for two hours. So it was no surprise that I slowly started to really like him.

You can understand my disappointment when I slowly felt him pulling away. You know how it goes: the phone calls stop, the texts get shorter, and suddenly you haven't seen each other for more than a week. In an attempt to convince myself that I was imagining things, I invited myself over to his place. It was the night before my birthday, but I wouldn't be celebrating it for a few days. It was going to be a party with all my friends and family, and he was also invited.

That evening was very pleasant, but it didn't take away my uneasy gut feeling. The fact that he left his house quickly that morning, leaving me completely birthday-girl in bed, and didn't say a word the whole day spoke volumes to me, but I decided to park it. After all, I had a party to plan.

The day of my party quickly arrived, and since we had still kept in touch in the meantime, I decided to text him to ask if he still planned to come by. The party was already in full swing when I saw that I still hadn't received a response from him. I decided to call him, as we had done so many times before, but he didn't pick up. Hours later, I received a short but powerful text: ‘Have fun at your party!’. Ugh. Did he seriously wait until my party was almost over to not really cancel? Fine that he wasn't coming, but where had that decency gone that I was so charmed by? Mind you, this wasn't someone I had just met, and although I'm generally against the silent treatment, his overwhelming silence in this situation was particularly uncouth.

After my party, we had no contact for a week. He claimed to be tired and sick. The charming, involved man I had met a few months earlier was now nowhere to be found. Not wanting to chase after a lame duck, I let it go. Fine then. Still, it gnawed at me that he didn't have the decency to at least express that he had changed his mind. I shouldn't have said that too loudly, because after my existence was ignored for exactly a week, he wanted to come by.

His visit turned out to be the date equivalent of ‘this meeting could have just been an email’, as I found myself involuntarily in a speech about all the things he didn't like about me. He concluded his speech with the words: ‘You're really nice, but I'm just going for gold.’ Okay. Ouch. Heavily offended and slightly teary-eyed (it's so annoying that I always cry when I'm frustrated), I showed him the door.

Although his mission to wrap this up neatly completely failed, I actually never think about him anymore. A few months later, I met my fantastic boyfriend who always shows up and regularly makes me feel like I am the funniest woman on earth. Who has won gold here?

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