Dating Disasters: ‘I still cringe with secondhand embarrassment when I think of that moment’

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

I was about sixteen and I was allowed to go out with my friends for the first time during New Year's Eve. I lived in a village where nothing ever happened and everyone knew each other, but I found it so exciting to finally be let loose. It's important to mention that this story takes place long before dating apps and social media. At that moment, I had a Hyves page that I never looked at and a Motorola Razr with exactly €2.32 of call credit on it. You hung out with who you knew and certainly didn't waste your precious call credit on a complete stranger.

Anyway, as exciting as I found it, I actually already knew exactly what awaited me that evening. Nothing could be further from the truth when I saw that my friends had brought someone I had never seen before. His name was Joost, his straight black hair was slicked back with half a jar of gel (don’t judge, it was the early 2000s and anyone who looked a bit like Nick Carter had already won my heart) and his bright blue eyes seemed to look right through me. Oh, and perhaps the most interesting thing for my developing teenage brain: he was nineteen. My parents would absolutely disapprove of this boy and that only made him more appealing.

That night we wandered through the village and kept warm with our bottles of Smirnoff Ice (again, don’t judge, you drank this too in 2008). Joost and I ended up together on a bench where, shivering from the cold and excitement, I asked what kind of education he was pursuing. Joost laughed, pulled a wad of cash from his jacket pocket, and said: ‘the school of life, darling’. Oh, if my parents had seen this, they would have dragged me home by my Björn Borg bag (now I really will stop with the 00s disclaimers) and never let me go out again. That knowledge made me decide to kiss Joost. I can still feel how exciting that was, because aside from the fact that everything is just exciting when you're sixteen, I had never met such a bad boy. I found it quite delightful.

A week, a few text messages, and a revelation that Joost might be a bit too wrong for me later, I was sitting in a restaurant with my family. I know what you're thinking, but at that age, weren't we all in love with someone else every week? I had almost forgotten him when my phone rang: it was Joost. My family teased me to answer and insisted that I put the phone on speaker. I succumbed to that peer pressure and answered, hoping he would hang up soon, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was silent on the other end of the line until I heard music playing. It's important to understand that this is NOT a joke, but this man seriously played the full three minutes and sixteen seconds of ‘Ik hou van jou’ by Gordon for me. On speaker. At the end of the song, he hung up and left me dumbfounded with family who completely didn’t understand what had just happened. For a moment it was silent, after which we all burst into laughter. What a stunt this was. I still cringe with secondhand embarrassment when I think of that moment.

Maybe it was mean, but I really wasn't developed enough at that moment to come up with an appropriate response, and so I never spoke to Joost again after this action. Sometimes I wonder what happened to him or what would have happened if I had reacted to this, but one thing is for sure: I will never forget him.

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