Now 2 months has passed I can put up my second Estonian Cosmopolitan article, this time about first dates!
Louis Zezeran on… First Dates
First dates are hard. It’s like the first impression was a slick sales pitch and now you have to actually come though with the goods. Most of the time I feel like a used car salesman. Sure, what I am selling looked ok in the car yard, a foreign brand with a good reputation. However, now she has taken it for a test drive and it’s belching gas out the back and needs a good amount of alcohol in the tank to run properly. How can I keep this going long enough to impress her with my meager achievements so that when my faults come to the surface they won’t seem so bad? Does such an amount of time exist in the universe? What if she sees right through me? “So by ‘love to cook’ you mean you are great at boiling the water for kiirnuudlid and by ‘I donate to the Kasside Turvakodu’ you mean ‘I once saw a cat picture on the Internet’”. In the first date game of “Battleship” you just sunk my aircraft carrier.
Me on an average first date. Note by now I am crying under the mask
How about the time I sat through 4 hours of Shakespeare not understanding a word of it because I had a public school education? Or another time after a meal and some cuddling I walked the girl home and smoothly suggested I could come up for a coffee when she replied “oh you can’t because my boyfriend, whom I live with, is at home”. Oh. Or when over dinner another girl said “I’ve never had a boyfriend before… only girlfriends”. To which I rather smoothly replied “so that means you have never had sex before?”. Nice work Romeo. “No idiot, I’ve had sex with women.” Then in an apparent attempt to defuse the situation she threw a bit of food at me. I guess she figured the only way to reply to my utter childishness was to reply with similar utter childishness. It worked and as I wiped away the cabbage from the side of my face, I knew I had to see this girl again.
Remember how this came out in a 2 hour and a 4 hour version? I agreed to sit through the 4 hour version and I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND A FUCKING WORD. Hamlet wasn’t exactly required reading at Nelson Bay High School
Once I met a nice girl at a party at a party and we chatted all night. She was unique but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why and we agreed to meet up for lunch and a walk around the harbor. The next day I told my friend I had met this nice girl and she said “ummmm you mean the one with the Adam’s apple?” Oh. Yes. That one. The one I had driven home and given a kiss on the cheek to. Being slightly freaked out but still trying to be an open thinking guy I felt I only had one choice. Go on the date and just say “hey you are cool but I am not into you”, never mentioning “the situation” for fear I would be instantly labeled a massive homophobe and chased down the street by an angry mob. Or so stupid 21 year old brain thought. This was Sydney, home of the Gay Mardi Gras, this sort of thing was situation normal in this town, how had I not seen it? I think I went for no other reason than to convince myself that her “look” was really well done and any red blooded man would not be able to tell. It got awkward. I remember I drank a lot of coffee. Everything went fine, the food was nice (none was thrown) and as I walked her back to her ferry I felt like I had done the right thing. Yeah, waste her time on a Sunday afternoon and act super strange for several hours, good move champion. In 12 years I have not told anyone that story, so what better way to redeem my soul than to write it in a national magazine?
This is a photo of an average Monday morning as everyone goes to work in Sydney, how did I not see this coming??
The question you want to know… are guys just looking for a way to get into your pants? Kind of. But we do genuinely like you too, it’s just that you look really pretty and we have a million years of evolution pounding inside our errr… heads. Look, first dates are always going to be weird. You will be lucky if the guy a) doesn’t have a girlfriend b) won’t drag you to the new Ironman movie and c) will actually be a guy. However, if you are stuck in a tricky situation I highly recommend the throwing of food at your date. He will never see it coming and if he sticks around, you know you have a keeper.
Source: Estonian Cosmopoltian June 2013