Halfway To Manteca
Summer 2018. I had just broken up with my brokedick boyfriend of one year — no, I can’t really explain that phase of mine, either — and signed up for online dating, very much ready to move on. The only problem was that most my photos were from about 80 pounds ago. I used the photos with the proviso that if anyone ended up being decent to talk to, I would be upfront about my changed appearance and send a current photo. This seemed like a good enough plan to me, and technically it ended up working, since a relationship did come out of the whole deal.
But that wasn’t without first coming across plenty of interesting characters. I gave Bumble a try and matched with a guy who, when I gave him my number, responded by calling to verify that I was, in fact, a real person and not a spam bot. The only other topic of conversation during our phone call was his penis, and how he had been approached to do porn. I wasn’t impressed. I quickly ended the phone call and blocked his number.
Perhaps the most interesting, though, was a fellow we’ll call Frank. He was psychotic in a way I couldn’t understand. I’ve come across my fair share of crazy in my time, but he was on another level. We were chatting and hitting it off and he wanted to schedule a time to meet. It didn’t end up working out the first time around, so we rescheduled, and rescheduled again…
Finally by about the fourth time of rescheduling, he texts to ask if I can come to Manteca to meet him there. All along I had been assuming he was coming to my town to meet me. In fact, I thought that’s what all guys did — if there’s travel involved, the guy does the travel on the first date. Frank was asking me to do the travel and I was not happy about this.
I refused with a simple “no.” I had just gone to Merced the day prior and was exhausted from driving around the Valley for other people. If he can’t even make a 30-minute drive to see me, fuck him.
He responds by saying I’m “having a fit” about going to Manteca, when really all I was doing was refusing to comply with his demands. He said he had plans later in the evening, so I suggested we plan to meet another time instead. He lost it, saying how he really wanted to see how we hit it off in person, could we please meet tonight. He had told me previously how the wait to meet was “aggravating,” whereas I couldn’t understand the crazy pressure to meet.
More than driving to Manteca, I was honestly offended that he was trying to sandwich me in for a quick meet ’n’ greet. Why not meet when we have more than an hour together? I didn’t particularly feel like driving a half hour for an hour-long coffee date.
Evidently, neither did he. Until I resisted enough times, at which point he relented and said he would drive out to me. After all that fighting, he was willing to make the drive after all. Now I was confused. Maybe he was lazy and thought it was worth a shot, so he asked if I would drive to him. Either way I was not having any of it.
By this point I had already ordered dinner for my mom and I, so I called off the date entirely. I told him that if he wanted to reschedule I was open to that, but by now he was thoroughly pissed at me and had no interest in doing that.
That’s where we left things. Until a few weeks later, when he feels it necessary to inform me that he never got to a third date with one of the prospects he had going at the same time as me, as she was still “hung up on her ex.” I guess he expected me to somehow care about this.
Radio silence until Christmas, when he reaches out to text me “Merry Christmas” or something or other. I reach out in return, against my better judgment, because I’m feeling in the Christmas spirit. I use Facebook to do my communication, and he sees I’m in a relationship now. I tell him that online dating didn’t end up being so terrible, and he says how if I would have met him he would have shown me that. He goes on to say how he’s “definitely butthurt” that I’m in a relationship, and abruptly ends the conversation.
How strangely possessive of someone he never had. From my perspective, we failed to meet due to scheduling conflicts. I didn’t purposely avoid meeting with him, but I wasn’t about to meet him under the conditions he specified, either. I feel like I really dodged a bullet with this one. I can’t even imagine how that kind of attitude would play out in a relationship. I figure if we’re arguing before we’ve even had a chance to date, we’re probably not right for each other.
That’ll teach me to respond to texts.
