Michael was a Nice Guy™ in so much as he absolutely thought he was a sweetheart but was actually kind of a dick. When he opened the door of his apartment, I could tell right away that he was shorter than his profile had said. He’d written that he was 5’10 but he was 5’8 if he was an inch. Women (especially fat women) spend our whole lives making sure men online don’t think we’re hiding anything from them, and men have the audacity to mislead us about their height as if we won’t notice, as if being eye to eye with a man who’d said he was 5’10 when you’re 5’7 isn’t jarring. But I stayed because I had already done my hair and makeup and driven over to his place for a homecooked meal.
One day I will leave a date when a man has lied about something. One day, I will take myself out alone instead of settling for dishonesty disguised as an accident. One day I will wash the makeup off my face and put up the hair I’d spent half an hour on instead of hoping a date with a man will get better. I’m not sure it’s ever gotten better. It’s so boring how predictable they are.
Michael wore a button-down shirt and skin-tight jeans with cowboy boots, which to be honest was kind of hot and did lessen the sting of his having lied about his height. He ushered me inside to have a seat on the couch while he poured me a diet coke. He made an alcoholic drink for himself which in theory was fine, encouraged even. In many ways, I prefer a man having a drink or two on a date because it lets them loosen up and become more fun. But things can really go left once you open those floodgates—I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t think they’re more interesting and fun when they’re drunk, but I’m here to tell you that most of you are worse—especially men. It sounds sexist to make such a generalization but based on the anecdotal evidence of my dating life, men do not get better with alcohol (nor marijuana while we’re on the subject). They usually get louder and sloppier and more open in the worst ways possible. With each drink, they gain an unearned confidence in their wit and behavior, as if straight white men weren’t already too full of their own hype. They stop reading social cues and body signals (if they were ever really reading them before). Somewhere between the second and third cocktail, things usually take a turn for the worst.
Michael and I played cards while dinner finished cooking and I genuinely had fun. I He was surprised by how good I was at crib, and I was just happy to be doing something fun on a date. I think about this often, how many times a woman is having fun on a date simply because she’s having fun on a date (not because the man is special, or the connection is great but just because she’s a person doing a fun thing and leaning into it). That’s the thing about dating as a cishet woman, it’s a lot about being a good sport. I know the way I talk about men makes me sound bitter, but I’ll be completely honest in that I think that’s because society has conditioned us to see women complaining as inherently untrustworthy and inaccurately dramatic. I mean, it’s not like he was murdering me, right? So, what’s my fucking issue, yeah? My issue is how disappointing and lame men (men I’ve dated) have turned out to be. I say turned out because isn’t that what every movie and tv show and book has been trying to tell us—how great men are? The only great man I know is my dad, and if we’re being honest, I still had to train him to ask reciprocal questions in conversation.
When the timer for the chicken rang, Michael jumped up spilling his third drink just a little. He’d made stuffed chicken and rice with veg. He gave me my plate first and then went to the washroom. A few minutes later Michael emerged wearing sweatpants. He’d changed into sweatpants to be more comfortable. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is why he’d invited me over, why he’d offered to make us dinner rather than going to a restaurant, so that he could have an outfit change.
Some people like sweatpants on men. Not me though, and not this early (for the love of god!). We hadn’t even kissed yet and he was already this comfortable? I couldn’t help feeling slighted somehow, like I wasn’t worth wearing his best outfit for the duration of an evening. The worth being about how he saw me though; I’d never interpret a man’s view of me as my reality. I was worth the tightest jeans in the world. I was worth his nuts sweating and his dick being crushed a bit. I was worth his discomfort.
When I called him out for his mid-date outfit change, he laughed and seemed genuinely embarrassed. I should’ve known not to trust that interpretation though. Men are never ashamed of anything except their dick size. No matter how much I want them to be ashamed of all the stupid things they say, their cruelty, their inconsideration, their misogyny—they never are. But tell a man his dick is trash and just this once you’ll hit a nerve. Not that I said anything about his dick, I was too busy leaning into the date—trying to have first date magic. I had ignored the lie about his height, and now I was ignoring his outfit change. But the chicken he’d made was good and the cards had been fun, and I was horny and bored and ever hopeful of meeting a man to have an ongoing situationship with so that I might be able to have an orgasm every so often, you know, as a treat.