Have you ever dated?

Come on now, don’t be shy. Sure you have. You’ve gone through the consistently excellent and successful exercise of attracting people of the opposite gender, engaging them in productive and illuminating conversations, carrying them forward into fascinating and intimate moments, and very possibly banged them utterly rotten.

I mean, we’ve all done that. Who hasn’t gone an entire week without sweeping some random person off of their feet, dazzling them with a breathtaking exhibition of personality and good looks, and given them such a night to remember that they may never recover from it in the duration of their lives? Can you even think of anyone who hasn’t been able to attract whoever they want, over and over again, without even the risk of failure? The very idea is almost hysterically laughable.

And yet, it’s impossible not to admit that sometimes the profound emotional connections, intimate conversations and absolutely limitless sex that accompany the normal success we all meet becomes, well, just a little bit boring. Where is the risk? Where are the hilarious stories that come of the utterly failed dates we hear so much about on situation comedies? Where is the total horseshit that helps us appreciate the good outings, when they come along?

That’s why the research team here at Miscellaneous, etc (read: Mike) has been hard at work doing their (his) best to explore just how horrible their (his) romantic life can be — so that the rest of the normal population, with their absolutely epic and mind-blowingly successful love lives, can have some shot at the mediocrity and failure that will ultimately help them appreciate the epic and mind-blowing success that they otherwise effortlessly achieve. And so we present:

The Miscellaneous, etc. Guide to Having a Catastrophic First Date

Step 1. Picking the Right Candidate

Most reasonable, well-socialized people have an array of methods at their disposal to attract a member of the opposite sex, all time-tested and experience proven. These may include:

• Introducing yourself to attractive co-workers
• Seeking out those with common interests through local clubs, organizations or charities
• Totally picking up a hot piece of ass on a good Friday night at the bar

Each approach has its relative strengths and weaknesses, but taken as a whole, an appropriately confident individual can ensure that whatever the circumstances, they’re only a brief conversation away from a new romantic/genital adventure. However, as we have already mentioned, this sort of consistent success can get tedious, and so it’s important to consider other avenues if you’re interested in undertaking a truly disastrous date.

Let’s turn to our candidate, Mike.

Name: Mike
Age: 28
Odds of Success: Incalculably small

Mike is a university-educated salesman who works for a major corporation. His interests include writing, photography, technology, and more recently physical fitness. He owns his own home and car, socializes with a fairly diverse group of men and women, and enjoys modest popularity. He also enjoys massive alcohol consumption on a scale that would kill smaller animals, chain smokes almost angrily in the right settings, and is pathologically shy when it comes to approaching women romantically.

Not only does this make Mike ideal for our discussion here today, but it also makes choosing a potential first date for him remarkably easy, as long as we are general enough. This leads us to rule number one of having a horrible first date experience:

Don’t dig too deeply! The less specifically you attempt to match yourself up with someone, the more easily you will be able to stray into disaster later on. If you start noodling around with specifics like “common interests” or “similar personalities”, you will inevitably eliminate potentially damaging individuals from your dating pool. Let’s practice, why don’t we? Which of the following criteria would you say is going to guarantee you the least certainty of a successful outing?

1. Both daters are university-educated professionals, who love Italian food and French poetry
2. Both daters are from an Anglo-Saxon background, and live within twenty-five kilometers of each other
3. Both daters use their lungs to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide

If you chose option A, then you’re still thinking too successfully! Remember — the key here is to experience the invigorating free-fall of a completely failed date, so keep it generic!

Step 2. Building the Expectations

Now that you’ve successfully broadened your horizons to include possibilities that you’d never considered before, or indeed about whom you know next to nothing, it’s time to really start building up your hopes and aspirations.

Now, we all know that during the normal course of events, you don’t start getting excited about romantic possibilities for quite some time. Common sense and emotional maturity both dictate that you should wait until you’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with a new person before you really start to build them up in your mind. This ensures that you approach your decision-making rationally, and allows you to make logical decisions about your relationships.

What, however, fun is that?

The next time you’ve picked out a nearly-anonymous person to go out with, do what our candidate Mike did, and see if it doesn’t bring about some refreshing crisis to your life.

First, talk about your date incessantly, as though you have been cut off from contact with the opposite sex for at least six years. Ideally, you want to do this frequently enough that others around you begin to ask you about your date by name, and are capable of educating others about him/her. Not only does this help you get yourself disproportionately excited about the time you’ll spend with that person, but it will also do the same for all of the friends, relatives, co-workers, bus drivers, cafeteria cashiers, and strangers in the elevator that come into range.

Second, strategize constantly about how best to approach an evening with someone about whom you know nothing. Build a series of complex contingencies, addressing both the structure of the date and any potential conversations. How you go about this — involving your friends, brainstorming in the shower, practicing dialogue to yourself in your car, or any combination of the aforementioned — is entirely up to you, but the critical outcome must be that you have at least eighty percent of the evening planned out, two weeks before it’s even going to happen.

Finally, worry, worry, worry. This should be done as quietly and desperately as possible, in order to ensure that nobody can shore up your confidence as you approach the big moment. No preparation for a catastrophic first date is complete without undermining at least half of your self-confidence, so take this seriously! If you don’t go into the big night without doubting yourself at least a little, there is no way you will be vulnerable enough for the evening to end in complete disaster.

Take a tip from Mike: “If you haven’t over-thought it, you haven’t thought at all!”

Ha ha, you sure haven’t, Mike. You sure haven’t.

Step 3. The Big Night

Let’s quickly review what we’ve learned so far. Before heading into your soon-to-be-memorably-humiliating date, your preparation should have brought you:

• A date about whom you know nothing other than that they are your gender of preference, are not visibly disfigured, and have the same assumptions about you,
• A sense of hysterical optimism about the other person, and
• A sense of crippling doubt about yourself.

Now, you’re ready for your first date!

By this point, how you’ve planned your evening is entirely up to you. So many seeds of disaster have already been sown that even the most pleasant dinner, coffee, drink or stroll is tainted by utter failure. However, if you still think you’ve got a fighting chance at success, keep some of these general guidelines in mind:

Know your strengths, and pick two or three of them to really rely on. If you understand what you’re really good at and do everything you can to bank on those skills, then you’ll be guaranteed to crash just that much harder when they fail you.

“I just love salad!” and other signs of boredom
Nothing indicates that your date is coming to a crashing halt quicker than painful conversation, so keep an eye out for these important cues:
1. Unnecessarily lengthy discussion of side dishes
2. Stories about friends more interesting than you
3. Exhaustive discussion of the font used on the menu
4. Use of the phrase “pretty good” to describe any more than 3 things
5. Livelier conversation between your date and the waitress than between you and your date

Mike, for example, prides himself on his sense of humor and his keenness as a listener. Using this combination of traits, he finds it easy to interact with people and quickly establish himself as genial, friendly and interesting; however, when both of these fail him, he is rendered completely helpless and is reduced to nearly monosyllabic shyness. If he wanted a really, horribly unsuccessful first date, then who better for him to end up with than someone who at the very best acknowledges maybe one wisecrack in twenty?

As if this wasn’t wonderfully-executed enough, Mike’s fallback position — that of the interested and sympathetic listener — resulted in an even greater failure. Consider this exchange:

Dream Date: …but enough about me. Do you consider yourself a risk-taker? And what’s one big risk that you’ve taken? Give an example.
Mike: Well, I, uh… (gives example too boring to even reproduce here). The important thing is, I’m not one of those people who’s going to go jumping out of an airplane or anything.
Dream Date: Oh. I am.
Mike: You mean you’ve– literally, that’s something you’ve done, where you… shit.

Notice how not only did acting as the listener put Mike at a disadvantage when he was finally forced to talk — about something he wasn’t, which by all reports women simply love to hear — but also lured him into again attempting to rely on his humor, allowing him to inadvertently imply that his date was fucking crazy for jumping out of airplanes.

Properly deployed and then annihilated, your personal strengths can lead you to some of the most memorably horrible dates you’ll ever experience. And, when you combine them just so, you can experience one-two combinations that will rock not just one of what you thought were your best traits, but several at a time! If that isn’t catastrophic dating, then truly, what is?

Ultimately, though, no date can go incredibly bad without the Point of No Return. It is vitally important that, as you begin to feel the ground start to crumble out from under you, there is clear and sharp identification of the moment when your date has gone irretrievably bad. This is for several reasons, most critically as a signal of the following:

• To cease investing financially in the outing,
• to recognize that there is no chance that the outing will end any other way than awkwardly, at best, and
• to convert what remaining optimism you might have about your date into pure, raw escape velocity.

The Point of No Return is also your chance to restore whatever dignity you might have burned off over the process of your catastrophic first date, as well. Even those of us who occasionally undertake to deliberately date disastrously must admit that by the end of the evening, one still feels like something of a piece of shit. The moment that you are able to clearly recognize that there is not, nor never will there be, any hope of a happy outcome to the evening, you are immediately free to restore yourself by any means.

Back with our test case, Mike, we see that he accomplishes this by recklessly re-asserting his strengths. While him joking to his date (upon her admitting that a friend was supposed to call her at a pre-designated time and ensure that she was physically safe from him) that he didn’t normally abduct and dismember women on the first date, but he’d be happy to make an exception, might be seen by some as distasteful, it can also represent a joyful release from three hours spent talking about human resources.

Catastrophes, after all, need not only ever be one-sided.

It’s easy enough to impress people, charm them, and take them to bed. We all do it every single day. But the next time you’ve spent yet another weekend meeting, talking to, or seducing members of the opposite sex and wondered to yourself, “Isn’t there anything else to life?”, just remember that there is a whole world of nightmarish dating that you could be a part of.

Any time you become bored with the easy, laid-back and emotionally fulfilling world that you’re living in, Catastrophic Dating is just three steps away! The Miscellaneous Etc. Research team (Mike) will see you there!