My Worst First Date Ever

“What’s the worst first date you’ve ever been on?”

There are people who tell you they’ve never had a bad first date.

The word for those people is “liars.”

Even if you’ve never been on a bad first date, that does not mean you weren’t somebody else’s bad first date.

In the age of online dating, it’s pretty easy to determine whether or not that’s true. I’ve gone out with a woman (or two) and by the time I log back into my profile, they’ve already eviscerated the connection. Gone. Adios. Finito.

But my worst first date is pretty easy to quantify. It wasn’t when I was in high school or college. It happened post-divorce, when I was in my early 50s and new to online dating. Moving out and splitting custody of the kids were both still fresh wounds. My divorced younger brother insisted that I needed to shake off the dating rust. “Odds are, right away you won’t find someone you click with,” he advised. “But if you’re not out there, nobody can find you, either.”

When I didn’t make a move for a few more weeks, he informed me that unless I got busy registering for a dating site, he would set up a profile for me. I didn’t take him seriously until he started texting me photos from Facebook, asking “Which do you like better?”