After the most serious ex of my life & and I broke up, it took me months to move on.  I pretended to be social for a while. I’d put on a booby shirt and head downtown but I just had the hopes of running into him & his 20 year old girlfriend to show them that vodka and sadness allowed me to fit into skinny jeans.  Well one night, I ran into a cute guy who I recognized from mutual friends.  I had had enough liquid courage to throw my arms around him and introduce myself.  We did as all people do now in this electronic age, we became Facebook friends.  And then I verbally assaulted him, gave him my phone number & told him to call me.
Over random texted conversations of him asking me to make cupcakes, I told him I would do that and then I asked him if he wanted me to make him dinner as well.  Holy shit guys, don’t do this.  I am socially awkward and sometimes don’t know how to deal with people.  I have that mid-western illness where all I can talk about is the weather and say ‘oh that’s funny’ repetitively.  In times where I don’t do that, I make dinner.  I make dinner and bread and dessert.  THIS SCARES MEN.
In preparation for this bearded fellow to come over I planned a feast of a salad, lasagna, white wine & baked goods.  To top it off, I uncomfortably played Sinatra on my Pandora station.  THIS ALSO SCARES MEN.
I remember drinking too much wine and then every time Pandora stopped and asked, ‘are you still listening?’ I put on more perfume.  That was probably weird.  Well, he left soon after we talked about American Pickers and I gave him some cupcakes to go.  In my mother’s expensive Tupperware.  He didn’t call.
I of course drank a bunch of vodka while downtown one night and once I saw him decided to go awkwardly hug him and ask him what I did wrong.  His words, verbatim, were, ‘well, you kind of jumped the gun.’  It was like a blow to my little pile of dead, cold heart.  All I did was make dinner!  For some reason, since I was in high school, I’ve thrown off this horribly domestic ‘I just want to get married and make 18 babies’ vibe.  It has miraculously worked both for and against me.
He and I still talk occasionally and I would still love to touch his beard.  But I will never, however, make him dinner ever again.  I’m convinced that someday I will make dinner for somebody that I like and he’ll like me in return.  And maybe it’ll end up that he’ll call me again and he won’t avoid me in public.  And maybe he’ll return my mother’s Tupperware so she won’t make me feel guilty about it.  I’d replace it but I looked it up once and one container is like $17.
The moral of this story is to just go to a restaurant so you don’t get abdominal cramps from worrying about how dinner will turn out. What’s worse than him not calling back is getting pre-date shits. Or, just make dinner repeatedly until someone doesn’t take it the wrong way.
Cheers friends,
-a damsel & her dog-