Double Blind Experiments in Dating

Hypothesis (prediction before the date): This guy has been tremendously boring to converse with via email. I’m guessing he’s pretty shy, though not without a lot to say (seriously, I write two sentences and he feels the need to respond with twelve).

Materials (the guy, the place, any other variables):

• Another Subject who traveled far and wide to see me! There was recently some upset in the local traffic situation, so it actually took him about an hour to drive into Downtown to meet me at a small microbrewery that - fun fact here - doesn’t pasteurize its beer so all the beer is served fresh!
• This Subject is a grad student who is getting his teaching credential and student teaching a crew of seven year olds.

Procedures (omg what happened???): Well he was a few minutes late to the date, due to the forementioned traffic problems. This turned out to be great because as I mentioned in yesterday’s post he looked absolutely nothing like the guy in his online pictures, so had I not been staring at my phone when he walked up and asked for me by name, I would have likely walked right past him and embarrassed myself.

My first impression was that he was adorable, like a teddy bear. I ascertained with record speed that he is a geek beyond measure. Which is fine by me, because I like-a-tha-geek. However, about half way through dinner he said, somewhat ashamedly, that he’s kind of a geek, and he was so startled that I told him I had gathered as much by that point. So how did I know?

"You can tell I'm a geek? What gave it away?!"

There are many indications of geekdom, just as there are many different types of geeks. This particular varietal could not stop talking. I don’t mean a word vomit or verbal diarrhea type of run on… No, this man just has a brain that works too fast. While his brain is firing out millions of watts of brainpower per second, his mouth just tries to keep up. Generally this results in the geek saying whatever comes to mind without filter, and usually as a tangent of an original thought. For example, we started talking about Aunts and uncles > Parents’ relationship with their siblings > Parents relationship with each other > Last summer his sister went home to visit and their mom walked downstairs naked as the day she was born to grab strawberries and whipped cream to bring back upstairs where his dad was WHOA DUDE YOU ARE OVERSHARING RIGHT NOW!

Welp, after two and half hours of sitting and chitchatting and enjoying some greasy pub-food appetizers, he decided it was time to go to a restaurant for dinner and I decided it was time to go home. Fantastic little truth about Dr. Jane: I am very bad at lying. I don’t usually do it! I have the few lies that I have stacked up for Subjects that keep me from having to reveal personal information about where I live/work, but other than that I’m very truthful with them about my life. So the logical thing for me to say when I didn’t want to spend another two and half hours with this man on a school night would have been “it’s getting late, I’d better go.”

Far be it from me to be logical – the response I came up with was “My roommates are really protective of me and when I go on a date with someone I met online they say I have to be home by 10.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my roommates are really my parents and I have a curfew of 10:00 at the age of twenty-four. NEVERMIND that my actual parents live 400 miles away and couldn’t care less what time I stay out until, but the look on the Subject’s face as I tried to explain why I’m a grown-ass woman who has to check in with her roomies was nothing short of uncomfortable/entertaining.

Results (the good, the bad, and the ugly): Much like The Tool, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, but in a very different way. The Tool just liked to hear himself talk and would talk right over me because he’s so freaking cool (at least that’s what his mom tells him, right?). This Subject just couldn’t finish a thought because he’d happily ramble on and on about every little thought that came to his head if you didn’t interrupt him to share something you thought was related to what he was saying. But he was a conversationalist, and adorable like a teddy bear.

Conclusion (overall rating): All in all, the Subject was remarkably nice and had many entertaining (albeit excruciatingly detailed) stories. Beer was good, food was fine, guy was all but completely forgettable. I’d give it a 5.