If you’d like to waste an hour or two like I have this morning vicariously living out a sad internet sack’s dating experience, please avoid the rest of this post and click the link below to the “First date smoochin’” thread on videogame forum Quarter to Three. Forum regular “extarbags” started a thread with a relatively innocent question about the appropriateness of kissing on a first date, then followed up for several weeks with details of his painfully feeble attempts to pour his heart out to any woman who would give him an even passing interest. And if pathos isn’t your thing, the loads of advice—some brilliant, some brilliantly misguided—given by fellow forum members is like a Master’s class in dating.

A sample:

Ok, I say, no big deal (which it isn’t), and I also ask her, in a tone of voice that says I already know the answer, if she’s still feeling the way she was.

“Honestly… no.”

Whaaaaaaaaaat? She goes on to explain that (contrary to every perceptible signal given during the date) she wasn’t feeling any chemistry between us. I go on to have some kind of fucked up nervous breakdown consisting of me continually making wrong turns and then getting even more upset, culminating in me screaming, crying, hyperventilating, not being able to feel my hands, feet, or face, and eventually being picked up by my mom and brother, who had decided after hearing me talk on the phone that I was in no condition to drive.

Kudos to extarbags for putting it all out on the internet; twenty demerits for being so loathsomely self-pitying. I debated on whether it was cruel to link to the thread (which gets good on page 14), but it’s out on the public internet and Qt3 doesn’t allow unregistered comments, which should prevent drive-by trolling.

We’ve all been creepy emotional retards at some point in our lives, ‘bags. Get thee to a treadmill and learn to love the dating game, because you’re not the first who’ve wished in vain that it wasn’t a cruel, heart-rending machine.

First date smoochin’ [QuarterToThree.com]

(Photo: Staryprd)