People usually want to know why I’m not a huge fan of dating when I tell them that I’m not a huge fan of dating.

There are so many reasons beyond the actual things I’ve experienced, but they haven’t helped.

Here are a few of the more memorable ones.

1. I went on a pretty awkward date with a woman who asked if I dug Thai food. Instead of copping to the fact that I’d never had it — I didn’t want to seem uncultured — I said I loved it and took her to a Thai place nearby. When I had no answer to “What do you usually get when you eat Thai?” she realized I was a fraud. It was even more awkward after that.
2. I had sex with a girl on a first date. Then I had a vivid sex dream about my ex-girlfriend with whom I’d not slept with in about three years. I woke up very confused, and the first-date girl asked me who Rachel was. I told her I wasn’t really close with anybody named Rachel. Which isn’t entirely untrue.
3. I ripped my jeans in the crotch as I ascended the subway steps toward my destination. I was too close to turn back and too short on time to buy a new pair of jeans, so I just went with it.
4. During a really awkward date, my date and I didn’t know what to do so we both got extremely drunk. I blacked out and came to hours later, playing video games with my roommate. Not knowing how the date had turned out, I decided it was better to just let bygones be bygones instead of texting her out of ignorance to see how things had gone. She texted me later in the week and admitted she didn’t remember how the date had ended, but had “felt a pretty nice and strong vibe” in my presence.
5. Earlier this year, I met a lovely woman named Suzy on OkCupid. We messaged back and forth for a while before exchanging numbers and eventually deciding to meet. We had a nice date, kissed at the end, talked for a while after, etc. But we never could get it going because our schedules were very disjointed. We kept in touch, though, and she kept me informed of her situation, which was that she had started dating a guy form her past. Months after our date, she texted me to tell me she thought I was a great guy and that her younger sister was newly single, and would I be interested in meeting her sister? I was like, sure, why not, it’s not like I’m over here drowning in p**sy or anything. So I meet her sister, and it goes really well. We go on, like, four dates. During the fourth date she reveals to me that she was shopping for dudes for her older sister on OkCupid when she found me, at which point she proceeded to engage. I was messaging with the younger sister — who was in a relationship at the time — until the point of a phone number exchange. Younger sister also catalyzed the text from older sister about meeting up after she found herself back on the market. Younger sister and I went on a few more dates before a tacit agreement was met where we decided that our schedules were too erratic to see each other often enough to keep putting any effort into it.
6. A woman I had met less than 60 minutes earlier borderline chastised me for never having tasted my own semen, and insisted that I try it for empathy reasons.
7. I told a woman she could ask me anything she wanted, that I was an open book, and she asked me which part of a baby human I would eat. This came shortly after I had shown her a photo of my newborn niece.
8. A girl came home with me. We had sex. The next morning, she revealed to me that she was not on birth control. I then revealed to her that I had faked an orgasm.
9. On a first date, I involuntarily wept my way through the second half of “Marley & Me.”
10. I walked into a bar on a first date and accidentally approached the wrong girl. The girl I was supposed to meet was maybe four seats down.