My Very Worst Date Moves

Ladies and gents, we've moved to MyVeryWorstDate.com. Please visit us at our new home from now on. Brand new and all the old My Very Worst Date yarns are on the new site. We'll be expecting you (and all your stories)!

Call Back Blues

You thought the first date went well. So why then are you still waiting to hear back from your potential beau? A new book called Why Didn't He Call You Back: 1,000 Guys Reveal What They Really Thought About You After Your Date by dating coach Rachel Greenwald [first tome: Find a Husband After 35 (Using What I Learnt in Harvard Business School)] out today attempts several answers: you were a bossy boots, you were too full of the blahs, drank too much etc. In short: you were a bad date. The book reminded us of a more literary take from another era altogether on the no-phone back phenomenon by famed wit Dorothy Parker. Her short story A Telephone Call is a stream of consciousness soliloquy by a woman praying (and waiting by the phone) for a dude to ring her back. It's hilarious, painful and pathetic. A cautionary tale if there ever was one.

The World's Worst Pick-Up Lines

Honeymoon With My Brother author and friend of MVWD Franz Wisner is at it again with his new book How The World Makes Love (St. Martin's Press), out today. Here's a short list excerpt from the book:

The World's Worst Pick-Up Lines

1. Don't I know you from a past life? INDIA
2. What's a nice place like this doing around a woman like you? CZECH REPUBLIC
3. I would love to be a farmer and you to be my soil. Our crop would be bananas. NICARAGUA
4. At what time does a hurain like you need to be back in heaven? EGYPT
5. You are smelling very nice to me. BOTSWANA
6. Let's have cafezinho. I can call you or nudge you. BRAZIL
7. My parents already have engaged us to be married. They just forgot to tell you. INDIA
8. How would you like your breakfast eggs, scrambled or fertilized? NEW ZEALAND
9. So, you like music? LOS ANGELES
10. Does your backside want my phone number? BRAZIL

What are your worst pickup lines, abroad or local?

This Is Your Brain On Love

Dr. Alex Benzer, author of Tao of Dating, has a op-ed piece on The Huffington Post that claims dating is harder for smart people. He makes an intereresting case (smart people spend more time on achievements than relationships for example), but can't you be smart, attractive, interesting, and very dateable? And if so please head this way.

He goes on to give some good tips on opening up to the world, whether you're in the top 5% of intelligence or not:

"The purpose of relationship (and perhaps all of life) is to practice the loving. No partner is going to be 100% perfect anyway, so learn to appreciate people for what they have to offer, not what they don't. And love them for that. That's what real loving is."

The Anti (Speed) Date

Here's an antidote for those who hate the dating dance: speeding hating. On the other side of the pond, Brits, who've never really cottoned on to the dating idea (preferring instead to get slaughtered on Stella and pull whomever they fancy and close the deal by taking them home), are enjoying this new trend, which the The Mirror bills as: 

"... the second-cousing-twice-removed of the more conventional speed dating. 

But instead of having three minutes to impress the opposite sex with your painted-on smiles and zest for life this is a night dedicated to grumbling, misery and despair."

We think this fits with the whole Brit self-deprecating persona. And there is a lot to bitch about in these economic times so why not just get it out there on the first encounter? 

Marriage à la Mode

After yesterday's fashion dating hilarity, we sobered up a bit when we read about how dress preferences can kill a relationship in Mariella Frostrup's agony aunt column in The Observer. Mariella, a reformed party girl, Friend of George Clooney and serious literary journalist, is our kind of agony aunt. Her stunning resume and late-but-extremely-happy coupled up status are some of the reasons we heart her. Then, there's her wisdom and attempts at empathy. Here's what she said to the cross-dressing husband who's losing his wife because of his wardrobe choices:

The closest I've come to understanding the urge was when I found myself attracted to Eddie Izzard despite the fact that he was wearing rather nasty nail varnish and a skirt shorter than mine. It taught me that you can never predict or dictate what's going to turn you on. Reverse discrimination is rife in what we wear. Women sport ridiculous concoctions, call them fashion and are admired by their contemporaries. Men are barely tolerated out of trousers. 

The rest of her terribly sane and sensible advice is here. 

Up Close and Hilariously Personal

As we've heard and read, the truth is often sacrificed in the prose of online profiles. Presentable becomes "gorgeous." Obesity is passed off as "a little extra meat." Being "athletic" means having been to the gym once in the last six months. So we were amused to read about the self-deprecating, self-lampooning lonely hearts in the London Review of Books via The Guardian. There's no way of knowing how factual/satirical the claims are but we enjoyed the the cheek of these Brit bibliophiles: 

"Mentally, I am a size eight. Compulsive-eating F, 52, WLTM man to 25 for whom the phrase 'beauty is only skin-deep' is both a lifestyle choice and a religious ethos..."