The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

I was on a second date with someone I’d met online. I felt neutral enough about him after the first date that I agreed to go on the second date; I would have said yes even if he hadn’t offered to take me to see my favorite performer.

But by the end of the night, I was pretty sure it was not a match. I thought I might give it one more date because he was a pretty nice guy, but I was leaning in the other direction.

He walked me to the door when we got to my house. Then he put his arms around me and drew me toward him. Out came my hand like a crossing guard at the elementary school: stop right there.

I was surprised that, at his age, he didn’t know how to read the cues. It showed a certain cluelessness that was enough to convince me there wouldn’t be a third date. I understand that it must be difficult to gauge whether to make the pass and then get up the nerve to do it. But you would think, given the stakes, a guy would want to be confident that his pass will be accepted. Look for some eye contact, smiling, hair flipping, probably a little touching…feedback that she is attracted to you.

It wasn’t the worst pass in the world. That honor may go to Steve, who I met at a Jewish singles event that I fled almost as soon as I arrived. Most of the men were old enough to have hair coming out of their ears long enough to braid. Steve was the only guy under 40. We chatted for just a moment, and somehow he wangled my phone number. I really wasn’t interested—there was something a little weird about a 35-year-old guy shopping in that market—but he called several times to ask me out. (Why is it that the guys you are interested in never call but guys like this do?) Each time he asked, I said I couldn’t go. Considering our association was based on a 30-second interaction, it didn’t seem necessary to explain myself any further.

However, I eventually agreed to meet him for dinner, thinking I ought to give him a chance, or perhaps my friends urged me to go. After dinner, we walked out to the parking lot and he asked if we could sit and chat in one of our cars, saying the restaurant was too noisy. We were in the front seat of my car when he put his arm around me; that maneuver was met with a gentle shove and probably something cool like, “Oh, no-no-no…”

But rather than deal with the rebuff, Steve started to lecture me about accepting the date when I wasn’t attracted. I explained that I wanted to get to know him before making that determination, and that really set him off. Research shows, he told me, that if you’re not attracted to someone when you meet them, you never will be. “Attraction doesn’t grow,” he explained. Did I mention he was a psychologist? There’s a couch I wouldn’t want to find myself on, in any capacity.

One of the scarier bad passes happened in my hometown when I was a teenager. I can’t even tell you what the guy’s name was or how I got in his car (given the prevalence of alcohol in that particularly suburb, I can pretty much guarantee drinking was involved), but I do remember that he drove me down a dirt road that dead-ended at a cornfield. As he drove deeper into the field, I was frantically trying to make it clear I was not interested in parking with him. He stopped the car and started to try to persuade me. It wasn’t that he liked me so much but that I had a famously large chest he was dying to get his hands on. I told him I wanted to leave, and he looked at me forlornly.

“If I could just…touch one…” he whimpered.

That was a request I was able to say no to, and he finally backed out of the long drive and took me home. Thirty years later, I can still hear his pathetic plea.

Not every rejected pass is a bad pass. Usually, it’s just a losing gamble on the guy’s part; you both say “oops,” move on, and forget it. To make the Hall of Fame takes some creativity, and a hell of a lot of nerve.

Has someone made a bad pass at you? Please comment or send me your story!