I spend a lot of time thinking about good dates. It’s important to impress girls, and dinners, bike rides and junk trips are important ways to show you care. I spend the same amount of time thinking about bad dates. I’ve been on quite a few (“Hi, I’m Yalun,” “Hi, I’m Cheryl and I’m married but my husband doesn’t love me but we’re staying together for the kids and just thought I should put that out there OK let’s go to dinner”), and I wonder just how bad a date could go before I bailed.
Would I leave if she threw a drink in my face? If she insulted my mom? If she told me her No.1 interest was shopping? Most bad dates aren’t horrific, just horrifically boring, so it’s fun to think about a date actually being horrible in a tell-your-friends sort of way. And because I’ll probably never get to experience the horror/joy of going on the worst date ever, I decided to design one myself. Two important points before we start:
- The worst date in the world is the worst DATE. Going out with someone who turns out to be creepy qualifies as a “bad date.” Going out with someone who then kidnaps a dog and tortures it as she watches qualifies as a “horrible crime.”1 So we’re staying on the side of strange/bad, not murder/sex crimes. Got it? Good.
- This is a thought experiment. If you don’t approve of messing with the heads of strangers, that’s cool. You can stop now and check out some stuff about restaurants on another page of the mag. But if you’re petty like me, read on…
My plan is to start the date somewhere trendy with good drinks, convo and cheer. See, the worst date can’t start out badly or she’ll bail and then it’s just a bad date. Truly awful experiences must start with some real joy before you ruin it all (see: Thrones, Game of, for this move). So we’d have a nice fine cocktail, I’d compliment her—but not too much—and show enough interest that she decides, hey, maybe this could work out.
Next: a special dinner. This requires isolation. Somewhere she can’t leave easily if she wants to. A taxi to the New Territories. A junk to the border of China. A special place for the two of you. Now slowly (and this is the key word) get weirder and weirder.
Tell her that you like her dress and it would look good if you wore it. Tell her that you’re intrigued by what goes through a serial killer’s mind as he kills his victims. (“The passion. It’s incredible!”)2 Tell her she’d make a great wife and your other wives are gonna love her. Tell her your phone’s dead and when you borrow hers, take a selfie and MMS all her contacts with “Husband to be!” as the descriptor.3
She’s going to start getting concerned now. This isn’t going well. That’s when you bring in the next thing: another girl on the date. Preferably somebody you paid who works as a dancer on Lockhart Road. Tell her that the three of you are going to have a lot of fun together tonight and keep trying to get a fist bump from her. Then ask if she remembers the spaghetti scene from “Lady and the Tramp” and tie two noodles together so you can have a three-pronged piece of pasta.