A few weeks ago, I matched with a handsome and brooding-but-genial funeral director on Hinge. As my friend Dom said, going on a date with a funeral director is her worst nightmare and my dream come true. What can I say, I’ve always harbored a curiosity for the morose (darkness reigns!) and the idea of dating a literal embalmer was very cool to me.
On Friday, we agree to meet up on Sunday night when he is off work. We’ll have some wine in the park and fall madly in love over our shared love of creepy shit. As you can see, I like to keep my expectations for first dates low. But that Saturday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the motherfuckin’ election and the whole ass city erupted in utter joy and champagne and dance parties and, needless to say, Sunday came around and I was feeling pretty close to death myself.
He asked if we were still on for later and despite feeling like I would need a mortician to do my make up, I agreed to pull myself together for the date. Because, hangover aside, I was excited! I didn’t want to put it off! You know how I know I was still excited to go on this date? Dude sends me a video of SOMEONE’S FUNERAL and turns the video to selfie mode and does a little head bop, and instead of thinking to myself, “Wow that was an intensely private moment between family members that should not have been shared” I was like, “oooooo he cute.”
Thirty minutes before our date, he floats a very forward idea to me, something along the lines of, “Hey I know you’re super tired, I wouldn’t kill you if you just wanted to drink wine at your place, maybe order some food, and watch YouTube videos. But it is a nice night out!” OK first of all, person I’ve never met, I can’t tell you how much I hate watching YouTube videos. Somehow that suggestion was more offensive to me than when he, a total stranger, quasi-invited himself to my house during a global pandemic. I tell him I would love to get out of the house. He said he would let me know when he was off work.
Ten minutes until our date was supposed to start:
Have you left work yet?
No, shoot I haven’t, just finishing up! Shouldn’t take long.
Uh, ok.
You’re probably getting tired though so I understand if you want to find another time.
*Me, already showered with mortician make up on* If you leave within the next 10 minutes, I can hang in there.
This is how it went. For the first 20 minutes he enthusiastically tells me all about his life and line of work and, to his credit, what he does is very interesting to me. He is — and this is not an exaggeration — a celebrity embalmer. He then looks at me, “so, what do you do?” I start talking for the first time and his body language is screaming, “I DON’T CARE.” Dude could not have been less interested in me or what I had to say. In the course of our date, he also accidentally tells me that he was having a beer with his friend after work “tonight.” Uhh. He’s also proud of himself because he actually left work much later than when he told me was leaving. I think I was supposed to be impressed? I hate this dude. At one point when I was talking, he got his phone out. I stopped talking just to see if he would notice. Needless to say: not a match.
But here’s why I’m actually so glad I went on the date with him.
Six months ago, I would have gone on that same exact date and instead of writing him off, I would have gotten to work on how to make him love me. Classic Cheyenne. I love the chase and what’s more fun than winning over the guy who couldn’t give less of a shit that you exist? Ha ha ha. A great question for my therapist, I know. But actually none of that was true this time. Instead of immediately trying to figure out what is was about me that he didn’t like and how to remedy those parts of my personality post-haste, I was like, “hold on just a minute…. I don’t like HIM!” What a fucking relief to finally see it this way. Like, news flash, your opinion in these matters is actually kind of important, Cheyenne.
Logically, this always made sense to me, but I had never put my ego aside long enough to let it actually happen. And let me tell you, now that I have, I am never going back. This feels like an act of self love that is so very long overdue. I wish I could bottle this feeling up and give it to my 20-year-old self, or at least all the 20-year-old girls out there right now. But then again, maybe this is just something we have to experience for ourselves in order for it to really stick. We have to let our hearts/brains/evolutionary instincts go all haywire in the face of a “cool” guy who is currently talking to 17 other girls. We have to lose who we are while we contort ourselves into our idea of his perfect girl, only for him to leave us on read. We have to go through these grueling mental gymnastics long enough that we eventually tire ourselves out, to then come to the life-altering realization that the best and only course of action is to just be our amazingly cool selves and only make time for men who see that, honor it, and do everything they can to keep up. RANT OVER. I AM FREE! (FROM MYSELF!) AND STILL SINGLE BUT WHATEVER LOL.
A horrific little P.S. to this story:
I ran into my friends [redacted] and [redacted] who are similarly into creepy stuff like me, so, naturally, I was excited to tell them about how I was *this close* to falling in love with, and ultimately marrying, a funeral director. OK, ha, not that close. Anyway. I was like, “Oh you guys, I went on a date with a funer—” and before I could get another word out, [redacted] stopped me and was like, “WAS HE TALL? DOES HE HAVE A MUSTACHE? IS HIS NAME [REDACTED] AND DID YOU SLEEP WITH HIM?!” Turns out, they have a friend who went on a date with him and slept with him. He failed to mention to her that he had a kid and also failed to mention that he gave her an STD. Bullet, dodged. And this is why they call it the smallest big city in the world, folks. Eeek!