All Stood Up

Last night, I had a very strange dream in which I was supposed to be going on a date, only I was stood up. In the dream, I was not married, and I had made a date with someone I knew already (a friend who had suddenly become interested in me), and we were supposed to meet at a bar, but he never showed. It was a huge bar/restaurant with many sections and I kept wandering through them, wondering if maybe we were just in two different places within the bar, but he wasn’t there. It was totally humiliating. In real life, I’ve been stood up twice (well, actually two and half times), and the experiences weren’t nearly so humiliating. But still, there is something about being stood up that can make you feel utterly worthless and unattractive. (“I kiss so badly he didn’t even bother to show up” or “After making the date, he decided I wasn’t hot enough.” There’s nothing like a crushing blow to the old self-confidence.)

1. In college, I spent a semester going to school in Ireland. I had a date to hang out with this guy I had made out with the previous weekend. We were supposed to meet at the school’s main gate at noon. I waited for a while, because everyone in Ireland is late for everything, but he never showed. I wasn’t all that devastated, because I figured that we might have gotten our signals crossed. This was before cell phones, and hardly any of the students had land lines. (I lived in a student building, which shared one pay phone for four flats. The phone was broken for approximately 80% of my time there, and we pretty much relied on a pay phone up the street. Thus, communication was a bit difficult.) When I arrived home later that day, one of my flatmates was very excited and told me that a “hot Irish guy” had stopped by to see me and he felt really bad about not meeting me earlier and he would be back later. He showed up again that evening and apologized profusely, saying that he was finishing up a paper (it was the end of the semester) and he had lost track of time. I figured that was a decent enough excuse, he had no way of contacting me to let me know, and he had come all the way to my flat twice to see me to apologize, so I let it go and we went out the next night. It was actually a very nice date, but sadly, I was leaving to go home the next day so that relationship wasn’t exactly going anywhere.

2. A few years ago, I had just gone through a long torturous breakup (a fitting end to a long, torturous relationship), and I was dating again. I met this guy (we’ll call him “Joe”) through a friend and we had hung out in a group a couple of times and exchanged a few emails. Joe seemed interested and asked for my number, which I willingly gave, since I enjoyed his company. I invited him to a cocktail party I was throwing, and he said he would be there, but he ended up not making it. He called the next day to apologize, saying that he had unexpected out of town guests that night. It was no big deal, especially since he made the effort to apologize. The following weekend, I hung out with him and a friend and I had a really good time. We made plans to have dinner that Thursday night. I said I would call him when I was heading out of work and we would determine the time and place. I probably should have had him call me, but I didn’t think much of it since he had been good about calling and emailing, and I wasn’t doing all the work. So I called around 5:30, got his voicemail, and said I was leaving work and was ready to meet up whenever, so call me. And he didn’t call back. I spent the next hour in the company of a friend (who I would later divorce because she totally sucked) and her unbelievably lame friends sucking down margaritas. Friend was being really insufferable. She had a date later that night and she kept going on and on about how psyched she was for her date and how awful it was that I was being stood up (this was an early warning of the suckitude that would later lead to my initiating the friend divorce). I left that group and met up with some other friends, who were sympathetic, but in a “fuck him” kind of way, which was much more bearable. He finally called around 8:30. I didn’t answer, and he left a voicemail saying he had gotten stuck in a meeting at work. At the beginning of the message, he was very blasé, but by the end, he kind of lost it and you could tell he was realizing he had fucked up (or at least that was the consensus among my friends—male and female, gay and straight—all of who listened to the message). I understood that it was a work thing, but I knew a lot about his office and it was a very casual, hipster kind of environment, where he could easily have excused himself from the meeting for five minutes to make a phone call, but he didn’t. He called me that weekend, but he was completely unapologetic, so I basically wrote him off. (I ran into him a few months later, and we ended up having lunch, just as friends. He was so annoying over lunch that I realized being stood up was a blessing in disguise.)

(2.5. This one wasn’t exactly a stand up. I had been dating this guy and it had ended rather badly, but he reappeared a few months later and we started talking again. I was at sort of a weird point in my life, and I actually considered getting back together with him, mainly because nothing else was working out (yes, very bad idea). We hung out a few times, and one Friday night, he was supposed to meet me and some friends at a bar. And he never showed. He left me a voicemail that said something along the lines of “I made it halfway there, and then I decided I just couldn’t deal, so I turned around and went home.” And I remembered all the reasons it hadn’t worked out, and in the end I was really glad he bailed, since it kept me from making a huge mistake by getting back together with him.)