10 Will Get You 20

In one of my recent therapy sessions, my therapist made a rather brash, forthright statement when she said, and I quote…”Ge, there is one common denominator in all of your failed relationships. And that’s you.” She then proceeded to ask me a significantly poignant question…”What exactly is it that you’re doing to attract the same type of guy over and over and over again?” The more I ruminated over these sudden epiphany’s the more I deduced that maybe Rihanna had summed it up best with her hit song ‘Love the Way You Lie Part II’ when she belts out the line…”So maybe I’m a masochist.” An emotional cutter of sorts. I left her office feeling a new-found sense of hope. Now that I had been made brutally aware of the things that had ultimately been leading to my slow demise, I could make it a point to be substantially more aware of the men that I obviously needed to steer clear of.

I found myself at the mall one Saturday afternoon, about to hit up the semi-annual sale at Nordstrom. I rationalized my ‘Day-‘O-Spending’ by promising myself that I’d dedicate an extra day volunteering and mentoring at the local Big Brother/Big Sister program the following week. I reckoned it was more than a fair trade off. After I had made my purchases I figured I’d done enough damage to my bank account so I began strolling off through the mall, headed towards the exit. As I maneuvered around one of the center kiosks’s I made eye contact with the guy who was manning this particular booth. He smiled at me, so naturally I smiled back. I couldn’t help but notice that he was strikingly good looking. The very epitome of ‘tall, dark and handsome.’ He approached me with an air of confidence that I hadn’t seen exhibited in a long time. There was no beating around the bush, no pretenses, just a sense of poise and self assurance that immediately attracted me to him. “Listen, I know you don’t know me but I have to have your phone number. I’d really like to take you on a date sometime!” Instinctively I thought back to all of the hours of therapy I had sat through, and all of the life lessons that I had hopefully learned in the process and I figured this guy was bound to be “different” than the last DB I dated…the one who put the ‘I’ in narcIssIst. Insecure. And InsensItIve. I consented.

He picked me up on a moped which I thought was a little sophomoric, but I figured I’d remain buoyant and just pretend that I was Audrey Hepburn in the classic movie ‘Roman Holiday’ and that on this night, we would morph Orem Utah into our very own little Italian getaway. Even when we pulled into the Arby's parking lot, I chose to remain sanguine. Dinner (and we use that word loosely) started out with the mainstream questions that one usually asks when out for the first time. I found out he played Rugby for the local college, which would explain his incredibly toned physique. After we got the typical run-of-the-mill stuff out of the way I all of a sudden realized that it was extremely difficult to carry on a conversation with him. It was almost as though instantaneously we had absolutely nothing in common. I decided that he ranked high enough on the “Hotness Scale” that I couldn’t give up on him just yet, so I kept on plugging away. I discovered rather quickly that every time I asked him a question his response usually had a one-worded reply. And then when he did have something to say I couldn’t quite make out what he was trying to convey because it came out as one big gibberish, unclear mess…almost as if he were speaking in Cajun tongue. That is until I heard him mutter something about the number 18. When I asked him to recant what he had just said he looked up at me with a seemingly innocent expression and re-announced that he had just turned the big ‘ol 1-8!

If your date is underage…UNDATABLE!