When strangers confessing their love for you isn’t as romantic as you’d think…

Every girl holds on to that Cinderella moment when you walk into a ball and the prince just immediately falls in love with you. It’s less of a love-at-first sight romantic dream though and more of an ease thing. And to you ladies out there, I will be the first to confess: when my friends are talking about these “stalkers” who follow them around and are hopelessly in love with them to no avail, I am secretly jealous. How nice would it be to have someone love you for no reason? When people tell me that I won’t find anyone if I don’t put myself out there or even talk to guys, I won’t find one, I always joked and told them that I just want Joe Shmow off the street to come up to me and confess his love for me. Little did I know that he actually would?

On one fine June morning I found myself running into coffee shops and diners after the gym. On a health kick, I had been working out in the morning and then was on a mission to find my friend a large black-and-white cookie for her birthday. After bakeries, bagelsmiths, and diners my mission was marked a failure and I headed home to finish my ab workout and take a shower. When I got out, I had a rare surprise. I logged onto my always desolate Facebook notifications and saw that I had a message and a friend request. Upon opening the message, I read a letter from a guy claiming that he wasn’t a stalker but he was eating at the bagel place off the highway today and a girl with my college volleyball team and number walked in and then immediately left leaving him no time to go up and talk to her. He had this strange feeling though that he needed to do just that. So he drove home, whipped out his computer and looked up the roster to find that this mystery girl, he thinks, is me.

Imagine my surprise. I was mixed with flattery (my legs were looking mighty toned), fear (I mean Facebook, really? Isn’t this the start of every missing persons story?), and straight disbelief, like what? Since I had nothing else to do and couldn’t ignore the message altogether, I called upon my friends who yelled at me for not answering him back. I didn’t want to accept his request because he could be a murderer, but that meant I couldn’t see his page to see his face, age, location, or occupation. I told them all that I would do nothing about it, and save it as a laugh, but they theoretically slapped me in the face by telling me that I got exactly what I wished for. A random guy from off the street basically just walked up to me and confessed his love for me like I always wanted and I was just throwing this princess moment out the door? Their logic was sound, my reasoning not so much, but I decided to answer this stranger for no other reason than my respect for fairytales.

I continued cautiously and gave this man a chance. On paper, this frog could be a prince: he graduated from high school top of his class, NJIT with honors, was taller than me, liked adventure, and thought it was cute that I liked Harry Potter so much. He worked on a farm, which I chose to mean that he could make me homemade pickles and that he was naturally muscular from throwing hay bales all day. I eventually accepted his friend request and after my friends stalked him a bit online I started to realize that he was probably a bit nerdy and probably a bit weird but who am I to talk? His profile picks were tiny photos of himself with shade over his face so I had no way of knowing what he looked like but my friends kept encouraging me. Eventually, he got my phone number.

Now I have this friend whom I would text and she would just never answer me back. I thought she was the worst texter until I called her out on it and she said she doesn’t answer me on purpose because of the attitude a give her. Apparently I sound like a witch with a B over instant messenger. I swear I am just sarcastic but without inflection and tone, my friends can’t tell whether I am being serious or not. I tell them to just always assume not. My bad texting aside, I at least can hold a conversation. With time to think and retype me words I can actually sound witty, smart, and hilarious via messaging but with this guy it was like pulling teeth.

He sounded like a hick, but I knew he was smart so again I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He kept talking about his darn vegetables or just hounded me with questions. I don’t like talking about myself (she says ironically as she writes an entire book about herself) and it made me uncomfortable. When I would be short or try to end a conversation he would keep at it, and again I was told to keep trying. He asked me out a couple times but I always came up with an excuse about why I couldn’t go. He called me once, to which my typical response to talkingonthephoneobia (the non medical term for fear of talking on the phone), I ignored it. I then called him back and left him a voice mail of me laughing hysterically saying sorry, ikfdhjsiofhdskf, and mumble mumble mumble. From that, he got “yes, I’d love to go to ice cream with you.” Well this experience almost made me turn my back on ice cream.

After much prodding from my friends I end up at the ice cream parlor with huge feelings of regret. Frequent failed trips to Barnes and Noble has taught me never to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can just tell the quality of the Italian leather shoe by the shoebox it comes in. What greeted me was a pair acid-washed mom jeans which were a little too short giving me the unfortunate glimpse at a pair of white New Balance sneakers I wouldn’t let my grandfather wear. On top was a stained grey t-shirt which I’m pretty sure had a hole under the armpit. The body that graced these clothes stood as awkward as me at my eighth grade dance, but someone screamed for attention rather than averting it. I would categorize him as an oblivious awkwardian. He bought me an ice cream, I opted for a small cone as to speed up the timeline of the “date” and but his large blizzard did the opposite of just that. He lead me to the back of his truck to sit on the tailgate, an experience which has ruined about ten percent of country songs for me till this day. Perhaps if I had developed a love for this genre of music at this time rather than years later I would have appreciated it and found charm in the encounter instead of the pure humiliation I felt and judgment of him that I now apologize for. I was being vain, I thought better of myself and thought bad of him but he must have been either very courageous or very stupid to have done what he did. Like in texting, the conversation was a struggle and there was just no way to make this work, but if you think I’m bad at saying hello, imagine what it is like for me to say goodbye.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times, two wrongs don’t make a right and two awkwards don’t make a left. So that’s exactly what I did, I left the situation as soon as I deemed reasonable and drove home in a fit of laughter. I had tried, I really had, and I just could not do it. My mother pointed out that my father didn’t even own a pair of shoes when she met him and now he is a well dressed man, and I did say that the poor guy was not the most unattractive man I had ever met but I swear there wasn’t a chance of this working out. I let him down punctually explaining that he was nearly ten years older than me and I just couldn’t see it working out and I laid the idea to rest.

At the time it had given me hope that maybe a situation like this would come along again, possibly with a man better suited for me, but after a couple years of absolutely no one, I can’t say I haven’t considered what a life of making my own pickles and riding horses to the county fair would be like. So no happily ever after in this fairy tale, but there is still hope that one day my prince will be riding in on his white elephant (since I’ve exhausted the horse option) and break the spell of this nightmare of social anxiety.