Sometimes, it’s good to not end up with “the one that got away.”
There are many ex-flings to wistfully reflect on each Valentine’s Day, but there’s just as many potential pairings that were doomed from the start. Be it because of marriage, murder suspects or a distinct lack of hygiene, here are The Hatchet staff’s worst first dates.
Annie O’Brien | Advice Columnist
I went on more first dates during my first year at GW than I care to admit. I was desperate for a boyfriend and tried to lock one down through any means necessary. At the start of my second semester, I thought I had found a Shakespearean sweetheart in my playwriting class. We bonded over our shared desire to be writers as well as an appreciation for cinema.
When he eventually asked me to go to the movies, I was elated. I wanted to impress him by choosing the most distinguished movie at the Georgetown AMC. Having already seen “Licorice Pizza” and worried “House of Gucci” was too lowbrow, I chose “Belfast,” a black-and-white Kenneth Branagh film story set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, an uber-violent and dreary period of Ireland’s history.
I set a mood — just not for romance. We watched the nearly three-hourlong movie in puritanical silence, our hands frozen to our individual laps and lips pursed as bombs exploded and middle-aged actors fought in an accent nearly indiscernible to our American ears. He paid for an Uber back to campus, opting for a five-minute drive instead of a 15-minute walk to avoid debriefing the dread we’d just witnessed.
We spent the rest of the semester avoiding eye contact in the classroom and offering stifled criticism of each other’s work, that unbridgeable gulf between us reminiscent of the conflict in the film we saw.
Nick Perkins | Culture Editor
I don’t claim to be great at first dates, but in my defense, situations are sometimes out of my control. Take a date I went on during a seemingly innocuous Wednesday afternoon in September 2023. Everything appeared to be going fine as we sipped on our lattes in For Five Coffee Roasters — in hindsight, a date location choice bound for failure due to its dull corporatism impossible for inspiring any feelings — until around 6 p.m., when the cafe started to close for the night, and my date checked her phone.
A horrified expression fell over her face. Worrying that my sixth joke about Tom Cruise had really been the final straw, I asked her what was wrong. She said there seemed to be some sort of escaped convict on campus and that we were supposed to have been in lockdown for two hours — the entirety of the date. I checked my phone, and I saw a stream of worried texts about where I was after falling off the grid for the entire lockdown. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the manhunt for Christopher Haynes, who had escaped from custody near GW Hospital that day, lasted longer than any sort of relationship from that date.
Rachel Moon | Senior News Editor
“So when you’re in the shower you just like…stand there?”
After people leaning in close all night to scream in my ear over the booming speakers at a fraternity party — the venue of a first date I was taken on last month — all I could think about was soap. My party companion was telling me that he didn’t believe in using it.
“I just don’t see what it does for you,” he said.
He was a sweet guy, and it had been an okay evening, but I couldn’t stop the musk reminiscent of a high school football team locker room from wafting down my nasal passages. If he smells bad, he just puts on deodorant, my date said. I said to myself that maybe I was too old to be going on first dates. Maybe I should have just settled for the first fish that leapt out of GW’s shallow dating pool and called it a day.
I started to explain that soap picks up dirt particles then shrugged it off. I wasn’t his mom. He got up and went to the bathroom, and I was left to chew on the information he had just given me. The thoughts volleyed across my mind, “He doesn’t smell bad, and what does soap do for you after all?” My own conscience shot back, “Even children use soap.”
He shuffled through the sea of people back toward me from the bathroom and took my hand. I just hoped he used hand soap.
Faith Wardwell | Managing Editor
In a moment of weakness during the winter of my junior year, I tossed a line into the sea of dating apps, hoping to reel in my Mr. Right. I soon matched with a Georgetown University student, and — much to my friends’ surprise and even my own — I agreed to meet him for a drink for what would be my first and last Hinge date ever.
The date started strong, as we bantered about our schools’ crosstown rivalry, trading joking insults about which student body was more insufferable. We got to talking about our majors, which, in classic D.C. fashion, led to discussions of our past internship experiences, as he shared he had spent the previous summer interning in Las Vegas.
“Vegas was awesome,” I remember him saying. “That’s where I met my wife.”
I nearly choked on my tequila soda, frozen in my seat. He looked back at me, a slight smile and glint in his eye, as if he had been dying to let me in on his secret. “Your what?” I responded.
Very nonchalantly, almost giggling at my panic, he attempted to assure me that his marriage was “nothing serious” and that his decision to get hitched on a random Saturday night was simply a drunken mistake made in Sin City — despite the key fact that neither of them had yet made an effort to annul the union.
I may have been sad and single, but I was no home-wrecker. I’d learned my lesson from Rory Gilmore’s affair with Dean in Season 4 of Gilmore Girls, and I had no interest in becoming “the other woman.” With the wise words of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” echoing through my mind, I departed from the date that night and retired from Hinge for the foreseeable future.
