In all of my experiences of dating, online and off, I have always felt I had one thing going for me: I was, at the very least, memorable. I might not be gorgeous or wildly entertaining, but having someone completely forget that he even dated me has managed to knock me off of the pedestal I was already struggling to climb atop. Getting the basics out of the way, the guy who forgot about me is named Cal, and he’s 49 years old. I guess I could blame this one on old age.

Cal was one of the first people to pursue me on the dating site, sending me dozens of Emails a day regardless of how much I ignored him. He hounded me for months, never giving up that I would hand over my Phone Number, but I blew him off completely. And after I met Married Guy, Cal might as well have ceased to exist. After a few months, he took the hint and stopped emailing me.

So on one pathetic evening when I was particularly overwhelmed with the feels after ending things with Married Guy, I caved and glanced at Cal’s profile one time, and boy was that all it took! He pounced right away, bombarding me with a stream of emails asking where I’d been and if I would consider giving him a chance. Out of all the girls he’d talked to on the site he thought I was the “most intriguing”, whatever the f that means. I guess in Cal’s world intriguing means forgettable, nameless, bland, faceless and everything BUT memorable and/or intriguing.

I gave Cal my Phone number and things started off well enough. He texted me every morning to say hi and we spoke on the phone almost daily for about two weeks. Cal told me he was a manager in the restaurant industry and when I asked where, I got a whole lot of crickets. I had gone on a date with someone in the past who had also claimed to work in the restaurant industry, and he turned out to be a teller at McDonalds so I was bracing myself for a repeat when Cal said, “It’s a strip club.” Wait, what? You’re a what the what in a what? What. The. Shit.

I try hard not to be a judgmental person, and I try to be understanding when a person tells me they work in a less-than-desirable occupation. And to Cal’s credit, he immediately admitted that managing a gentlemen’s club was probably not helping him get dates. You would be correct about that, Cal. “Hi Mom and Dad, I’d like you to meet Cal. He hires strippers for a living. How does he know they’re qualified, you ask?” No. Just no. It was pretty obvious that if I ended up dating this guy, I would also be judged for his occupation regardless of how shallow the judgement may be. He’d started working there when he was 19 because the money was good and the girls were a nice extra perk to a kid in his late teens. Fair enough. He had worked his way up to management and said that dating any of the girls there now was not of interest to him, and he’d worked too hard to get to the position he was in now to lose it getting caught with one of his employees. Again, fair enough, but of zero comfort to me.

He asked if I felt like going to a seafood restaurant in a nearby town and I agreed because while the judgmental part of me was already thinking this wouldn’t work out, another part of me said I was being shallow. In person, he seemed like he would probably be a lot of fun as a friend but my notes here all say greaseball. He was predictably skeazy (drink!) and I realized within about two minutes of meeting him that the judgmental part of me was all too correct. We sat down to order and glancing through the menu he told me that I had to try the scallops here. I told him I would game for trying anything else on the menu that he recommended, but I was allergic to scallops so I’d have to pass on them. He rolled his eyes (!) and told me to go ahead and order whatever I wanted. Gosh, thanks Cal. I’ll go ahead and do that.

The rest of the date was a total eh, with him coming off as a weird mix of very cynical mixed with creepy attempts at being charming. At the end of the night I told him to have a great weekend and thanked him for dinner. Later on that night, the Get-What-You-Deserve Fairy decided to pay Cal a visit and he texted me the very unnecessary information that the scallops had made him extremely sick and I was lucky I was allergic and didn’t order them. Yuck. I was hoping thinking I would never hear from him again. But as you probably guessed eons ago, this guy did not quietly disappear into the night as expected. In fact, several months later I got this gem of an email from him on the dating site where we met:

I was thoroughly confused reading his email at first because it took a second for it to sink in that he didn’t recognize me, did not remember that he’d pursued me to the point of stalking, and did not remember that he actually MET me. And then the flow of emails began once again…

Most men, after realizing they had just made this mistake, would have apologized and left it alone, but not Cal! More and more emails came in until I finally blocked him from sending me any more messages. And luckily, since I’m probably one of about 300 Sarahs on his contact list, he will likely never contact me by phone.

But SERIOUSLY, guys. I have dated a lot of people, roughly 50-60 or so off of this dating site alone and many others outside of it, and I have never forgotten one face yet. Even after one date, I am still capable of remembering SOMETHING about him. So if you can actually look at the photos and read the description of someone in their profile and STILL not have your memory jogged, it’s time to turn the whore volume down a notch and re-evaluate. Or go over to Tinder. I hear they encourage this stuff over there.