Bachelor #44

Online dating sucks. I know this. And yet, for lack of random encounters with handsome strangers, I just keep banging my weary head against the same old wall.

Bachelor #44 sounded just dandy. 45, nice enough looking, no major grammatical errors in his profile, and he swore up and down that he's 6"1! Hallelujah! We talked on the phone and he was charming, funny, interesting, yadda yadda yadda. When he said he feels that coffee dates are a train wreck, and he'd like to take me to dinner, the oddest thing happened: magically, all previous experiences of being trapped in restaurants for hours on end with horrid men vanished from memory. I have no explanation. I know better. Blind dates must allow for an easy exit. And yet, there I was, happily agreeing to dinner. So I deserve whatever fate awaited me, right?

Well, as it turns out, I understand perfectly why he doesn't like coffee dates: not enough calories. I swear, I am not exaggerating AT ALL when I tell you the man weighed EASILY 350 pounds, quite possibly more. He was a mountain. He was, without question, 150 pounds heavier than in his photos. In fact, in one of them he was engaged in actual physical activity, obviously not something he's done in the last couple of years.

I know this is typically the male online dater's domain: nearly every man I've met online has a horror story of the girl who posted a picture taken 50 pounds ago. Up until now, I thought men were more interested in lying about their height than their weight. But isn't it nice to know that sometimes men and women are from the same big, fat, dishonest planet after all?

The one saving grace was that he picked a small, out of the way restaurant (with generous portions) so I didn't have to worry about being seen by anyone I knew. I did, however, have to sit through an entire dinner, because I just couldn't think of a polite way to say, "You know it's funny, but you didn't say anything in your profile about being morbidly obese." Or "I wonder why I couldn't see all your chins in any of your photos."

Fate's a bitch.

Next.