The Man of my Dreams and Tampon Boy

When it all started, I was already in love, alone and in love apparently, but in love all the same. I had met the man of my dreams while following my passion of traveling the world. It was going to be the perfect story – regular girl travels to foreign country, meets wonderful boy, is swept off her feet and lives happily ever after. Except that happily ever after wasn’t ever and certainly wasn’t after, or even happily for that matter.

I met Winston, as we shall call him, while I was in a foreign country. I was immediately smitten, and for crying out loud, he gave that aura off too. Lesson #1: Never trust the aura! So, when Winston and I both went back to our respective locations, I was convinced that this was just another side bar in the happy story of our soon-to-be-happy lives.

And that’s where Tampon Boy comes in. It was several years after meeting Winston. There was plenty of long distance swooning, but then again, I suppose it’s always easier when there’s half a continent between my flaws and his. It was about this time that my mother decided that I needed to date. Ah dating. I had successfully made it through college with a degree or two, or in my case three, and had managed to avoid the marriage trap that my friends seem to have fallen victim to…something like lemmings jumping off a cliff. And I was happy. I had a crazy job and was starting to make friends again in my hometown in my post-college life.

It wasn’t that I was wishing for the date to go badly. But then again, maybe I was. After all, I was in love with Winston. Tampon Boy (hence forth referred to as T.B.) started out okay. Well, maybe not. He was late picking me up. Tardiness is not an attractive quality. But I was nervous, so I could overlook some of those things. It started out innocently enough, although I had a few doubts about T.B., since it took him an hour to drive us to a restaurant that was 10 minutes away, but whatever. All doubts quickly turned to “get me the heck out of here!” shortly into our dinner.

Dinner conversation usually starts out innocently enough, but it was not too far into eating my pasta when I was praying for the floor to open up and swallow me whole. In the course of our conversation, if you can call it that, we started talking about plumbing. It was a relevant topic, given that I had just taken apart a sink that morning to dig out a retainer…sorority girls – that’s all you need to know. And yet, in the process of talking about sinks, the topic of tampons came up. And not because I brought it up. I have never, in my life, met a man, a MAN, that can monologue for a solid hour and a half about the hazards of flushing tampons in a house full of sorority girls. The expansion, the blockage, the plunger, everything I could ever want to know and then some, and most of it I didn’t even want to know. I mean seriously, I don’t even know any females that can talk that long about tampons. As I sat eating my garlic pasta (don’t be shocked, I knew then and there that there would be NO kissing!!), I silently begged and pleaded for an earthquake, a tsunami, a mudslide, anything to make the conversation stop. No luck in my landlocked city.

Now imagine me sitting there, during all of this. And imagine the table directly to my left with six transvestites (okay, so I’m pretty sure they were just flamboyantly gay men, but the story has snowballed in my head over the years), pointing and laughing hysterically as I try to sink in my chair and T.B. continues his soliloquy on tampons. You know it’s bad when the whole restaurant stops to listen.

But then fun didn’t end there. After we finally left dinner, T.B. announced that we were stopping by his friend’s birthday party. Wahoo…a bowling alley full of people that I don’t know while I’m on a blind date that just involved a tampon monologue. But, as I have learned from my life of dating (and dating and dating and dating), I went along with the plan to prove that I was not one of “those” girls. At the bowling alley, the evening revolves around a toilet seat. I apparently had my own group of friends that must be fairly boring and uncreative because I had never received a toilet seat as a birthday card. I walk in with T.B. and am handed a Sharpie and a toilet seat and told to sign. And what do you write to a complete stranger? “Shit Happens. Happy Birthday” or “Holy Shit, it’s your birthday” or “Crap, another year older”…my list could have gone on forever. Okay, so I seriously didn’t write anything like that, but if I knew then what I know now, I might have. So while T.B. goes to bowl a game with his friends, I get the third degree from some guy…where is my relationship with T.B. going, where do I see our relationship in five years….etc, etc, etc. How about clogging up the toilet just like those tampons?! And after that, I was pretty much done. The night ended with an awkward hug in a house full of sorority girls watching my ever move.

So memorable, was I, in fact, that several weeks later when a mutual friend (whom I am no longer friends with) asked T.B. about our date, he didn’t even remember who I was! Think tampons, my friend!

Nicely done, mom!

And thus, I made a vow not to date again, for a long time.