I tried some of the dating services several years ago and, to me, it was worse than going to the bars. I don’t know if any of you have tried these things, but my advice would be to ignore them. Even though I communicated with many women I ended up meeting only one, so this is the story of my first (and only) encounter with a dating service girl.

First of all, I didn’t pick this girl, she picked me. The pictures she used were all very attractive and her profile found her to be bubbly optimistic, talented, and spiritual. These are good qualities in a woman so I corresponded with her through the dating service. She was having a hard time at this time so the bubbly optimism was nowhere to be found. This should have raised some red flags, but I’m the kind of guy who is empathetic toward people and I’m a bit naïve and willing to give the benefit of the doubt out freely. We quickly moved to emails, then to IMs, and finally to talking on the phone.

I found that on the phone she was a talker…in fact, a talker who rarely had to breathe in …a talker that would ask a question and rarely wait for an answer. I found this annoying, but it wasn’t a deal breaker just yet. She was kind of funny and she did talk of spiritual things and she was also supposedly a Christian rock singer.

Anyway, we decided it was time to meet (actually, I decided this…I think she was satisfied with me being an audience to her relentless monologue). She wanted to meet me at my house before I went to work one day and she also wanted to bring me pizza. This was all fine by me but I did offer to take her out or at least let me buy the pizza and have it delivered, but she had her mind made up.

I told her what time I had to be at work so we set the lunch date at noon and that would give me plenty of time to get ready. It was after 1:00pm when she finally made it to my doorstep. When I looked out of my peep hole all I saw was some young guy standing there. I opened the door to see what he wanted and there was my date standing behind him.

She didn’t look much like her pictures, well she did in a way, but she had suddenly gained about fifty pounds. She reminded me of Liz Taylor after her year long diet of biscuits and gravy. She was carrying two pans with a pizza on each…frozen pizzas that had been cooked already, but needed warming up again. She had a little black outfit on that might have been pajamas and the back of her top was mostly open area exposing the six inch wide orthopedic bra underneath. She had a ton of perfume on that instantly sent my sinuses into painful overload.

The young guy turned out to be her son and the first words out of his mouth were, “Do you have a men’s size 32 belt I can have?” I told him I would look here in a second. The woman pushed past me and headed for the oven apologizing for her tardiness on the way. Me and the boy made ourselves comfortable and talked while his Mom “fixed” our lunch. He asked me if I had some nail clippers. I said yeah and supplied him with them where upon he proceeded to clip his nails on my living room carpet.

The Mom came in and started telling me that when she moved in she would decorate my living room with all of her Coke knick knacks and showed me where she would put all of this stuff. Of course my stuff would have to go somewhere else. I thought to myself, man that perfume must be going to my head because I think just told me she was moving in. She confirmed it when she asked if it was all right if her son moved in too…”He’s a good boy.” She went upstairs to check out how much room I had for their stuff and left me and the boy to talk some more. I guess since she talked so much it had left the poor guy nearly mute. He hadn’t learned the intricacies of conversation yet which made it a little on the uncomfortable side sitting there with him. Luckily he was preoccupied with his nail cutting.

The pizza was finally done and I wolfed down the tasteless cardboard facsimiles of real food to, not only get rid of these two, but I also had to get to work. I tried to excuse my rudeness by blaming it on the lack of time I had, but they weren’t taking the hint. I told them that I had to leave in five minutes and they would also have to leave at that time. She jumped up and said, “Well I can’t leave without doing the dishes.”

To which I replied, “Oh, that’s alright, I’ll do them when I get home.”

Her response was to run the dish water and proceed to wash the dishes. I hurried her up and nearly pushed the both of them out the door as I was leaving also. I really think they wanted to hang around after I was gone, but that wasn’t going to happen. She gave me a big bear hug at the door just long enough to permeate my clothing with her deadly pur…fumes that lingered on me the rest of the day. I was also nearly late for work.

I talked to her later that night (she called me as soon as I got home). I told her I didn’t feel the chemistry and that her perfume had made me ill. I also told her that I wasn’t looking for a roommate either.  I would think that would have been enough to discourage her, but that wasn’t the end of this story.