I met this really cute guy at a party. We hit it off and he asked me out for dinner. Yay!

When he came to ‘pick me up’ it turned out I’d need to drive; his car was in the shop and a friend had dropped him off.

No biggie, but I wish I’d known ahead of time since my car generally has about 14 pairs of shoes riding around in it and I could have done something about that.

We’re headed off to the restaurant we had agreed on when he says, “Oh, and you’re going to need to pay for dinner. I lost my job a few weeks ago and I’m really broke. That’s cool though, right?”

I turned the car around and went home. No, you can’t come in. Call the friend who dropped you off and have them come get you.

Nope, not gonna happen. Don’t need none of that.

If he had been honest from the beginning, I’d have been fine with planning something free or cheap - going to a park or having coffee or whatever. But this whole bait and switch thing just wasn’t cool. Too many Big Red Flags.

Another time, when I was trying online dating, I had a few doozies.

• One guy, who was very proud of being Dutch, showed up for cocktails in actual wooden clogs. The only thing he wanted to talk about was how cool being Dutch was.
• Another guy met me at a bar and immediately told me he’s actually married and looking for someone to have a threesome with his wife. She hadn’t actually agreed to such a thing, but, “You’re so hot, I know she’ll be down for it when she sees you!” Nope.
• And there was this really sweet guy who was cute enough and fun and smart…but his voice sounded, I kid you not, just like Minnie Mouse. I just couldn’t take the poor guy seriously and told him we couldn’t date. We were friends and hung out for a while, until he revealed that he had a huge crush on me and we agreed the friends thing wasn’t working. I felt a little bad about that, but every time he opened his mouth I just wanted to giggle.