When the Dentist Hurts Less Than Dating
It’s a balmy late summer evening in New York – or let’s say Braunschweig – when I suddenly find myself in a situation so bizarre that it could have almost been romantic… if it weren’t for the question of trust and a blind date looming over everything.
It all starts with a photo. A harmless photo, taken in front of the magnificent Sultan Qaboos Mosque in Oman – an exotic place where dreams and distant adventures seem to hang in the air. I didn’t think much of it when I came across it on a dating profile. But my curiosity was piqued. How could I have known that this picture would trigger more than just a simple, “Hey, cool photo!”?
“Send me another picture,” he says. His name is Frank. “I can hardly see you in the photo.”
At that moment, I could practically hear Carrie Bradshaw saying, “Bad lighting or bad character?” I chose to believe the former. Even so, I had absolutely no desire to send him another photo. Not by SMS, not by WhatsApp. I mean, who really knows who’s on the other end of social media, and what happens to the picture afterward?
“This won’t work between us,” Frank writes, upping the ante with, “You need to trust me.”
Trust? The word rings in my ears like an unfulfilled contract. Frank, who barely knows me from a brief chat, expects trust? Trust doesn’t come from a photo, I thought. Trust is built through… well, everything else.
“Or then a blind date,” he writes suddenly when I remain silent. It sounds almost desperate, as if he’s given up on photos and on my spontaneous enthusiasm.
“Three things don’t come back,” I reply wisely, almost like an Arabic proverb you’d find on a Pinterest board: “the spoken word, the shot arrow, and the missed opportunity.”
With that, I thought I had elegantly closed the matter.
But as in every good drama – and Frank seemed to know this intuitively – two weeks later, a message came out of nowhere: “Good evening and best wishes to BS.”
I can’t help but smile. Two weeks of silence, and now this? It seemed like, in Frank’s world, I had just been waiting for him to pop back up. Sometimes men’s hearts are hard to decipher… or maybe just hard to get the message.
“Do you still have hope?” I ask, amused.
“Yes… you should never give up hope!!!” comes the reply. Three exclamation marks. Three!
Like a sailor who never quite left the shore, Frank was trying again. And as I pondered his brave persistence, I remembered another dating truth: “Exotic places and exotic conversations don’t always go hand in hand.”
I offer him a walk. A chance. Bürgerpark, 3 p.m., meet in front of a hotel. Simple, straightforward, or so I thought.
But Frank had other plans. “Sorry, I can’t this week. Maybe next week?”
Maybe. A word that floats between hope and resignation in the dating world. And while he reassured me he “wasn’t at the dentist” – which, frankly, I had never questioned – I decided this whole situation felt more like a failed mountain-climbing trip. Not because I was particularly eager to reach the summit of getting to know him, but because I wondered how many “next weeks” there would be.
And then, in a final act of self-awareness, came his ultimate message: “I need a woman, not a mountain climber.”
Well, Frank. I’m not a mountain climber. But I do know this: sometimes the biggest mountain to climb is learning to accept a simple “no.”
As Carrie Bradshaw would say: “Sometimes the greatest adventures are the ones you never take.”
