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Too Soon to Be My Valentine

It should have been common sense:

Don't have your first date be on Valentine's Day.

Even so, I gave it a shot.

I'd been talking to this guy for about a week, and we began planning a first date.

I knew Valentine's Day was coming up, so I wanted to make sure we could get at least one date in before then, so that if it went well, I'd be set for a date on February 14th.

The problem was that every time we'd set up a date, something would go wrong. The weather would be bad, or one of us would get called into work.

Sure enough, we reached the day before Valentine's Day.

"So," he said, "Do you want to...postpone?"

I could tell that neither of us wanted to be without a date, and it seemed silly since we both had talked on the phone multiple times after we met at our mutual friend's party.

We liked each other. How bad could it be?

"No," I said, "Let's just do this."

Hey, I thought, if it works out then our anniversary will be on the most romantic day of the year. How great would that be?

You can hear the ominous sound of thunder in the background, can't you?

The first issue became where to go.

We managed to snag reservations to this nice restaurant on the East Side of town. Unfortunately, when we got there, the place was dimly lit with candles and there was soft music playing. The atmosphere was not great for a casual "getting to know you" session. We found ourselves talking in hushed voices as if we were in a library.

When the violinist showed up next to our table, I suggested that we pay for our salads and then find somewhere else to eat.

We ended up at TGIFriday's next to a mom and dad who decided to spend Valentine's Day with their five screaming children. Believe it or not, I preferred that over the previous awkwardness.

After dinner, we decided to go to a bar. At least there we knew we wouldn't run into happy couples on the verge of proposing to one another.

Instead, we wound up next to a drunken man who gave us the two-hour epic of how his fiance dumped him that morning and confessed to cheating on him with his best friend.

"Love sucks," he barked at us, "It's for moronos and liars!"

I was ready to run back to the violinist after that one.

We tried to end the night on a high point by having a nice, quiet conversation in my car where it seemed like the rest of the world would be unable to interfere with its Valentine's Day shenanigans.

No dice.

Both our phones started ringing, and they wouldn't stop. Our friends were calling about their dates, their forgetful boyfriends, their angry girlfriends, and questions about how our date had gone.

We decided to give our first date another try the following week when the world would be a little less lovey-dovey.

Believe it or not, we actually ended up dating for about four years after that, but we celebrated our anniversary the week after Valentine's Day, and from that year on, we always spent our romantic holidays at home.

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