This was originally published at In Our Words: A Salon For Queers & Co. Republished here with permission.

Dana Norris once went on 71 Internet dates. This is date no. 18 (we posted no. 17 here).

Jeff is wearing a necklace in his profile picture but his Match.com message calls me pretty so I agree to go out with him. He wants to meet in Lincoln Park, where he lives, so we can go to some nearby bar that he likes.

I drive to Lincoln Park after work and park outside of his apartment building. He walks out of his building, sees me, acknowledges me with a head nod, and looks away. Not a great sign. Why don’t these Internet men smile when meeting a new person? He’s also still wearing a necklace.

We start walking west on Fullerton. We’re chatting a bit, telling stories back and forth, and he mentions cruises, and I say how I once went on a Star Trek cruise with my aunt, and he mentions that he once went on a cruise with an ex-girlfriend who tried to cut his dick off. I put my hands out to both sides, stop walking, and almost yell, “You must tell me this story, in complete detail, immediately.”

He’s dating this girl for three months and she wants to go on this cruise but he doesn’t want to go so she somehow forces him to go by pouting a lot. So on the cruise he gets drunk and starts a religious debate with their dinner companions, like you do. His ex-girlfriend is very religious while he’s a professed atheist so she tries to stop him and he responds by calling her a psycho and she leaves dinner crying and he goes back to their cabin. Later, he wakes up with her on top of him, holding a butter knife to his dick, threatening to cut it off. So he pushes her off of him and they break up and end of story.

I consider just getting up and limping back to my car but our food has arrived and I’m hungry. I decide to stick it out and turn the evening into something other than a date. I turn it into a game where I occupy myself by studying Jeff like I’m an anthropologist. I count the number of times he says he isn’t as smart as his brother (15), the number of ex-girlfriends he mentions (three), the number of times he tells me that his job is to make people laugh (seven). I spend my time memorizing quotes, such as: “…that’s why I love weddings, because it’s my job to make everyone laugh but at weddings I don’t have to work because everyone is already laughing.”

On our way back to my car he asks if I want to stop at another bar. I agree because it’s still early and there’s more anthropological work to be done. We stop at a nice bar and sit down at a quality wooden table and order some whiskeys. Jeff asks me about my writing, which is nice of him, and tells me that he wants to write a fantasy novel. He sketched out the plot when he was in high school and he knows that his characterization isn’t any good, but he’s working on it. He pauses and looks into his whiskey for a moment and I think, you know, this guy is kind of a jerk and I’m never going to see him again but, really, I’m pretty lonely and he’ll probably listen to me talk about whatever. So I tell him about my recent breakup and how I wake up every day feeling so sad and worried and how I have to fight to not be depressed and how exhausting it is. He sympathizes and tells me about the darkest time in his life, when an ex had emotionally abused him and slept with his friends. He reacted by going out, getting hammered, falling asleep while driving home, waking up with the car in a ditch, getting arrested, and then the cop arresting him broke his necklace, which he had been wearing nonstop for five years straight. And that story is ridiculous but I kinda feel him. That’s a long time to commit to a necklace.