Dating as an Olympic sport

Bad dating is so competitive it should be declared an Olympic sport. Sure, everyone is happy when single friends meet great partners and embark on new relationships. But there is just as much – if not more - excitement when a blind date goes wrong and a funny story follows. And for every bad date story out there, someone has one just that much worse to regale.

The most challenging category in the bad dating genre has to be that of shortest date (otherwise known as quickest rejection). There are many horror stories to be told about bad first impressions, and since this is a competitive sport the stories I am writing about today are not mine alone.

I was shocked to hear a friend's story – years ago – of a date that lasted just 10 minutes. It was a fix-up through common acquaintances, and the two potential partners met at the top of a popular walkway in Jerusalem. They agreed to go for a cup of coffee at the bottom of the street, requiring a 5-minute walk. By the time they reached the coffee house, he had decided that he was just not that keen, and told her that he'd prefer not to waste any more of either of their time by following through with coffee. My friend was left standing on her own next to a coffee shop she had no interest in entering, having shared nothing more than a handshake with the man who had just rejected her. At the time, that was by far the shortest date I'd heard of, and I was horrified by the lack of tact he had displayed by calling such an abrupt end to the pre-date.

Imagine my surprise, then, when another friend met someone through a dating site, arrived at the designated meeting spot, said hello to her date, and got the following response: "I don't think so", before he got up and left the bar. While we've all heard of foreplay, this rejection was nothing more than a four-word foreword of a date, and its sting lasted a lot longer than the meeting itself.

And just when I thought this friend had won the gold medal for shortest, most humiliating date ever, I almost met Eli. Eli and I lived an hour apart, and we had come across one another on a dating site a week before. After a couple of emails and a quick phone call, we decided to meet up and see whether there was any point investigating a 'long distance' connection (since Israel is so tiny, an hour's distance between partners sometimes seems like an insurmountable obstacle to overcome). So we decided to meet in Caesaria – a good location because it was a central point between where we both lived at the time, but even better for a first date because there's a lot to see and do there, just in case there's not much to talk about (not unusual when the only thing you have in common is that you've both resorted to cyberspace dating to find your one and only….).

I arrived first, found a shady spot and waited for Eli to arrive. He arrived 10 minutes later, and I directed him to a parking place next to mine. While we had swapped photographs before the meeting, I couldn't help but feel an all-too-familiar pang of disappointment as he parked his car and I realized his photo was not exactly recent. It had been taken about 15 years before, when he was in his prime, and like a good car, his physical condition had very obviously rapidly depreciated since then. I worked hard at not letting my disappointment show on my face as I got out my car and walked over to greet him. After all, looks are not everything and it was quite possible that his personality would make up for his deteriorated exterior. It's not as if I walked off the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine.

But as fate would have it, from the very briefest of encounters, I have to declare that his personality is a perfect fit with his physical appearance. He got out his car, looked at me, and gave me the one-word verbal version of the finger-flip. "No", he said, before getting into his car and shooting out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, never to be seen or heard of again. I was left in the dust, gob smacked, looking in vain for the candid camera crew to pop out and yell that it had all been a hoax. But no such luck.

And with that, I officially became world champion in the category of shortest date in history. Let me know if you can beat my score.