Horror Stories

Most people would probably agree — to varying degrees — that dating can be awful. The path to happy relationships often is laden with mishaps, awkward moments and casual cruelties. Here, in honor of Valentine’s Day (or maybe in spite of it, rather), is a look into the real-life dating stories of five local singles.

TWO SERVINGS OF CATFISH

The 2010 documentary Catfish follows an artist as he forges a relationship with someone online whom he thinks is a young musician — but she turns out to actually be a mother twice his age. The term “catfish” has since become a colloquialism for people pretending to be someone else on the Internet — and for 29-year-old Aaron*, he’s already been cat-fished twice in the two weeks since he signed up for Tinder.

(*To protect the privacy of these individuals, we’ve used first names only, most of which have been changed.)

After ending a stint in the Air Force, Aaron recently moved to the Islands to help his family run their food truck business. He’d never done online dating before, but when a friend encouraged him to sign up, he figured why not? He was in a new place and it seemed like as good a way as any to meet people.

Aaron thought he’d scored. The first girl he started talking to seemed cool enough — so he set up a meeting to see if their connection would translate offline, too.

Two days later, he was sitting with her at RumFire, giving her all the important bullet points on his life, when she leaned in and told him something about herself: She’s actually an escort.

“We had a drink and we were just talking and then she said, ‘Hey, you do realize I am working,'” he says. “She was trying to charge me! And then she started going into her rates, ‘It’s $250 an hour.’ I thought it was a joke.”

Pissed off that she hadn’t been upfront about her intentions from the get-go, Aaron paid his tab and left.

Angry, but not discouraged, he began talking with another of his Tinder matches a few days later — Heather, a pretty 25-year-old — and they arranged to meet for a drink at Duke’s. But when he got there, he didn’t see Heather anywhere.

“I was like where the hell is she, and then this lady came up to me and was like, ‘Hi, I am Tiffany. I am Heather’s mom. I thought you were cute, and I thought this is the only way I would be able to talk to you.’

“I was trying to not freak out!” Aaron says. “I thought I was getting punked at first. I was like this is not real.”

He doesn’t know if Tiffany simply borrowed her daughter’s Tinder or had created an entirely fake account. Either way, it turns out there was no Heather. He’d been talking to Tiffany the entire time.

Tiffany was hoping that Aaron would agree to have a drink with her anyway. He admits that Tiffany was attractive — and relatively young for having a daughter in her mid-20s. But he was too turned off by the whole situation: “False advertisement, you know what I mean?

“I got lied to — it was kind of weird,” he says. “I laughed it off, but I was mad at the time.”

He stayed and had a drink at Duke’s anyway, alone.

BAIT AND SWITCH

Here’s how 21-year-old UH student Amber describes Will, a guy she matched with on Tinder: “You know the person where you are like, I have no chance, this guy is gorgeous? That was him.”

She’d recently gone through a breakup, so after chatting with Will on Tinder, she invited him over to watch TV. He showed up late, and drunk.

Watching Netflix, as it has a way of doing, turned into “Netflix and chill.”

“After, he was like, ‘I need to get my friend at the airport, I got to go’ — within five minutes,” Amber recalls.

When she tried to find Will’s Facebook profile to learn a little bit more about him, she discovered that Will was not even his real name. At least according to Facebook, his name was Nick.

She was a little bummed that he’d lied and then bailed so quickly, but it seemed like he was still into her: In the following days, he continued to stay in contact — asking her to hang out, texting her random photos … and sending Snap-chats of his genitals.

Despite the red flags, she decided to give him one more chance. So she invited him over again, and he came over late again — and then he even used the same excuse to leave again.

“Five minutes later, he was like, ‘I have to go pick up my friend at the airport,'” she recalls. “I was like, ‘You used that line last time, dude.'”

That was over a year ago, and Will/Nick/Whatever His Real Name Is still tries to contact Amber regularly — through pretty much all forms of communication. When Amber was still on Tinder, he would resurface every now and then with a new profile under a new name. They’re friends on Instagram, and he’ll often unfollow her — only to re-add her, and then proceed to like all of her posts. Sometimes he will text her asking to hang out — from a new number every few months.

When she asked him if he ever planned on meeting up and hanging out with her for real, his reply was simply, “No.”

She never did find out his real name.

“After that, I never wanted to meet up with other people,” Amber says.

MENAGE A … NO

Brad met Julia right out of high school, during the few months he had before shipping off to boot camp. For Brad, it was the first time that he’d really liked a girl like that. They could talk for hours about anything. And when he went to boot camp, Julia wrote him letters constantly.

Brad, now 24, got stationed here, but every time he returned home to California, he’d see Julia.

“Things would start back up and then we would keep in touch for a couple months, and then things would die down,” he explains.

It was one of those “will they or won’t they?” scenarios that went on for years. He’s always — even now — referred to her as “the one who got away.”

But finally, two years ago, they were both single, and they arranged for Julia to visit for Brad’s 22nd birthday. They were friends, sure, but the sub-text of this trip was that they were finally going to give this thing a go and find out if there was really something between them.

If this sounds like the climax of one of those When Harry Met Sally-esque romantic comedies that take place over a period of years and then the best friends-turned-lovers finally realize they’re perfect for one another, well, it just gets bad from here.

Shortly after they booked the ticket, Brad started seeing Cathy. At first, he thought it was just going to be a fling — but as his birthday got closer, so did he and Cathy.

He was honest about the situation, explaining to Julia that he was seeing Cathy, and telling Cathy that Julia was coming to visit. When Julia arrived, he managed pretty successfully to keep the two girls as separate as possible. That is, until the night of his birthday dinner.

Brad had planned a big dinner celebration with friends and co-workers. He figured he’d just seat the girls on opposite ends of the table, and while that might still be a little awkward, it’d be manageable. But it didn’t pan out quite like that: “As time drew closer and closer to the birthday dinner, one by one, people started falling off,” he recalls.

“And so it was just the three of us.

“The waiter came by, and I was like I need a drink NOW,” Brad says. “And I just chugged my entire drink right there. I was like, keep bringing them until I can’t stand up anymore.”

In the end, nobody won. Cathy and Brad broke up a few months later, and the trip was bad enough to unravel the years of friendship between he and Julia.

GETTING BLOWN AWAY

Trelaine’s first date with Michael went OK — the conversation seemed to flow well enough, but nothing spectacular. So when they walked from the bar to the train station together, Trelaine, a 25-year-old who grew up here but now works for the federal government in Washington, D.C., assumed they’d just be going their separate ways.

“My train was about to arrive, and I was like ‘OK, I guess this is it,'” Trelaine says.

Then Michael gave Trelaine a lingering stare and started leaning in. But Trelaine wasn’t feeling it — it was so sudden, so unexpected, and he wasn’t even sure how much he liked Michael.

“I was like, ‘Oh crap, no, I don’t want this,'” Trelaine recalls.

You know how when someone coughs or sneezes in your vicinity, or there’s a bad smell, and you kind of take a prolonged exhale to avoid it? Well, for whatever reason, that was Trelaine’s automatic reaction to Michael’s lean-in. Only, their lips met just as Trelaine was blowing out air.

“So it made this farting noise,” Trelaine says.

“And then I was just like ‘OK, bye!'”

How did Michael react? Trelaine is curious about that himself. But he was on the train so fast that he never got to find out.

“I would have liked to have been like, ‘What did you think about it? Did you think it was an accident? Or could you feel me blowing you away?'”

SWEET NOTHINGS

Melanie is a 32-year-old social worker who has had her share of dismal dating stories. There was the time, for instance, when she found out that she’d unwittingly been Tinder chatting with a guy her friend was already seeing. Another time she went to dinner with a man who turned out to be a pimp.

So when she started dating Daniel, she was hopeful. They were still in those early, blissful stages of a relationship when he had to go away on business for a months-long stretch. To her surprise — after all, they weren’t even “official” yet — he stayed in close communication the entire time.

“We’re talking emails morning, noon and night,” she says.

It crossed her mind that Daniel might be talking to other girls, but she brushed off the idea. Keeping up with that many emails to her alone had to be time consuming enough.

Shortly after he returned, Daniel was scheduled to go to Kauai for his birthday — with a friend, he told her — and the morning he left, Melanie received a Facebook message from a stranger, a woman named Kristen. In Kristen’s message was an attachment of a trip itinerary to Kauai — first-class tickets, a stay at the Hyatt Regency, reservations for a fancy dinner. It was all, Kristen explained, supposed to be for her and Daniel — whom she says she had been dating for nine months.

Melanie and Kristen later found out that they weren’t the only ones: Daniel had been flying other girls out to meet him while he was gone, and they both suspect that he took someone else to Kauai with him.

Their solution? Go out and have drinks together, take a bunch of selfies and post them to his Facebook page with the caption: “Thanks for being the catalyst to a meaningful relationship.”

Melanie and Kristen remain friends. Daniel? Not so much.

For these five individuals, these stories were just the tip of the iceberg, really — all of them had more than one dating horror story to tell (one had a whopping 15!). But, in spite of that, most of them seemed at least somewhat hopeful.

Aaron admits that he is pretty skeptical for future Tinder endeavors — “I don’t trust anybody else! It’s like let me see a picture, or FaceTime me” — but says that he is willing to give it at least one more go.

Amber took something of a hiatus from dating after the Will/Nick/WTF debacle. But in December, she went on Tinder again on a whim — and ended up meeting a man whom she went to dinner and a movie with for their first date.

“It was like we were friends already, it just clicked,” she says.

They’ve been dating for about a month now, and it’s going well.

Melanie has a little platitude she likes to follow when it comes to dating: “Have an open mind and a sense of humor — laugh when it’s funny, get the hell out of there when it’s weird.”

After a beat, she adds, “You never know.”

Whether she meant not knowing is a good thing or a bad thing, the meaning wasn’t clear.