Back in 1999, Roger Lodge scored a job hosting a new reality show called Blind Date. This was pre-Apprentice, pre-Kardashians, pre-Bachelor. The idea of watching normal people embarrass themselves on TV was still thrilling and kind of insane.
Blind Date was the original dating reality show and it was cruel, pairing attractive, level-headed women with porn-obsessed accountants. Sometimes they would cut the subjects some slack and give them someone they might actually fuck, but they only did that so we could see some necking and they could make a wacky comment in a cartoon air bubble. They would send the subjects on weird dates, like going to the park to do finger-painting then off to a fancy Italian dinner.
Blind Date always delivered. It was painful, real and mortifying. I miss the days when reality TV was all about normal people fucking up.
One of the greatest episodes of Blind Date involved two 21-year-old UCLA students named Lauren and Bill. They were both complete wastoids. After a makeshift massage (where Bill kneaded Lauren’s body like it was poisonous dough), they went to a restaurant and immediately began throwing back shots. Bill had a disgusting chin strap beard, and let Lauren shave it off at the table if she promised him a kiss. After they slobbered on one another, Bill screamed, “boo-ya” and “YOU LOVE IT” in his date’s face. Lauren was tipsy, but Bill was bum wasted and she dodged his goodnight kiss like it was a diaper full of baby shit. Even though he had been burned, Bill still screamed, “YOU LOVE IT” in Lauren’s face a few times before stumbling off onto her lawn.
Another one of the best (worst) episodes of Blind Date was with Beth and Mark. Beth was a makeup artist who liked to brag about how much she could drink. Mark was a lizard-loving hyper-nerd who said the last two girls he dated treated him “like a God.” Mark showed up in a wild striped shirt and wore his leather driving gloves the entire date, while mumbling about his OCD and how he was once abducted by martians. Beth wanted a guy with “pizzazz,” but soon found herself in the restaurant bathroom yell-whispering into her Nokia that she had been set up with a geek. The hug goodbye at her front door was so, so painful.
Recently, I asked what some of your worst dates were, and they turned out to be even shittier than what happened to Beth.
“I once had a guy nod off on our first date.”
“The first time I slept with a guy, I woke up the morning after to find him nudging me while he stuck my vibrator up his ass.”
“A guy once asked me to go get him Wendy’s while he jacked off.”
“I once had a dude ‘vlogging’ on our first date. He asked me, very loudly, if I liked sex.”
“The guy (wearing completely unexpected eyeliner) who talked about his mom for the first 10 minutes, and when I mentioned I interviewed someone for a story I was working on, he asked, ‘Oh, did you fuck him?’ I left and took a cab home because he freaked me out so much.”
“I had a man tell me that his greatest fear was women falling in love with him. Then he told me that I have the same name as his mother.”
“I once had a girl leave our date to go have sex with two other guys. She announced this before she left.”
"I once had a guy start off by telling me he was a virgin, and then proceed to spend the entire rest of the date telling me about all the times he almost had sex."
“I once had a girl start talking about her ex-boyfriend after a few drinks. She would not shut up about him. Then, she got really wasted and called him in front of me., over and over again like a complete psycho. When she started slurring her words, I put her in a cab and told her to go home. Thankfully, I never heard from her again. I assume she died of embarrassment.”
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