Goin’ to the Chapel and I’m – Gonna Find a Date?

Name: Church
What it is: Where you go to worship God. And eat doughnuts.
Cost: As much (or as little) as you want to put in the collection plate.
Random Fact: The odds can be tough -- single women are much more numerous than the single men, since a lot of men don’t start going to church until they get married and their wives drag them along.
The scoop: Doesn’t church sound like a promising place to meet someone? Everyone’s singing and listening and in a good mood, and there’s free coffee afterward. There’s also that stereotype that people who go to church are somehow more moral than those who don’t. Unfortunately, that’s just not true – that BTK serial killer in Kansas was a pillar of his church, for example. But the non-sociopath guys who do go to church are at least nominally interested in something besides themselves. That’s a nice quality.

My dates: Much like my experience dating guys from the subway (see my Feb. 7th post), although there were a few guys here and there I liked at St. Bart’s Church (http://www.stbarts.org/), nothing ever ended up lasting.

I met The Workaholic at a course I was taking on the Episcopal church, and on St. Bart’s in particular. The class met for dinner at the church once a week for a talk and discussion. The Workaholic and I sat at the same table two weeks in a row. He was friendly and interesting, and he had long brown hair that reached his shoulders. I can’t remember what he did for a living, but he mentioned he was working a lot of overtime at one job and was also working a second – in retrospect, not a good sign. But I thought he liked me. He even walked me to the subway after the second class, and seemed to be stalling before he finally said goodnight. I decided that the following week, I would invite him to my birthday party. Of course, the following week he didn’t show up. I thought, what do I have to lose, and asked the priest if he could call The Workaholic, tell him I’d like to invite him to an event, and give him my number. The priest did. The Workaholic never called – and never showed up at the class, or church, again! Think I scared him off? :O

I met another guy I liked at a brunch for the 20s/30s group at church. We’ll call him Tropical Dreams. He was really nice, had a good sense of humor, and a PhD (!) in something or other. He was also interested in writing, and we started talking about starting a writer’s group at the church. Soon we were e-mailing a few times a week, and in one of his e-mails he asked if I wanted to have breakfast before church the following week. Despite my poor track record with morning dates, I was excited and said yes. But when I met him at 10 AM on Sunday, Tropical Dreams said, “There’s a really interesting Rector’s Forum talk starting right now – do you want to go to that instead?” I sighed, said okay, and grabbed a donut leftover from the 9 AM service before heading into the chapel.

But all hope was not lost. We had talked about this thing called the Moth StorySlam (http://www.themoth.org/storyslams) where people tell stories and teams of audience-member judges vote on the best one. In Tropical Dreams’ next e-mail, he asked if I’d like to go to a story slam that week. I said yes, of course. But I don’t think it counts as a date, because I went to the place where it was being held, and so did he – but we never found each other! It was packed, standing room only, and neither of us had cell phones (not so unusual five years ago). I wedged myself in a corner toward the back, and apparently he was upstairs on a balcony -- so not only did we not sit next to each other, I had no idea he was even there. (And the stories that night weren’t even that great.)

We e-mailed for another week, and in Tropical Dreams’ last e-mail to me he suddenly, out of nowhere, brought up the notion of moving to HAWAII (!). He said he’d been looking into jobs there (news to me), and did I know anything about it? I promptly wrote back and told him all the bad things I had ever heard about Hawaii (“It’s so expensive! You’ll get island fever! You have to fly to go anywhere else! Outsiders have a hard time breaking into the culture! It rains every day!”).

I never saw or heard from him again.