My Dating Horror Stories to make you feel better about yours.

If you want to feel better about your dating life, pop along to a Story+Party event if it comes to your city. It's a roaming one and a half hours bonding session of hearing and sharing your worst dating stories.

It went along with my single partner in crime, Eva, to their Kings Cross event in September.

The event was billed "come alone and leave with someone" to entice unsuspecting single females who ended up sitting and laughing by themselves....There were only two men at the Sydney 9:30pm show we attended and one of them was on a Tinder date. 😏

Although not a real hooking-up grounds for the single attendees, the show was a worthwhile and hilarious distraction from the anguish of our modern day dating woes.

There were raucous dating stories involving "pegging" (a new sex term for my innocent ears), Hitler, incest, shoplifting, a 7 news reporter and an unsettling anecdote involving a finger being cut off...Thank you bogans of rural Australia for that disturbing doozie.

I reveal the stories there .... It's kinda like you had to be there.

At the end of the show, you were invited on stage to share your own nights of hope gone terribly wrong. In the moment, I thought that my dates gone wrong paled in comparison one of the comedian's recounts about having sex with a Nazi. So I didn't bound up to the stage. Eva did though and she told a hilarious story about a guy who shoplifted on their first (and last) date, even asking her to put a bottle of perfume in her purse.

The laughter and stuck-in-my-head-mental-images from last night prompted the revival of some of my own disastrous dating memories, which I will share.

One was a Tinder date - as most of the stories usually are. I was genuinely excited about this guy - our texting was going well and I gushed a little when he finally asked me out to dinner. At the restaurant, the conversation could not have been better... common interests, funny stories ... I was just at the point where I was thinking how my first name would sound with his last. (Girls you know you do this, don't front!!)

Then this guy casually mentions, "By the way, I'm married."

I was like, "What?!.... You mean married to your work?"

"No ...I'm actually married," he blushed.

"Yeah and this is actually a date and we met on a dating app!"

Then he runs off on a rant of justifying himself.

"My wife and I are going through some tough times and I needed a break...."

Blah, blah, blah .... The shock made me hearing-impaired for a minute.

Now, I know you would like to think that I got all indignant - slapped him across the face and marched my little black booty out off there.

But I figured this meant he was definitely paying for dinner. So I ordered another glass of wine and dessert and listened to him moan about his wife another hour or so.

Yeah - I'm looking forward to the days when I can just walk on by the offer of a free meal ... One day!!

That's my number two worst date ever. Number one was sans a Tinder introduction. I had met this guy on the dance-floor at a Dancehall event.

We had been dating a few weeks and I thought it was going really well .... possibly even approaching 'relationship' status. So I was excited when he invited me to go to a street music festival with his friends. (Hmmm an introduction to his clique --- that's a good sign, right?)

His 'friends' turned out to be a young and in love couple who could not bear to be separated for even a second. My date, on the other hand, seemed to have developed a allergic reaction to me overnight. While his friends strolled lovingly in each other's embrace, he strode a few paces ahead of me. Any attempts to hold his hand would end in a quick awkward release ... You think I would get the hint that this guy was just not that into me, right?!

But behold the mind fuck ladies and gentlemen...He had invited me out!

We get to a spot where we can watch the show and homebody continues to

A) ignore me and B) make friends with everyone around us within a 100m radius. All while his friends are practically conceiving their future child before my eyes.

(Yes, now I remember why I stashed this one back into the dark crevices of my memory.)

Then it got worse. A girl took a liking to my guy and he pretty much spent most of the night talking to her. I tolerated it until the moment she puckered her lips and he reached forward to kiss her.

In a split second, I became a ninja and I grabbed her by throat with a vice grip and shoved her.

It was at that moment that my date remembered that I existed.

It only takes attempted murder these days to bring a man back to his senses.

He did apologise to me later that evening, saying that he was just going to let her kiss him and 'get it over with it'. I was such a desperate little sook that I forgave him.

Again sorry to disappoint you about the lack of indignation... I'm better now, I swear!

Not surprisingly, our dating didn't last much longer... He ghosted me the next week.

There's a commonality in the dating horror stories we share ... Sometimes we, as women, are really caught off guard and a man pulls a Jykll and Hyde on us.

But many times, we observe actions and attitudes that display a disregard for us and we push it under the rug and hope for the best. We do it because we're getting something out of it in exchange (sex, companionship) or becuase our sense of own self-worth is down in the dumps. Most likely it's a combination of the two.

As we roam the dating terrain running into our share of trolls and minefields, there are two things that give us comfort as we press on

1) We'll grow out of dating these weirdos and

2) We'll have awesome stories for a dating comedy show one day.

#storyparty #storyandparty #storyparty #dating #badfirstdates #horriblefirstdates #datinghorrorstories #theworstfirstdate #baddate