‘His teeth flew out of his mouth and landed in my spaghetti’: 10 first date horror stories

A first date is unpredictable by nature. Often, you’re meeting up with someone you barely know, or have never met. Will the conversation sparkle or will it fall flat? Will they look like their picture? And what’s their name again?

It can be fun meeting someone new, no matter what the outcome. Yet it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up. Many have experienced that sinking feeling when reality falls dramatically short of expectations.

Here, ten readers share the excruciating details of a disastrous first date.

A bird flew into the wall and landed dead in front of us

Geoff, Georgia

Geoff’s first date with one girl bombed after a freak avian intervention.

“We had a fantastic evening and hit it off extremely well,” he says. “We were enjoying a very nice extended goodnight kiss when a bird flew into the wall above and landed, dead, right in our faces.”

“She decided that no matter how well our date went, it was a bad omen. She never returned any of my calls for a second date. Alas.”

His teeth flew out of his mouth and landed in my spaghetti

Cristine, 68, Arizona, artist

Cristine had just moved to San Diego after her divorce when a co-worker asked her out to lunch in the 1990s.

“I wasn’t interested in dating,” says Cristine. “However, I agreed because he was my superior and because I was hungry.

“He leaned forward, said something enthusiastically, and his partial denture flew out of his mouth across the table, landing perfectly in my spaghetti.

“He reached across and with his fingers retrieved his teeth, putting them back into his mouth without a hint of embarrassment or apology and continued talking.

I never agreed to another lunch date with him, and thankfully, he was transferred within weeks of the oh so horrifying yet hysterical incident.”

A truck ran over both my legs and my midsection

David, 59, California, general contractor

A gentle bike ride should have been the perfect date, but it ended up putting a 25-year-old David in the hospital.

“It was a beautiful day and the views of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean couldn’t be matched,” he says. “We were going to grab lunch via a ride under the bridge towards east Fort Baker.”

As they descended the hill, David saw a truck driving on the wrong side of the road straight towards him.

“Horrified, I tried to ride off the road,” he says. “It all happened so fast and the truck ran over my legs and midsection with both sets of tyres. Needless to say the date ended abruptly.”

David sustained broken bones and other injuries, and had to endure four operations and a two-month stay in hospital.

His date was “very kind” and visited him in the hospital.

“We never saw each other after that,” he adds. “Luckily, things turned out well for me, and I am still physically active due to modern medicine!”

He suggested a hike even though I was on crutches

Allison, 44, Georgia, PhD researcher (statistician)

Allison had been chatting with and messaging a man for a few weeks and decided to go on a date with him. However, she stressed that she was on crutches after surgery and would not be able to do anything too active.

When he picked her up, he suggested a “fun” surprise, which turned out to be a “short hike” to a monument.

“After about 1 km, my crutch slipped, I tumbled – my leg was in a full brace, so it couldn’t bend, and I landed hard on my other side,” says Allison. “My wrist was throbbing and I had tears in my eyes.

“He said to me, ‘I thought your profile claimed you were athletic!’ and told me I should return to the car, while he finished the walk and took a photo of the monument, so the day wasn’t wasted.

Allison adds: “Thirty minutes after he dropped me off, he texted a selfie at the monument and said he thought I might want to see what I missed out on. My friend said, dryly, ‘a bullet’.”

She freaked out at my haphazard driving

John, 72, Atwater, California, retired

A simple trip to a restaurant went terribly wrong when John, unfamiliar with the city traffic in Wichita, made a potentially treacherous traffic turn.

“I went the wrong way on a one-way ramp,” says John, who was about 19 at the time. “It had been pretty awkward anyway, but that was the thing that finally tipped the balance. My date freaked out and said to take her home.”

“I came from a place that had only 200 people living there so I didn’t have that much experience with that sort of traffic and I’m also a haphazard driver.”

He arrived wearing boxer shorts

Jennifer, 53, Maine, magazine editor

It had been a very hot day and the AC was broken at the Frederick, Maryland cafe where Jennifer had agreed to meet her date in 2013.

“This guy walks in - T-shirt and white boxers, the kind with the flap!” she recalls. “There was some backstory about a bike or motorcycle, and he was a drummer for a band. I never figured out if he had chaps for riding and left them on the bike with his helmet.”

He asked a witch to predict if I liked him

Louisa, 25, California

During her date back in February, Louisa’s date asked if she was having a good time. “I said that while I was having an okay time, I didn’t really feel a romantic connection.

“He said he understood and then there was silence for a bit,” she says. Then he said he hadn’t been sure if she liked him, so he hired an Etsy witch to divine the truth.

“The Etsy witch told him I did not (something about negative energy surrounding me when I thought of him) and tried to sell him a spell to make me like him, which thankfully he didn’t buy.”

He berated me about my profile

Aliyaa, 68, Michigan, retired

Fifteen years ago, Aliyaa matched up with someone on a matrimonial website and agreed to meet for coffee. Her tongue-in-cheek dating profile tagline – “brilliant, drop-dead gorgeous, and filthy rich” – would come back to haunt her.

“I saw a man older than me in a muscle shirt leaning up against his sporty ride, like some young heartbreaker,” she says. “I think I was hoping that he wasn’t my date.”

But he walked up to her and introduced himself.

“We went into the café, and I endured 15 minutes of him showing me photos of his ostentatious house and bragging about his wealth, intelligence, athletic prowess, and so on,” says Aliyaa. “He concluded by berating me about my profile, telling me that I had far too high an opinion of myself, and I was terribly average.

“I abruptly stood up and stuck my hand out like a CEO and said, ‘Well, it has been a pleasure meeting with you. The coffee is already paid for – after all, I am filthy rich’.

“He looked confused, then broke out into a fake laugh and started to protest that he had misunderstood my profile, but I was already out the door.”

I brought wine to a dinner party full of recovering alcoholics

Rick, 68, Illinois, retired

Rick had been set up with a man by a friend who said they “had a lot in common”.

They planned a brunch date for New Year’s Day, but on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, he invited Rick to a dinner party he was holding. Rick decided to bring a bottle of wine.

“When I arrived, I learned that the man and his friends were all recovering alcoholics, so we put the bottle aside,” says Rick, who was in his mid-30s at the time. “Conversation before, during and after dinner was only about their experiences and progress with Alcoholics Anonymous – nothing else. I could add nothing to the conversation except to smile and nod and make encouraging noises.”

He decided he would tell the man on their date the next day that it wouldn’t work out. But at brunch, his date had brought a friend.

“He told the friend how well we got along and all the things we were going to do,” says Rick. “It seemed cruel to embarrass him by contradicting him in front of a friend, so I mostly stayed quiet.”

People sitting next to us at the bar started to put some space between us and them

Kimberly, 61, Arizona, marketing

“When he offered to pick me up and take me to his favourite bar in Chicago, his stock went up a bit,” says Kimberly, 61, from Arizona. “After he downed two drinks to my one in 30 minutes, I raised an eyebrow. But when he finished four drinks to my one-and-a-half, his stock took a major dive.”

Kimberly said she was already planning ways to “exit gracefully” when her date rudely snapped his fingers at the bartender to call him over.

“I over-tipped the bartender as my date started to complain about various ethnic groups,” she adds. “As I calmly rebutted his claims with a fact or two, my escape plan - going to the restroom to call my best friend to unexpectedly ‘stop by’ - started to become more real.”

“By then, people sitting next to us at the bar started to put some space between us and them, and I began to feel like I was playing a part in a movie.”

It was raining heavily and there were few cabs, but Kimberly grabbed her coat, “walked out and flagged down a cab after a few blocks of cleansing rain”.