Everyone has a bad dating story or two (unless you’re one of the lucky ones). Harper Anderson from Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies by Laura Stampler, is one of the lucky ones. She doesn’t have any dating drama to write about. Instead, she uses her best friend’s dating stories in her application essay for the chance to intern at a popular teen magazine. That essay impresses the magazine so much that they hire Harper to write about her dating life (yeah…that nonexistent one)! Once Harper gets to New York for her internship, she sets out to create dating stories of her own since she’s pretty much used up all her best friend’s. Here at Riveted we have quiet a few bad dating stories, so we thought we would help Harper out by sharing them!

Check out our stories and then read an extended excerpt of Little Back Dresses, Little White Lies (available until August 14th) to read about Harper’s experiences dating in New York City!

I was at a Halloween party with some friends and got a text message from a boy I had been texting a bit. He invited me over to his house for a party and a few of my friends decided to join me, but we didn’t have a car. One girl said she had a friend who was picking her up so they could go elsewhere, so they could drop us on the way. On the way to his house, we all talked about the boy, but I never thought to mention him by name. It was fun until we got close and started giving the girl directions. We slowly pulled up to the house and she says, “Um, this is my ex-boyfriend’s house.” Needless to say, I felt uncomfortable the rest of the night and more than that, guilty I had made this girl drive me to her ex-boyfriend’s house. He ended up being a jerk anyway.

I once went on a blind date with a guy who literally thought he was Weird Al Yankovitch (my LEAST favorite artist of all time) and would just randomly start singing at me, as if to impress me. Longest date of my life.

One time, I decided to go to a speed dating event with a friend.  Basically, we sat at tables and every eight minutes, a different guy would come sit at our table so we could chat.  I had some nice, normal conversations, but then a guy sat down and asked what I did for a living.  When I told him I edit children’s books, he scoffed and said, “Do children’s books need editors?  It’s not like it’s hard to write a children’s book.”  I was so shocked and offended that I almost started laughing.  Was this guy for real?  Then later, he asked where I lived in the city and when I told him, he said, “Oh, my ex-wife used to live there.  Isn’t that neighborhood infested with rats?”  Mercifully, our seemingly endless eight minutes together were up shortly after that.

A guy I was seeing in college vomited all over me once (I’m talking all over, including face and hair).

I met my first boyfriend in high school during Volleyball practice. Our coach was always yelling out our names,  so when I started talking to Matt we didn’t introduce ourselves. After our first few dates and becoming “official” Matt finally told me that his name is actually Mike. The coach had been saying it wrong for over a year and Mike/Matt stopped correcting him. I had been dating this guy for weeks and didn’t even know his name! (We broke up a week later).

Feel free to share some of your own dating horror stories in the comments!