Crap Dates

Most people have had dates that didn’t go quite as they hoped, but sometimes things are so crappy that the date becomes a story—perhaps even a tale of caution—that needs to be told. London-based writer/musician Rhodri Marsden withstood his share of crap dates, and he turned to Twitter to vent. He received thousands of responses, and a conversation began as people started sharing their own experiences @FirstDateHell. Marsden plucked the best examples of the worst encounters from his Twitter feed and put them in a book: Crap Dates: Disastrous Encounters From Single Life. Broken up into general categories like the Sexual Deviant, the Arrogant Scumbag, the Mama’s Boy and the Tactless Idiot, Crap Dates is full of bite-sized summaries of bad dates that were at turns humorous, sketchy and ridiculous, sometimes all at the same time: “He called 10 minutes before the date to ask if I was running late. He picked a fight with a stranger for looking at him and said aliens are in the Bible.” Crap Dates won’t win any literary awards, but it’s a fun read, and, at the very least, it might offer hope by showing us that our bad dates could’ve been much worse.