If You Play Your Cards Right, The Fiddler Will Get Someone To Fiddle With Your Zipper
It seems as though there's this new disease out there called the "group date". And I have it. Tomorrow.You see, a friend of mine is trying to set up Humpy with her boyfriend's friend. This is all fine and well, because Humpy is hot stuff, and I am all for my friends being happy, dating hot guys, and getting laid every night. However, my friend who is setting her up - we'll just call her the "Fiddler on the Roof" - insists that the most natural way to see if there's any chemistry there is in the context of a group setting. We'll all hang out, have a few drinks, and if they like one another, they can hang out all night and ignore us. If not, there's no pressure and they'll be within the context of a group of friends who are just hanging out and having a good time. You know, just the six of us. Like an orgy. Except no one's getting laid yet.
Bummer.
Maybe it's an age thing, or maybe it's just an Atlanta thing, but in the past few months, I've been invited on a hell of a lot of "group dates". Which sounds nice and exciting, but the sensation is actually more similar to a trip to the female doctor's office (if you're the "datee"), getting a Brazilian bikini wax (if you're the "Fiddler"), or having your wisdom teeth pulled without anesthesia (if you're the "support").
Apparently, tomorrow I will be having my wisdom teeth pulled without anesthesia, in the presence of the Fiddler, her boyfriend, Humpy, Humpy's potential boyfriend, and Matt.
When I asked the Fiddler who my date would be, she said, "Oh, hmmm. Well...your date can be Matt. You guys are really just there for the support." Great, thanks. All I can say is, Matt's one lucky little f*cker.
So now that the group has been selected, we have to have an activity planned. Our clever little Fiddler just got this fun little board game, Dirty Minds. Initially I jumped on board because the words "date" and "dirty" were mentioned, but I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. It's supposedly a word game where you're given clues about certain words, and the person who guesses the least dirty word gets the most amount of points per round, and eventually wins. (i.e. CLUE: "the word ends with a "-unt" and every woman has one" ANSWER: "aunt" The jackass that guesses the c-word loses. I will, most likely, be the jackass tomorrow night...every time.)
When it comes to board games, I'm pretty competitive. When it comes to vulgarity, I am usually the first person to pull out a "Bloody Mary". Matt is almost always very quick to follow with something equally disgusting. So to involve me in a game that asks me not to be dirty, with a "date" who has a tendency to bring out the most disgusting in me...well, that's just a recipe for disaster as far as I'm concerned. The good news to this is that if alcohol is involved, as I imagine it will be, at least I'll head home nice and belligerently drunk.
All of that having been said, this whole scenario got me thinking: are group dates really better? Do they really take the edge off of the whole "shit-you-and-me-have-to-be-alone-for-at-least-two-hours-now?" anxiety? Does getting wasted and deciding whether you're drunk enough to bail or suck it up not work anymore?
The whole thing reeks of old Jewish Yenta grandmothers matchmaking, and I can hear a faint, "Find me a find, catch me a catch..." in the background. The very thought of this makes me itch. Then again, our Fiddler does have a point - it is less intimidating to be with a group of people than to sit across from some loser at a dinner table somewhere wondering what the odds are of a lightning bolt striking you and putting you out of your misery.
I say the jury's still out on this one. What do you think: better to date Fiddler-on-the-Roof style?
posted by KA @ 10:42 PM
2 Comments:
If your friends are cool, they should be friends with other cool people. Thus, if you are the one getting set up, your date should be cool as well. This would erase the need to date "fiddler on the roof" style. If the logic breaks down at any of those points, however, then a group date is probably your best bet. I guess the real question should be, how cool are you, and how cool are your friends?
Good points being made here.
Hilla, I like your style. Your ideas are theoretically sound, but the operative word here is "theoretically". Cool begets cool, which begets good times, right? But not necessarily. We're not taking into account that while I think all of my friends are cool (including you), that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll like one another. And while most often, Fiddlers try to use good judgment, the sad fact is that sometimes it just plain sucks.
Another point I neglected to mention earlier is that I think a group date adds more pressure in some ways, because you have 2-4 other people pulling checks and balances on your ass from the minute that sucker starts to the minute it ends. And knowing that all eyes are on you can really skew how it goes.
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