A friend of mine recently started dating a girl who’s a little…um…weird.  Maybe that’s unfair.  I’ve only met her a couple of times, and I’m sure what’s weird in her is partly due to her age, which is not very high, and partly due to the company she keeps, which are rockabilly hipsters.

(If you’ve been reading this for any length of time you know that I have a problem with hipsters in general, but you should also know that I dislike the rockabilly hipsters most of all.  Because, people, it is not hard to be a hipster.  Shit, you’ll spend more money on a Pitchfork subscription than you will on clothes that barely fit and look like they were barfed up by a hobo’s dog.  Being a hipster is as easy as being really, really lazy, and failing at being really, really lazy is like failing at suicide.  Sorry, but you’re just not trying at all.  Rockabilly hipsters not only fail at being lazy, they also fail at being cool without costume.  Hey, uh, sorry those 1989-era Book It! t-shirts you found at Value Village aren’t good enough, Mr. Fonzarelli, but maybe you can appropriate the music, hair, clothes, slang, and every goddamn other thing from another era instead.)

I first thought she was weird when my friend told me about the beginning of their relationship.  It happened on the second date.  He introduced her as “my friend, {Insert Name Here},” and she threw a fit because they were not friends, they were dating.

My friend did not run away like his hair was on fire because he’s a lot nicer than I am.  If it were me, I wouldn’t have had to run away because I wouldn’t have introduced the other person as anything at all.

“Hey, nice to see you again.  This is {Insert Name Here}.”

Let the other person figure it out.  If they want to date you, they’ll say so (or obsess over it for the next few weeks, which almost always leads to really great sex).  If not, they’ll stay quiet.  If they have an outburst, you should stop sleeping with them/accompanying them to public places/speaking to them altogether/no don’t even text them.  My previous plan of action was that if we hadn’t had the dating conversation, we weren’t dating, and there was no way I was going to broach the topic first.

I once dated a guy who tried to have the conversation on our second date.  When we were drunk.  At a bar.  And he tried feeling me up in front of the bartender.

Another guy had the conversation with me in the same paragraph as his stipulation that if a threesome would present itself during our dating tenure, he should be granted permission to participate.  Only it was less like permission and more like “I am gonna fuck the fuck outta those girls.”

Another guy had the conversation with me the same night he told me he loved me.  When he thought I was sleeping.  And I pretended like I was because aside from “thank you” – which I’d said once before and didn’t receive an awesome response – I had no idea what to say to that.

Another guy tried to have the conversation immediately after balking at my suggestion that he pay for half of my emergency purchase of Plan B.

By the time I started dating Graham, I’d kind of lost interest in the conversation altogether.  I didn’t think about when he might bring it up because it didn’t concern me whether he did or not.  I was fine with not sleeping with anyone else and I gathered from his behavior that he wasn’t sleeping around, either, so what was the point?  I’m terrible at fixing things if I don’t have WD-40 or duct tape, and this thing wasn’t even broken.

He brought it up on a Sunday morning (possibly afternoon, we both worked late back then) when we were lying in bed.  We’d probably just finished having sex when he said that he didn’t want anyone else going down on me.

“Uh, okay,” I said.

“I mean, it’s okay if you want to go down on someone else,” he began, as if my insatiable appetite for dick had to be accounted for in this situation.  “But I don’t want any guy going down on you.”

Which he quickly amended just a few minutes later with “I don’t know what I was thinking.  I don’t want you going down on anyone else, either.”

He then added kissing and fucking other people to the “do not do” list, which as I said was pretty much fine with me.  This was almost three and a half years ago.  I’m thankful for this because I’ve lost patience as I’ve gotten older, and there’s no way I could have endured many more of those conversations.  I still have to have bizarre conversations involving oral sex, of course, but I’m used to those by now.

Anyway.  This girl seems nice enough and maybe she’ll get less weird.  And by that I mean maybe she’ll stop being such a close talker, because that freaks me out.