By the time my date with Adam* rolled around, I was feeling pretty jaded. I’d just had a string of bad dates — five in as many weeks, to be exact — and my mindset was one of, well, hopelessness. Not a good start.
Like with all the dates before him, I met Adam on Breeze. I say ‘met’ — Breeze is a dating app that doesn’t let you talk to people before you meet them. Instead, if there’s a match, you each share the dates you’re free and Breeze arranges your meet-up for you. There is a chat function that opens four hours before the date, so you can chat about travel logistics, and closes four hours afterwards, so you can — in my case, anyway — explain why you went to the bathroom one drink in and never came back.
Before we met, all I knew about Adam was what I’d seen and read on his profile. He was good looking, he worked in a similar field to me, and we had a lot of shared ‘preferences’: he drank alcohol, didn’t smoke, and was open to anything relationship-wise. His prompts had classic boy responses: currently re-watching The Sopranos, wants to travel to South America, spends his free time running. It’s fucking vague, but in 2025, that’s pretty much par for the course.
So, I’m essentially going in blind. Well, blind and, as mentioned, bummed out. Poor, doomed Adam didn’t meet me at a great time. I’d spent the last five weeks going on dates with people I had no connection with, and I was feeling really tired by the whole process. I presumed this date would be the same, so I didn’t care at all going into it. And when I arrived, my premonition came true.
First of all, I didn’t fancy Adam at all; his pictures were just good pictures. He was also really nervous, which is understandable and fine! But he couldn’t make eye contact with me, and was so awkward to the point that we couldn’t really have a conversation. In other circumstances, I might have been more forgiving, but the prospect of another wasted evening immediately hit me — and hard. I didn’t want to be there, and I knew instantly that this was going to be an escape situation.
Obviously, though, it was too late to turn on my heels and yeet myself out the door, so we got a drink. We managed a stilted conversation about our days, what we did for work, how many siblings we have, etc, but all I could think was: ‘This isn’t going to work for me’. Having already been dreading the date, not being able to have a flowing conversation was the nail in the coffin. I just felt totally sick of doing this, and it was so awkward that I couldn’t handle it.
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Now, normally in a situation like this, I can be quite upfront. I’ve been on dates before where I’ve only stayed for one drink and then told the person that I have to go and meet my friends. But for some reason, I couldn’t do it this time. I don’t know if it was because he was so awkward or if I felt awkward explaining that I’m not in a good headspace, but at that moment, I knew the only way out for me was to not say a thing.
So, I decided I would simply… leave. In one of many lulls in the conversation, I told him I was going to the toilet. It was summer, meaning I didn’t have a jacket, so I just picked up my bag and walked straight out the pub door. I didn’t even need to actually go into the toilets because you couldn’t see them or the exit from our table. Once I was free, I jumped on my bike and cycled to meet my friends at the pub.
When I’d travelled a far enough distance, I called the pub and said, “I’d just left a date and I’m not going to come back, so can you let him know?”, and I described what he looked like. She sounded pretty shocked — I think because my tone was quite nervous and emotional, so she probably thought there’d been an emergency. I guess it was an emotional emergency. Anyway, then I messaged him on Breeze and told him I’d freaked out and left, and said I didn’t think I was ready to be dating right now. I don’t know why I didn’t fake an emergency, but he was really sympathetic. He was so nice about it, which he really didn’t need to be.
I felt terrible. It felt like I’d committed a crime. But it was a wake-up call for me in relation to my dating life. It was such an extreme reaction to hate a date so much that I felt like I had to escape it like some kind of con artist. I was really ashamed. I’ve still only told a few select friends that it happened. One friend I did tell was like, ‘You can’t do that to people’, which wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the time, but it’s true. I had really bad anxiety over it, but I took it as a sign that I needed to have a little break from dating.
The dating scene right now is so terrible; conversations go nowhere, I’m not vibing with any of the people I meet. Looking for love feels very shit, and I don’t know what the solution is. But I wouldn’t walk out on a date like that again. If that happened to me, I’d feel humiliated. Even though I’m in pain, I shouldn’t inflict pain on other people.
I suppose an upside is that it makes quite a bizarre story — not only for me, but for him, too. Next time, though, I guess it would be better to just cancel.
*Name has been changed
