Killah in Germany

Life’s about learning lessons, and dating in Berlin has taught me a fair number of them. Many of these lessons are valuable, though there are a few I wish I could unlearn but can’t, the mental equivalent of an image so achingly awful that it has been scorched into your retinas for all eternity. These dating experiences, both good and bad, help shape our future behavior so that we can avoid repeating the bad ones: I will never again commit to watching a 3-hour  movie with a guy with greasy hair and noxious body odor who can’t hold a conversation unless it revolves around 3D film techniques, or sharing a pizza with a man who seems to only know how to talk when he’s currently chewing, whose flighty eyes can’t rest on anything for more than a few seconds without him starting to twitch. And ideally, fewer bad dates means more good dates, like going to a hipster bar on open mic night during which your date pulls out a bag of marshmallows and a wooden skewer, and you roast marshmallows together over a candle and laugh while collecting disdainful glances from nearby bar-goers like tiny victory trophies.

You can learn a lot about dating from HIMYM.

 
My hope is that in reading these stories, you will laugh and maybe wince at my mishaps, use my folly as your power, and try not think me too much of a basket case.

And use the truth to set you FREE!

 
Most of my comical dating anecdotes have their roots in a hilarious circus of doom known as OkCupid. For those of you who have the good fortune not to know, OkC is an online dating platform that has many, many disadvantages, the main one being that it happens to operate on the freemium model, meaning that anyone can sign up without having to pay a dime. The inevitable result is a gnarly cesspool of dating profiles, some belonging to some very, very lonely people, all managed with overall quality control that is sub-par at best. But the one major advantage is that everyone on there is available, or at least purports themselves to be. (This is the Internet, after all; even in the age of virtual self-projection via Facebook and Twitter, people still use it to lie about themselves.)

Then again, people are perfectly capable of lying without the help of the Internet.

Plus, OkC employs an interface which is rather user-friendly. I signed up for the site in Seattle a few months before moving to Berlin, but quickly realized that most of  the users in Seattle were flat-out crazy, and the ones that sent me messages tended to be the weirdest cream of the weird-guy crop. And the dudes that didn’t appear to be Bonkers McGee-insane had zero imagination with language proficiency levels to match, the result being that my inbox was filled with near-identical messages surrounding the central compelling theme of “hey baby, how u doin, u kno u wanna get wit me?”.

Is it me you're looking for?

So I let my OkC profile lie dormant for a while. But once I landed in Berlin in the spring of 2011 and launched headfirst into 4 months of unemployment, I realized that my newly-minted singleton membership card combined with my lack of acquaintances in the city meant that I had to get out there. As a result, I spruced up my profile on OkC and started going on some dates.

Now, before you judge me, know this: every unwed/unattached expat in Berlin has, at some point or another, dabbled in the strange, wondrous world that is OkCupid. If they say they haven’t, they are lying to you. At first, I was embarrassed to out myself to others as an online dater; so much, in fact, that when I made my first real friend from the site, I insisted we tell people that he and I met through CouchSurfing – a plausible excuse, since we were both active on CS as well and I was attending a fair number of CS meet-ups at the time. But, you see, the cover-up turns out to be 100% unnecessary, because everyone else here is on OkCupid, too. And we’ve had similar experiences. We’ve browsed the same profiles, gotten messaged by the same jerks and weirdo fetishists, tried out the same tricks, felt the same defeat after going on a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice person, knowing that there was absolutely no chemistry and that those 3 hours of pleasant get-to-know-ya chatter are 3 hours of your life you will never get back. After talking to other single expats on this topic, we’ve all reached the same conclusion: no good can come from OkCupid.

Well, except for the stories. Those can be really good.

Behold as  I prepare to exploit this fact.

Lesson 1: Get out while the gettin’s good.

Fine, so everyone in OkC is single and ready to mingle. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to mingle with them. Meeting in person, in my opinion, is really the only way to tell if you click, even if you’ve done all the legwork: perused their photos, read their profile to the bitter end, scanned their match questions for red flags.

You answered "yes" to this? Really? GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK.

 
So I tend to cut to the chase, springing straight for the date without wasting too much time messaging back and forth. Usually I suggest something low-key, like meeting up for a beer. The problem is, once I’ve committed to a beer, it is almost unthinkable for me to walk away from said beer before I have finished drinking every last drop. (Unless the beer isn’t good, but in my experience, German beer is rarely ever not good.) Unfortunately, the time it takes to figure out if you have chemistry with someone or not is a lot less than the time it takes to drink a pint of beer. Maybe I have commitment issues – OK, I almost definitely have commitment issues - but I’ve devised a number of ways to be able to back out of a date once it’s started:

They’ll never find me here.

Most of the time I am too nice to actually do any of this, unless I have already consumed more than one beer. (Except for #3 – I have to be back in the office no matter how much beer consumption has taken place.) But once in a while, you are jolted into action by forces beyond your control. This happened one evening when a guy from OkC invited me to come play pool with him and his co-workers. I was already out and about and happened to be nearby when I got his text message. Though I’d already written him off on our first date – he was a fresh implant from New England and had this whole "I usually try not to hang out with other Americans" arrogance thing that is common with new expats – I decided I didn’t want to go home yet and could do with a game or two of pool.

Why would I move to Europe just to hang out with other Americans?” OK, whatever, GUY.

I walked into the bar and was greeted with a big sweaty hug from the American dude (whom I will henceforth refer to as “L”) and dainty cheek kisses from his German co-workers, who by some happy circumstance were both super smoking hot. OK, so they were rather young, but hey, so was the night. I ordered a large beer and grabbed a pool cue – at this point, I didn’t see any need to follow any of my standing rules of exit strategy.


Halfway into my second beer, I found myself perched on a barstool against the wall, chatting with one of the cute Germans and pretending to be interested in the game of pool that was unfolding before us. It appeared that L was winning with ease, which was impressive considering his rather swift rate of beer consumption. In fact, it was impressive that he could even stand without swaying, a feat that he seemed eager to show off. By standing in one place. Directly in front of me.

He was facing the pool table with his back turned to me. Since I was understandably distracted in the (literal) face of so much Germanic beauty, it makes sense that I didn’t realize what was happening until the German co-worker finally spoke up.

“Dude, I think you have the wrong knee.”

I looked down at the German’s left leg at the same time L did. One long moment passed as all three of us stared at L’s hand firmly placed on the German’s knee, the last remnants of a drunken massage ebbing out of his fingers, a flirtatious move of which I had obviously been the intended recipient.

The Subtle Massage: It Came from Outer Space! Coming soon to a theater near you.

Who knows how long the young chap had humored L’s amorous advances – L had been standing there for quite some time. Maybe this German was a fan of knee massages. In any case, the spell was broken. L suddenly found he needed to go use the men’s room immediately, and disappeared lickity-split. Realizing that the time for subtlety had passed, I looked at the German hottie, blurted out, “Well, this was fun!”, grabbed my jacket and was out of the bar before L could return from the toilet.

Follow-up texts asking where I went and if he could meet me for a post-drinking döner kebap went unanswered.

Lesson 2: PDA is OK.

There was a study done some time ago showing that during World War Two, the differences in culture between cross-cultural couples resulted in things escalating at a rather rapid pace. There's a progression that is more or less understood among the members of a particular culture to be the correct order of increasing intimacy. For example, if you have a crush on someone, you feel like the feeling might be mutual when they return your smile. At some point, they might hold your hand. And then maybe a kiss on the cheek, leading to other kinds of kisses. And so on and so forth.

Have we progressed to eye contact yet?

But in other cultures, the order might be different. Presume for a minute that a kiss on the cheek is less intimate than holding hands for Partner A, but it's the opposite for Partner B. Partner B reaches for Partner A's hand, which is Partner B's step 1 but for Partner A is actually step 2. If Partner A can handle skipping the first step, they move on to step 3, which for Partner B might really be step 4. Skipping steps causes the whole affair to accelerate much more quickly than if the couple were from the same culture.

And before you know it, this happens.

PDA - public displays of affection – are a normal part of European life. For a German, showing affection in public probably clocks in pretty early on the intimacy scale, i.e. if you can kiss your girlfriend in private, you can kiss her in public, too. For Americans, PDA registers much later on the scale, and for some American couples there is no place for PDA beyond hand-holding.

But love is supposed to transcend all bounds, right? Maybe, maybe not. There was this one guy I met right when I got to Berlin, who I will call N. We met when I played some street music in a bar where he was hanging out with his friends, he bought me a beer, and we ended up sitting and talking at the bar until the sun came up. We went to brunch the following week and again talked for hours without realizing that any time had passed. It was magical. On our way to a Greek restaurant one summer night, standing at the street corner waiting for the light to change, I spotted a young couple behind me. They were making out. Like, parked-at-the-lookout-in-the-backseat kind of make out. I’m no doctor, but I suspect he may have been trying to remove her tonsils.

 I nudged N and nodded in the direction of the couple. He turned his head, saw the lip-locked lovers, and looked back at me with a confused expression.

"So?" he asked.

"So?!?" I said incredulously. "What do you mean, 'so'? That couple's about to make a baby right in front of us!!"

"Yeah, and so?" N countered. "I think it's nice they can express themselves like that."

Maybe N thought I was being too negative. Or perhaps he didn't like the way I seemed to view human sexuality as something that should be kept apart from the public sphere. Either way, that evening ended up being our last date, which was really too bad because N was really cute and I never even got to kiss him.

Making a baby! Right in front of you!

Lesson 3: Nakedness is not always acceptable.

This is Europe. You'd think Europeans would be OK with a little nakedness, having long ago shooed the Puritans away to the new world and with them their sex-negative beliefs. But in this case, nudity apparently wasn't welcome.

My contact with the guy behind lesson number 3 did not originate in the dark recesses of OkCupid. It started on a dance floor in Kreuzberg, sometime in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, as I was dancing with all the passion and abandon that the Berlin nightlife can bring out in a person. He appeared seemingly out of nowhere; our eyes met; we drew together like magnets – an in-person attraction that OkCupid will never be able to replicate. I felt like Cinderella at the ball as my prince took my hand and began to twirl me around on the dance floor. True, my prince was noticeably drunk, which was slightly off-putting considering my state of stone-cold sobriety that evening. Plus, he was shorter than me. But none of that was enough to overcome my attraction to him, and later, when he kissed me, I only barely registered the taste of stale alcohol on his breath, or the fact that I had to turn my head slightly downwards to meet his lips.

Flash forward to a month later. My dance floor prince (who I will refer to as M) and I had been seeing each other on a regular basis, so I figured it was high time that I got to spend the night at his place. It was a perfectly lovely evening. We sipped Berliner Kindl as he showed me around the apartment that he shared with his older brother.

Kindl: I made it sound classier than it really is. It’s just beer.

The nice wooden furnishings in all the rooms made the place look suspiciously tasteful and grown-up, which M explained to me was only because his parents had bought the flat for themselves a few years ago but gave it to their sons when they decided to move back to their hometown in Poland near Warsaw. Seeing as it was a Tuesday night and we both had to be at work early in the morning, we turned in fairly early, thus precluding me from getting to meet his brother. We heard him come in sometime after M’s bedroom door was securely shut and naked time was a foregone conclusion (at this point, the nakedness was very much OK and desired by both parties).The plan was to wake up by 6:30am so we could both get showered and ready for the day.  However, this plan did not take into account my extreme laziness. Anyone who has spent 24 consecutive hours with me knows how hard it is to get me to wake up, especially before 7am, so of course I stayed in bed and snoozed while he showered.

Some mornings, I could really have someone throw a cold one of these on me. To wake me up, you know...

M came in and kissed me on the cheek, smelling of soap and radiating wet warmth. He asked if I wanted anything for breakfast. At my simple request for coffee with milk, he said he'd make me one and disappeared from the room, at which point I managed to finally haul myself out of bed. I grabbed my clothing and thought briefly about getting dressed in M’s bedroom, but the bathroom wasn't too far away and I figured if M was making coffee in the kitchen, I could slip into the bathroom unnoticed and put my clothes on there, maybe even fit in a quick shower if time would allow.

I stole away completely naked  into the hall, and in a few quick steps had made it to the bathroom, noting along the way the noises coming from the kitchen just a few feet further in front of me. One hand held my balled-up clothing clutched to my side while the other reached for the bathroom door handle. In the next second I was inside the bathroom with the door closed behind me - and was shocked to find that I was not the only person there. Standing face-to-face with me was M, toothbrush in hand, mouth agape in utter surprise.

The look on M’s face was priceless. I'm sure my expression conveyed a healthy dose of shock too, as I realized that the person in the kitchen was not M but M's brother, and that he could have easily caught me dodging around his flat wearing not a single thread of clothing.

“What… what are you doing?” M sputtered.
  
Naturally I reacted by bursting out laughing, as I am wont to do in awkward/embarrassing situations. M started laughing too, but not in a hearty conspiratorial kind of way – more like a nervous, confused, “oh my god I just spent the night with a crazy girl” sort of way. In retrospect, I don’t think he thought the situation was at all funny.

We rode the train together to Mitte. The ride was spent mostly in subdued silence, which I attributed to the early hour and the fact that we were on a German subway train, the interior decibel levels of which hardly ever exceed that of even the quietest of American libraries. In reality, M was most likely calculating how probable it was that I would remember where he lived. My stop came. I kissed M goodbye and got off the train - and that was the last time I ever saw him. My hope that my little nudie move would come across as cute and spontaneous never panned out - I guess the incident was too harrowing for him, a bold moment of truth from which there was no return.

Lesson 4: Social media integration is hard.

I really pity the younger generations. They have to grow up in a world where all of their actions are reblogged, retweeted, shared and liked across several online platforms. It makes it hard to keep anything secret, even if you’re not one much for sharing all your comings and goings with your Facebook friends. And being totally offline is near impossible – your friends will tag you in their statuses and photos regardless.  

Excuse me while I put on my old lady hat so I can tell you how it was back in my day.

My first relationship in high school was launched without the aid of constant communication via texting or Twitter. The guy I liked gave me a ride home from orchestra rehearsal, and I attempted to ask him to the school dance via a note attached to a small box of chocolates I left in his car. The next two weeks of Winter Break were spent in sluggish agony, lolling listlessly around the house, remaining at all times within earshot of the phone so I could hopefully beat my parents to it when he finally called. But the call never came. Since I didn’t have his number, it wasn’t until school started again in January that I found out that he never found the chocolates. He still went to the dance with me. I don’t think it was out of pity because we ended up dating for a year.

And ended up doing a lot of this... locked in a closet.

I was 15. It would be another 3 years until I got my first cell phone. There was no way I could imagine then what teens in that same age range would be doing just 10 years later – uploading pictures of their sleepovers to Facebook, following their crush’s check-ins on Foursquare, and doing whatever it is we are to understand under the mysterious term “sexting”.  

Might this be sexting?

I admit it – I’m still unclear on the rules regarding this newfangled technology. My two longest relationships after high school began back before texting was a common practice – you only did it when it you were somewhere so loud that you couldn’t hear each other on the phone. One of my boyfriends didn’t even have a cell phone or Facebook when we started dating. And for all my dramatizations in my dating lessons 1-3 above, I suspect the real reason that things fell apart was that I am inept at flirt texting. The only contact info I had for N and M were their cell phone numbers, and every time I got a message from them, I had no idea how long to wait before texting them back. Text too soon and you come off as desperate. Wait too long and you seem uninterested and uninvolved. And what if you were the one to send the last text message? Do you have to wait for them to reply before you can text them again? Do SMS have to be exchanged at a ratio of 1:1?

The signing of the Equal Trade Texting Act of 1643

And that’s just texting. I have no idea how to integrate Facebook into all of this. I’m not even on Twitter.  Furthermore, Germans are strange when it comes to social media and data protection – many use pseudonyms on Facebook, so even if you search for them, you won’t be able to find them. I’m not sure I’d want to have been friends with N and M on Facebook anyway – texting with them was difficult enough, thank you very much. But I am Facebook friends with guys I have been involved with to some extent or another over the last few years, and it makes me wonder: should I still be friends with these people? Do I want them knowing what I am up to nowadays, where I’m going, who I’m hanging out with? Some of them have moved away from Berlin, some of them have steady girlfriends – one has even gotten married in the time between when we stopped seeing each other and now. So if anybody reading this has any handy dating tips, for technologically-inept expats or otherwise, please leave me a comment and let me know.

After all, it’s Valentine’s Day!