The dating game: Sometimes bad experiences offer good lessons

By Heather Warlick

Published: August 11, 2008

Dating is full of ups and downs. The ups are the good dates you wish would last forever. The downs are those dates from hell — the ones you wish you could erase from your memory permanently.

Most single women have had both — like Elizabeth Aven, 30, of Oklahoma City and Brittany Meadors, 24, of Edmond.

Aven recalls one really bad date. She had gone out a few times with a guy who seemed "nice and normal.” Against her mother's advice to never invite a man to her house unless she knew him really well, she invited her date over after dinner. After a few minutes, he started getting a little too friendly.

"I just told him he was going to need to back off,” she said.

He backed off but seemed annoyed.

"About 10 minutes later, he was like, ‘OK, I've got to go,' and he just left,” she said.

Glad he was gone, Aven grabbed a snack and kicked her feet up in front of the TV.

"Maybe 45 minutes later, I get a knock at my door and it was a cop,” Aven said. "She said, ‘Hey, we got a call from someone that you were going to hurt yourself or, I don't know, try and kill yourself.'

"I was like, ‘I have no idea what you're talking about at all. I'm just sitting here just hanging out, watching TV.'”

After a few minutes of checking for evidence that Aven might be suicidal, the officer asked if she knew who might have filed the false report. She related the story of her bad date, and the two women shook their heads in wonder at the nerve of her date.

Meadors had dated the same guy for several years. She met him when she was 19 and working at a mall. On their first date, he was Prince Charming, she said, but soon after they became a couple, he began treating her badly.

"Not even two weeks into it, he got mad because I talked to a guy friend,” she said. "He ended up not talking to me for the rest of the evening. Stuff like that continued, and I just took it.”

When the two started dating, Meadors lived with her parents, who enforced a rule that she would be picked up and dropped off by her dates.

"He lived on the south side, and I lived in Midwest City,” she said. "He always expressed how much he hated having to drive all the way to my house to pick me up and to take me home. I thought that was really rude.”

But Meadors was so taken with her new boyfriend's good looks, she tolerated his bad manners for years. She said she always thought that he was the best she could do and that she could change him.

"You think that you're in love with them and you think that you can change people, but you can't,” she said.

Their relationship was on and off. He would break up, then ask her to come back. The final straw came on a Valentine's Day. He called her about 4:30 p.m. to see whether she wanted to meet for drinks.

"I was immediately irritated after I hung up the phone because I felt like I should have been picked up, and it just killed the mood the whole time,” she said. "It doesn't matter if I date you for a couple months or a couple years, I still want to be picked up and taken home. Especially on Valentine's Day.”

Meadors admits she made a lot of mistakes in that relationship. She knows that she mistakenly thought she could change him. She said she wasn't happy with herself and therefore, wasn't able to really be herself.

But she said she is glad to be rid of him so she can concentrate on her career and making herself happy.

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