Your Weirdest Dates – The New York Times

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From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin. This is Modern Love, and this is our last episode of the season. And we’re going to start it with you.

And I got to say, you all delivered.

We have so many more of your stories, and we’ll get to them later in the episode. But first, today’s essay is about a date in a really weird and, frankly, unromantic spot. And it’s a date that lasts for 10 days. The essay is written by Dev Aujla and read by Keong Sim.

Liz and I were on a cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with the sun setting and a light wind. The scene resembled one of those retirement brochures in which a couple stares wistfully across the open sea and into their future, except she and I barely knew each other. It was our 10th date.

I had connected with Liz through work a few months before, and we had gone out on several dates that felt promising. Then she called to tell me she didn’t feel ready. Her actual words were, “My astrologer says it’s not the right time.”

I’m not a big believer in the stars, so I hung up, turned to my friend and vented about that astrologer, who definitely hadn’t been out on any of our dates. How could the position of the stars on the day Liz was born derail my dating life today?

The next morning, I settled into the familiar letdown of losing something that had barely begun — resigning myself to more of the casual dating that so often characterizes relationships in New York City. A few weeks later, Liz messaged me as I was returning home from a friend’s wedding overseas. She had changed her mind. In a small Chinatown bar, I showed her a photo I had taken of a cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Seeing the ship made me think about how we no longer know the size of the world because we don’t feel the distance when we travel. What would it be like to experience how far North America is from Europe, to travel by sea, as my grandparents did when they came a century ago from India?

“Let’s do it,” she said. She’d had two glasses of wine. “Let’s take a cargo ship across the Atlantic together. It’ll be our next date.” We both laughed.

The next morning, I woke up and texted to tell her I was still thinking about the cargo ship. “When are you free?” she replied.

“Any time in the next three months.” I was mostly joking, but it was also kind of true. My work as a consultant for startups allowed me to set my own schedule. Her work gave her similar flexibility. A few hours later, she told me she had booked it. We would leave in two weeks.

I gulped. Things weren’t supposed to move that fast. We had never spent more than five consecutive hours together. We had never spent the night together. And now our next date would involve a 10-day trip with only a few other travelers and a crew on a cargo ship?

Yet, I knew I had to say yes. Why not take a big leap? When I finally told my family, my parents tried unsuccessfully to meet her. And my brother sent me YouTube videos of dates gone bad on cruise ships. It all started to feel overwhelming and like a very bad idea.

After we boarded the ship in Halifax, it was clear that our room hadn’t been built with romance in mind. Two bolted down single beds lined the wall. Our small bathroom reeked of sewage and diesel. The ship was 15 stories tall and as long as three football fields. There were only 28 people on board, including the captain and 18 crew members.

Liz and I started to unpack. She had brought new sheets, cashmere blankets, candles and lamps. I had brought a small Persian rug, Scrabble boards, cards, books and a list of questions to ask on a date, just in case. My side of the room felt like a dormitory, while hers felt like home. So her side is where we stayed.

As we laid on the single bed, adjusting to each other, shipping containers were being stacked with hard thuds outside of our window. We fell into a rhythm as our journey began, reading, sleeping and sharing stories with the other travelers. We befriended a Dutch couple who had been traveling the world for six years in their modified Toyota Land Cruiser. They called themselves overlanders.

The big excitement involved emergency drills where we would rush through hundreds of meters of container-made ravines and water sealed doors up a five-story metal staircase on the ship’s outer edge to the escape vessel at the stern. We spent our afternoons camped out next to the espresso machine. One night, the Filipino crew hosted karaoke after a traditional meal of sinigang and breaded fish.

All the idleness meant that Liz and I had no choice but to get to know each other. Mundane interactions turned into deep dialogues about our pasts. Hearing the captain tell a story about sending money home to his daughter led Liz and me into a long conversation about our relationship to money and how it has evolved over time. Every day on the ship felt like a month of dating in New York.

Over those 10 days, we spent more than 160 hours awake together, shared two dozen meals and made out more than the average couple does in five months. By the third day, I told Liz I loved her. By the fifth, we were talking about the future. By the eighth, we were arguing.

She said I didn’t consider her needs. I was pressuring her to be social when she needed time alone. I wanted her to see things my way and wasn’t listening. In turn, I thought she wasn’t accepting the reality of where we were. We just stared at each other in our small room. There was nowhere to go.

If we had been back in New York, I would have left and met my best friend at a neighborhood bar to complain about her. He would have supported me, and I would have felt entitled to move on, repeating the dating cycle I had been stuck in for more than a decade.

On the ship, however, there was no one to talk to, to tell me I was right or wrong. I walked to the outdoor deck underneath the bridge and sat on a metal box filled with life vests while she stayed in the room. For the whole afternoon, I just sat there, replaying our conversations.

There were moments she had told me she needed space. I just hadn’t heard. I had never allowed myself to move slowly enough to truly understand what was being said. I never recognized the gap between what I said, what I did and most importantly, what I wanted. Hours later, as the sun set, I walked back through the windowless corridor, entered our room and sat down next to her on the bed.

I’m sorry, I said. I am, too, she said. We fell asleep on a single bed.

Two days later, we arrived in Liverpool, England. In ship time, it was almost our one-year anniversary. We checked ourselves into a four-star hotel, ordered room service and watched a bad movie. I looked at Liz. I loved her laugh, her red sweatshirt. Everything was perfect.

On the plane back to New York the next day, we opened a bottle of champagne. A few weeks later, we went to Liz’s astrologer for our first relationship reading. “You’re a match,” the astrologer said. My Aries, Liz’s Aquarius, the rising sign and the sun and the moon were all on our side.

And more recently, as the coronavirus brought our city and country to a terrifying standstill, the two of us quarantined in a small house across the street from where I grew up. It’s OK. We didn’t mind isolating ourselves. For us, it made all the difference.

After the break, I get Liz’s take on the home ship situation. Plus, more of your stories about the strange places you’ve been on a date. Seriously, some of you have been to some weird spots. That’s next.

I am inspired by Dev and Liz. When I go on dates, I pick between one of three bars. If I’m feeling really crazy, maybe we’ll get some ice cream. But I feel like I’m going to have to rethink my entire strategy because you all sent in some stories about dates in weird spots that sounded like so much fun.

And then maybe there are some spots that are a little too creative. When I heard this next call from Na’Tosha De’Von in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I was like, this is it. This is the winner. I mean, it’s not a contest, but if it was, this is the winner, ding, ding, ding, most unusual date spot ever. And I sort of — I need you to hear Natasha’s whole story. It starts off normal with an online connection.

There was this guy who I was friends with on Facebook for a while. And then he kind of slid into my inbox and was like, I would love to take you out on a date. So we go to this really fancy Mexican restaurant and ordered queso. The vibe is really good. He’s very handsome. I’m hot as shit. So things are going great.

Then he gets a phone call. And so he looks at me, and he goes, hey, that’s my job. I work at a morgue. And I’m the guy that goes to pick up dead bodies. But I’m really enjoying your company. And I don’t want the day to end. Do you mind picking up this dead body with me? I said yes.

So we’re driving for an hour and a half. And I look over and I’m like, am I the corpse? Because no one knows where I’m at. Like, this is a long drive, and I didn’t tell my homegirl. So if you’re going to kill me, tell me now. And he’s like, no, no, no, I promise. I promise. We’re going to get an actual dead body.

So we drive the rest of the way. We go pick up this old dead lady who died in her sleep. And let me tell you about the dead people van thingy that we’re driving. So you strap the body down to the passenger side, but it’s on this thing called like a roller. And so it slides back and forth. So if you hit a brake, then it hits the back of the passenger side seat. So we’re just riding and talking. And the little dead lady is smacking me on my back. And then I turn around, and I speak to the dead lady because I didn’t want to be rude.

We finally get to wherever they fix the bodies up there. And we walk in. He cuts the light on. It’s fucking six other little old dead white people! And I’m like, this is how you die. This is how you die in the scary movies. And this is how all the Black people in the audience is screaming at the Black girl, get out.

But I didn’t get out. I went further in. The funny thing is, though, now he doesn’t work in the morgue anymore. He’s a barber, which is way less exciting and probably why we broke up. But the point is dead bodies on the first date. No one can top that.

Well, there you have it. Thanks to Na’Tosha De’Von and to our other dategoers: Elizabeth Lee and Christopher Cartwright from Hanover, New Hampshire; Daisy Dow from Chicago, Illinois; Jeanne Galligan from Gainesville, Florida; Gareth Miles from Brooklyn, New York; Emily Russell from New York; and Martin Blumberg from Long Island.

This is our final episode of the season. We’re taking a tiny break, and we’ll be back with new episodes very soon. Modern Love is produced by Elyssa Dudley, Julia Botero, Christina Djossa and Hans Buetow. It’s edited by Sarah Sarasohn. This episode was mixed by Dan Powell.

The “Modern Love” theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. Special thanks to Anna Diamond at Audm and to all of the people who sent us voicemails and emails and voice memos. We loved each and every one of your date stories. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.