#28 THE ONE WHO REMINDED ME OF PATRICK BATEMAN, THE FSU FILM STUDENT: WHY I WANTED TO BE INTO HIM
#28 THE ONE WHO REMINDED ME OF PATRICK BATEMAN, THE FSU FILM STUDENT: WHY I WANTED TO BE INTO HIM
Sometimes you can’t fit the square peg in the round hole even if he looks the part and meets your (silly) checklist
I’m on my way to Manchester airport to fly to Tallahassee by way of Atlanta (with a super long layover) and I’ll record the voiceover at some point next week, but for now, here’s this week’s second post. Thanks to my beautiful friend/former personal trainer, Nicola, for taking me to the airport.
By the time Patrick Bateman (PB) rocked up into my life around May of 2011 (whilst RHSG, the CFO, the Air Force guy (to discuss later), and various other people were also happening), it was another Bramwell-style (and Dorian-style) beginning in that I’d joined OkCupid, messaged with a few people and then sort of forgot about those people whilst I got on with grad school life…and flirting.
We started messaging in May and because I was only semi-interested I played it way too “cool” at least “cool” for my anxious, intense personality. I mean sometimes I’d message that day and sometimes I’d wait four whole days to message again, which was very unlike me. I hadn’t even given him my number but like all online chats, I only assume, he was also corresponding with 12,642 people as well.
Then, I messaged him and he didn’t message me until ten days later. I waited a further two days to reply (all totally not intentionally). I mean this was already going nowhere fast.
I dropped off the radar until the next month and then I guess by the time he’d finished with whomever he was dating, he got back to me again.
He’d sporadically ring me sometimes and he had that whole creepy vibe where you use someone’s name over and over again at the end of sentences. He must have read it in some “how to have charisma” book but the advice was way off.
He told me he was off in August and to visit him. At this point, Brittany thought I’d end up in the freezer.
I’ve put our long message exchange as bonus material here so that I can start making my posts a manageable 5-10 minute read instead of, like, forever because if you wanted to read a novel, you would.
I wrote this bit thirteen years ago in 2011…
Recently, I began dating someone we’ll call Mr. Bateman. As in Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s American Psycho. Of course, as with any nickname given in retrospect, if I’d known that PB would remind me of PB minus the whole chainsaw and murdering bit, then I probably, most likely wouldn’t have dated him. (Although I do seem to enjoy making bad choices, so I’m not 100% certain).
How did I meet him? Well, I joined a dating site in April in order potentially to try and get over RHSG (Red Haired Sex God), this guy I’d dated on/off since January that I was super-infatuated with (more later). I’d never done online dating before. Maybe because of the stigma of online dating, but it’d been successful for my mother and a couple of my former English-majors-in-undergrad friends were on this site, so I figured why not try it? My roommate once described the small, college town in which we live as a fishbowl, which pretty much means that you encounter the same boring fish over and over again. And, lately, I’d been exhausting the options in my fishbowl and I was also pretty certain that I wouldn’t find another RHSG (or another SG in general red-haired or no) in my vicinity.
I browsed the site a bit despondently after making my profile. I didn’t really see options I liked either on an attractiveness level or on a grammatical level. Why can’t people take the time to punctuate, capitalise, and avoid slang and text speak? It’s really a turnoff, people. Eventually, after receiving a bombardment of messages – all of which I’d tried politely to respond to because I didn’t think it was nice to reject people (again, my need to like and be liked by people) – I stumbled across a person of interest. The site blasts my inbox each week with a list of “potential matches” and you can go through them and “skip” the ones you don’t like whilst continually receiving a steady stream of new information and new photos as well as your percentage of compatibility based on answered questions. I saw a picture of a guy who very much appealed to me:
He was tall (I like dating men over 6’ tall. Check);
He was working on a second master’s degree (Educated. Check);
He liked to read (READING. Check. Check. Check. Check. Clearly, reading is a must and I don’t just mean magazines or “porn” articles. And I prefer people who read literature, which brings me to my next point…);
He majored in English and Philosophy in undergrad (Crazy bonus points. For the English major thing, especially since my school is so small that it renders the THREE males in our grad program undateable, even if they didn’t have other English major girlfriends. Check. Plus more checks.);
He worked in politics in the past (I don’t really care for politics, but this seemed impressive. Baby check. I care for impressive as in someone who doesn’t just aspire to work at Bob’s Diner their entire life);
He seemed as if he dressed well (I like a man in a suit. Big check.);
Again, he was attractive (I’m a little shallow at times);
He could punctuate sentences correctly and used words over four letters long (maybe only an English major can appreciate this, but this is a MUST. Lots of checks);
Back to the books thing, one of his favourite books was listed as Jane Eyre and I’d recently spent a week at the beach reading the first part of Jane Eyre with my roommate (okay, so I hadn’t actually finished it, but the fact that he read the Bronte’s was impressive and I did finish all of Agnes Grey. Yes, Agnes Grey is also known as the shortest Bronte novel ever, according to my roommate and probably according to page count too. But check, nonetheless).
2023 me here: I did later finish Jane Eyre, of course, and omg my list is insufferable, snobbish, judgey, and just shows I had no idea what was good for me. Michael, who I consider a freakishly good fit and amazing life partner and husband, has very few of my checklist qualities from back then except that he’s tall and handsome – but also when we grow old together, he loses inches off his height, and his muscles atrophy, he will still be handsome to me because I love the very essence of him, outside of everything. He is forever my person. And people’s worth isn’t tied to their education, what their job is, what they wear, or anything of that nature as I would learn from dating someone, PB, that met my shallow checklist but then had zero spark.
Lurking amongst his other good qualities, there was one immediate no-no: he claimed that he HATED travelling and I love, love travelling. But I thought it through; my roommate is all about pro-con lists and the pros clearly outweigh the cons. And, besides, I’d detective myself to the bottom of the mystery and ask WHY he hated travelling because, clearly, no one should hate travelling and there was obviously a reason. I decided to message him and I began by asking him why he disliked travelling and if he’d had a bad experience. And also what he did in film school/what types of films he made—whether he wanted to be a director or cinematographer or et cetera (because those were the only two things I knew had a name that you could go to film school for and et cetera seemed as if there’d be a continuation if I’d had time to type more). So there it began.
I should mention now that one of his favourite films listed on his profile was American Psycho, which was alright because he'd also listed one of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels, Glamorama, as a favourite book, but Ellis’s writing style exudes wit and awareness as he writes about shallow, superficial people in an ironic and tongue-in-cheek sort of way, mockingly exposing the dreadful underbelly of society gone awry. Basically, liking Ellis wasn’t a red flag for the socially aware...or so I thought.
Anyway, that’s what past me rationalised as a good reason to date this guy: he matched my checklist. For far too long in my life, I had this imaginary checklist and if I found a guy who was like a rom-com novel character then my life would magically be perfect. Personality and compatibility be damned! He had to have the degree, the looks, the height, what else mattered?
Next up, I’ll talk about our first date and our initial (yet short-lived) time together.
Don’t forget to check out the other twenty-seven posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place.
Did you ever have a dating checklist like me even if it was only one in your head?