The Worst and Best Dating Advice I’ve Ever Received

I was not what you would call a smooth operator during my teenage years. That Sade song was definitely not about me. I was almost 6 feet tall and 155 lbs around graduation. I was thin and unconfident, with a slight Nintendo belly.

I was a funny kid. I could always make girls laugh with my sense of humor and silliness. But I was also raised in a very controlling Christian home by a pastor father. This did not lend itself to me being a suave young man when it came to dating.

It was probably a good thing. I’m certain that if I actually found a young lady willing to get naked with me, I’d have likely become a teen dad of at least a half-dozen big-nosed, curly-headed children. We were not allowed to take sex-ed in junior high or high school, and celibacy was encouraged.

I did not need to choose or practice celibacy. Celibacy was forced upon me by the universe. People later in life have commented about my exceptional strong handshake upon our first meeting. This was not due to chance occurrence.

It’s not as though I didn’t have options, growing up. I had my fair share of female attention. I remember having a little girlfriend for about a week or two in 1st grade. Good ‘ol Christina with the long brown hair and matching brown eyes. She was adorable and must have enjoyed my funny personality and bouncin’ and behavin’ hair. Enough to hold my hand at recess.

That ended quickly and 6-year-old Jason was taught the ins and outs of peer pressure. “Jason P’s got a GIRLFRIEND!” yelled my chunky friend Mark to the rest of the playground.

OH NO. I quickly released my future wife Christina’s hand. I wasn’t cool enough to be different. I ran off with Mark and my other band of goons. I told Christina I’d be back with a U-Haul to gather my belongings and bid her a proper adieu.

We were determined to come up with an agreeable plan and not waste our allowance on lawyers. We hammered out a visitation schedule for our toys we’d acquired during our time together. I rented a loft downtown, while she kept the treehouse. All in all, it was a fairly clean breakup. But I was scarred. I’d like to think she was too emotionally devastated to date until at least junior high, that I was THAT unforgettable.

However, by lunch recess, she was holding one of my classmate's hands and throwing looks back at me. WHORE! Jason H. was the new male suitor and living his best life in the sandbox with Christina. She didn’t even have the DECENCY to pick another boy toy with a different first name.

I felt tears of shame starting to form, so I quickly ran and pretended to fall and hurt my knee, so nobody knew the true source of my mental anguish. This is my first lesson in realizing that I knew nothing about girls and dating.

I’d like to say things improved from there. I’d also like to say I look like Jason Momoa and am hung like John Holmes. But sadly, only one of those two things is true.

It was 5th grade before my next brush with romance. Church camp. Ugh. It actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds. It was one of those types that you’d attend with your entire family. Again, not as bad as it sounds. My dad knew a number of pastors attending this camp somewhere in Southern California. So we got to know a lot of other kids from families we met on this religious-themed trip to the woods.

Rebecca Gomez. Another girl with long, dark hair, brown eyes, and a smile that made young Jason agree to just about anything. She was a more “take charge” kind of gal and immediately had my paw in her hand shortly after we met.

I’d like to say that I’d grown emotionally and matured in the four years since Christina. That dating the sheer number of other ladies since she prepared me for my destiny with Rebecca. Sadly, when that number was zero, the learning and progression toward being Don Juan Provencio were miniscule at best.

Once again, it was peer pressure that did me in. Rebecca had a very annoying younger sister who was probably close in age to my brother, who was three grades below me. They took quite an interest in what Rebecca and I were doing together the whole week at church camp. They would follow us around and hide in the woods, stalking us with precision and cunning outdoor skills.

That is until one of them would lose it and start laughing. We’d shoo them away, but it never lasted long enough. I recall being near a couple of my friends from our church on one such occasion. Matt was in junior high and a kid I looked up to since he was a couple of years older than me. Once again, we were being teased by Rebecca’s younger sister and my brother.

“They were in the WOODS together!” She yelled.

This caught Matt’s attention. His ears perked up. He smiled.

I had to address this quickly, “Yeah, SO?” Jesus. Clever.

She knew she had me. “Well, you were HOLDING HANDS with each other!”

Matt smiled bigger. I knew I had to play my cards right here.

“Big Deal! Don’t follow us around, then!” ARGH.

She moved in for the kill, “You’re gonna HUMP EACH OTHER!”

I imagine my already light complexion turned a whiter shade of pale once I and everyone else heard that gem. I looked over at Matt and he busted up laughing. As in, he had turned red from laughing so hard.

And I get it. Thinking back to this story, it’s pretty funny to imagine a first or second-grade little girl saying such an outlandish thing in front of a bunch of older church kids. I was mortified. Check and mate to her. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know what humping was, but I knew it was bad.

I chased after her, but she was as quick as a jack-rabbit. I decided it best to keep my distance from Rebecca for the rest of the trip. There would be no more romance and certainly no potential humping, whatever that meant.

It was more of the same from junior high to high school. My limited less than ideal dating experiences led to me not actively pursuing girls during this time. The first Nintendo console dropped not long after Camp Hump, so it was easier to focus on my new obsession more than on dating girls.

At some point, my father took notice. From what I understood, he was somewhat of a ladies' man back when he was growing up. At least that’s the story he’d seem to have us believe. Anyway, at some point, he noticed that I wasn’t a young Cassanova to the level he probably was at a similar age.

He’d ask me about my dating life occasionally which was about as fun as sitting in the dentist’s chair for a couple of root canals. I’d tell him enough info to get him to leave me alone so I could get back to The Legend of Zelda or Double Dragon. During one such exchange, he gave me what I consider to be the worst piece of dating advice I’ve ever heard.

“Don’t be too nice to girls. You have to act like you could either take them or leave them. Otherwise, they’ll walk right over you.”

Huh. So even though I really DID want to have a girlfriend and potentially get naked with this person (I figured out what humping was by then and was eager to try it), I needed to act aloof and not be TOO nice to them?

This sounded stupid to me. I’ve always been a smart kid if a bit naive. I was book smart. My IQ had been tested at 144 in the 3rd grade and I was in the gifted and talented program for smart kids during that late grade school to early junior high age. Which was fun until I realized it was mostly just extra school work to do after school and during lunch. I quit at that point. Again, 144 IQ, I was no sucker.

And I didn’t plan on being one based on my macho father’s ignorant advice. I observed what he was like toward my mother. They did not seem to have some fairytale romance by any means. If bitching each other out back and forth most evenings was considered the pinnacle of romance, I’d just as soon start looking into monasteries once I graduated from high school.

Part of my problem as it related to dating was that I tended to be pretty picky. I had a number of potential suitorettes before I finally met the woman I would marry. Candice, Mary, Amoryn, they all wanted a piece of my action. However, I wasn’t attracted to any of them. I felt that I’d rather do without and would be far less likely to meet Ms. Right if I was in a relationship with Mrs. Wrong.

As mentioned, I finally did meet someone at the age of 21 that at the time I was really into. So of course I did the smart thing and moved her in with me 6 months after we met. And married her a number of months after that. Ages 21 and 18, how mature of us, right?

Needless to say, this didn’t work out. 10 years together, a new young daughter, and it was time to pull the plug. We started out too young for it to work and had grown apart. I learned my first lesson about settling for less than an ideal relationship. I was newly single for the first time in my adult life and ready to do the things I had missed out on by being married so young.

It was time for “The Summer of Jason”. I was going to get my groove on. I’d only been with one person my entire life and that was about to change. I figured I had it going on and it would be easy. I was a successful real estate agent who owned my own, larger home and had my young daughter every other weekend. I worked out a lot and even more so since my separation and divorce. I was going to own this new single life and rock it properly.

One of the first times I went out as a newly divorced single fella was with one of my close friends. He suggested we go shoot some pool and have a few beers at a local place called “The Getaway”. What a perfect name for a venue where I’d hoped to meet some hot ladies.

We arrived and got a pool table fairly quickly for a weekend night. We lived in a medium-sized suburb not far from the bigger city in our state. So the action wasn’t really hopping that evening. It wasn’t dead by any means, there were women to talk to, certainly.

I quickly realized that I had no game. Not in regards to the pool table. I didn’t know a damn thing about approaching and talking to pretty women. If I could go back and Tivo my life, and see my attempts that evening to try to start conversations with a number of good-looking ladies, I most certainly would not.

It would have been ugly. I’m sure I’d have come across as polite and somewhat interesting if I had been given half a chance. However, the local clientele that evening must not have liked what they had seen between me and David that night. After a couple of hours of abuse, I had had enough.

“Dude, let’s just go. This sucks. I feel worse here than when I was married.” I said, dejectedly. This was not good for my self-esteem and I knew it. The Getaway was the name of the bar and the theme of the evening. Every woman I talked to wanted to get away from me, it felt like.

David then told me something I’ll never forget. I remember his exact wording, even 15 years on the dot later. It’s stuck with me after all this time and I still love him for saying it.

“Jason, you’re a great guy. Don’t even let a woman make you feel less than what you are. If they’re not into what you’re all about, that’s THEIR loss.”

Wow. That changed the whole vibe of the evening, right there. He was right. I knew I was a good guy. That I treated people with kindness and respect. That I had a lot to offer someone if given the chance. I suddenly realized that I didn’t need validation from some stranger at a bar to know that I was a hell of a good person.

We left The Getaway that evening and my perspective changed. I’d like to be able to tell you that I instantly found Ms. Right shortly after, but this is not the case. Ms. Right-away, perhaps, but not Ms. Right. That came a few years down the road.

But I did find her. Because I decided to take David’s dating advice to heart and not my father’s horrible advice. I was too good of a human being to ever treat someone I was potentially interested with an aloof, take-it-or-leave-it type of fake attitude.

When telling anyone about the story of how we met and fell in love, my Bride will mention how she immediately felt comfortable around me. As if we’d known each other and had been best friends for years. And how that had never happened to her in her 41 years prior to our meeting. I felt the same.

I recall being completely upfront and honest with her. I knew I liked her. I could tell she was a wonderful human being. She was also smokin’ hot and that didn’t hurt anything as far as chemistry. We had a date, I cooked for her and our kids the next night, and we never spent another night apart after that.

We caught lightning in a bottle that first night and have never allowed it to get away. I know that by being honest and not playing games when we first met and started dating led to us being happily married for all these years.

Be honest in your dealings, whether it’s dating, business, friendships, or anything else. You’ll be glad you did. &:^)