![](https://goodmenproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/0_h1RH3H5hWLjO7k2R.jpg)
My friends have labelled this man “the Cockroach King”, which is sadly kind of accurate.
On the app, he appeared quite awesome — he was fit, had a great smile, a cute dog, and wrote a witty profile.
In person, he… had clearly used photos from several years ago. It also transpired that the dog wasn’t his.
He was quite funny, though, and I enjoyed his company tremendously. He told me loving stories about his daughter and his parents, spoke thoughtfully and kindly about his ex-wife, and we had several shared experiences from work and travel.
Which was why, when he invited me back to his place to “watch a movie”, I said yes. I told him I don’t get physical on first dates, and he assured me he had no intention of making me uncomfortable.
(This is the point at which all the friends that I relayed this story to screamed and told me how stupid I was. In retrospect, I agree with them. But at that point, I had just started dating for the first time after 20 years and I was woefully, idiotically naive.)
In any case, we got into the cab. The first red flag was his address.
This guy told me he worked at Google in a managerial position, so I was surprised when he lived in a very low-income neighbourhood.
“Oh, I’m just so tired of the luxe expat life,” he said when he saw my surprise. “I want to live with the guy-next-door, you know?”
I certainly didn’t know anyone who would think like that, and I was pretty skeptical, but okay.
When we got to his tiny, dreary apartment, I gasped audibly. It was such a mess. There were used plates and cups sitting around on the coffee table, stacks of magazines on the couch, and cables and random bits of god-knows-what piled haphazardly on the dining table.
He pushed aside the magazines. “Come, sit down!”
I sat gingerly and placed my handbag down equally gingerly. “What movie shall we watch?”
“Um,” he replied. “I actually don’t have Netflix. So I’ll have to see what I can get on the streaming sites.”
He fired up a few different movies. They all got to the five-minute mark, and then they stalled with the “loading” icon.
As he muttered to himself and fiddled around with various streaming sites, I looked around the place warily, thinking about whether he would react badly if I said I’m gonna go.
And that’s when I saw the cockroach.
It had scuttled out from the kitchen, and was having the zoomies across the living room floor. It was also headed towards the couch, where I was.
I screamed and jumped onto the couch. Like many people, I’m absolutely terrified of cockroaches.
He turned and saw the roach. “I’ll deal with this!” he yelled. He grabbed the newspaper, rolled it up and started thwacking the roach, which reacted by scurrying around even more hysterically.
It’s hard to say who was being more hysterical, actually, as his useless efforts started driving the roach closer and closer to me.
By this point, his newspaper cudgel had wilted and become floppy. So as the roach neared me, this man — this man that I agreed to go on a date with — grabbed my handbag and started using it to whack the roach.
“PUT MY BAG DOWN!” I roared like a woman whose bag was being used to kill a roach.
He started guiltily, and dropped my bag. The roach took the opportunity to scamper away into the deeper, darker recesses of the flat.
I’d had enough. I picked up my bag and told him I was leaving.
“Wait, wait, I need to apologise,” he said, holding my arm. He started stroking up and down my arms and chattering rapidly about how he didn’t mean for this to happen, how he couldn’t understand why this happened because he always keeps his apartment “very clean”, how it had been such a wonderful date and he didn’t want this to spoil anything, how special he thought I was, and so on, as I edged away towards the door.
And then he pulled me in, closed his eyes and puckered up for a kiss.
I shrieked a bit and pushed him away, clutching my bag in front of me like a shield.
He looked genuinely befuddled. “Oh I thought that was what you’d want! You came back with me after all!”
I told him in no uncertain terms that was very much NOT what I wanted, especially after a Roach-Related Trauma, and hotfooted it out. Bizarrely, or perhaps not so bizarrely, he followed me out and insisted on walking me to the road to ensure I got into a cab safely.
The next day I woke up to a couple of cheery texts. “Good morning! Had such a wonderful time last night! When can I see you again?”
Unbidden, the image of a giant cockroach floated up in my mind. I renamed his contact to “NEVER AGAIN” and told him I would not be seeing him again.
Sadly, the Cockroach King proved eerily similar to his very resilient namesake, because he continued texting for the next few days until I finally blocked him.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash