The Other Guy (Continued)
In season 5, after I broke up with my ex, Gabby, I started to spiral. I think I have made it clear that my feelings for Gabby never evolved past a crush, but breakups are still hard. After our breakup, my arc in this series was about that spiral. The pinnacle of that spiral was when, in a panic, I downloaded another dating app. I immediately matched with a girl named Lauren and took her out on a date shortly before my birthday. Over the course of the date, she asked me if I was seeing anyone else. I said no, and I found out that she was in fact seeing someone else from Pittsburgh. She kind of pressured me into this weird The Bachelorette situation where it was her choosing between one of us, since he was coming into town for about a week, starting 2 days after our date. The installment I wrote about this entire event was called The Other Guy. At the end of that installment, I wrote, “I met up with her one more time before she met this other guy and we texted sporadically, while they were hanging out.” This is a depiction of that “one more time.”
On Wednesday, August 10th, 2022, at probably around 4:00 (I can't remember exactly), I pulled up to a Jeni’s ice cream in Westerville, Ohio. Two days before, I had taken Lauren on our date. I turned the car off and anxiously waited to see her pull in. She had texted me before I left that the other guy had left about an hour before, so we only had till about 6:00 before he arrived, and she wanted to be home by like 5:00 to get ready. I saw her pull up, a couple of minutes after I parked, and I walked to greet her.
“Hi,” I said confidently when she was in earshot.
“Hey,” she said very shallowly, “Do you want to go inside?”
“Sure!” I said, still way too excited.
As we walked into the ice cream shop, I reached for her hand, and she pulled away. Now let’s pause this flashback for just a second. As someone who is getting married in a week, I can look back on this memory and realize that she wasn't interested. Honestly, I think the only reason she agreed to go on this second date was out of pity. I don't think she's actually a bad person, and I don't think she was purposefully pressuring me into this The Bachelorette situation. I think she knew that I was autistic, that I had lost S.M., and I had had a couple of really bad girlfriends over the last 2 years, and she had no idea how to let me down easy. But Season 5 Mitchell did not have the wherewithal to realize this was a bad situation. And Unpause.
We got inside, ordered our ice cream, and sat down at a table. The entire date, if you can even call it a date, was incredibly awkward. We sat in almost painful silence, quickly shoveling the ice cream down our throats to get out of the situation. At some point, maybe about halfway through my ice cream, I asked: “So what are your plans for this weekend?”
“I don't know,” she replied, “I think I'm going to take him to COSI, possibly the fair, maybe the Columbus Museum of Art?”
“Oh, maybe take him to Pins or Otherworld?” I suggested.
“Oh yeah, I forgot about Otherworld,” she said.
What am I doing? I thought.
In some insane act of ignorance to the fact that the thing we talked about the most during this second date was “The competition,” I thought she might still choose me? Throughout the entire weekend, I texted her, asking her what they were up to until they got in a giant fight and he left. The next week, she confirmed that she was not interested in me.
Now, as I said, I am getting married next week. So I can hear all of you asking, why in the name of sanity would you write an installment about a girl that you had two dates with, a week before Paige becomes your wife? There are a few answers for this 1. Like I said, I don't think Lauren was a bad person. But in the original The Other Guy installment, she is purely a villain, because at the time, that is how I viewed her. I wanted to write this to, at the very least, acknowledge that I was wrong about that. 2. She and I have a few mutual friends, who knew that I went on a couple dates with her while it was happening. One of them informed me that she got engaged earlier this year, and I wanted to wish her and her fiancé the best! 3. The narrative reason for this is this is a two-part installment. While I portrayed my desperation appropriately across the rest of that season, it was a little dialed back in the original The Other Guy installment. I needed you to really understand how desperate I was, going into Part 2.
To Be Continued…
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