A first date gone wrong.
By Marianna Jocas
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
Hungarian was a war zone. The soundscape demanded a certain degree of intentionality: You had to commit to what you said before you catapulted it across the table. Mistakes were all the more brutal as a result. Sentences disfigured in my mouth; jokes fell flat on the floor like wet organs. And when we had nothing to say, it just so happened the rest of Hungarian didn’t either.
No bystander would have believed that two weeks prior, my date and I were vibrantly flirting while I typed my number into his phone. I had been eyeing him all year, attending a debate club I couldn’t care less about in order to talk to him. One evening I plucked up the courage and asked him out. Following my stunt, gossip and adrenaline crawled through the mouths of friends of friends of friends who learned about what I did—it was the date heard ’round the world.
We were sitting at a small table wobbling back-and-forth to an ugly rhythm. Our conversation was interrupted by a waitress howling my name, which persisted until I clawed through a sea of customers and received two scalding mugs from her tray. As I made my way back, a couple in front of me arranged themselves in a barricade formation that not only narrowed my already slim passage, but forced me to stand at a human traffic light while my skin grew raw. All I could do then was stare at my date and accept the whim of fate.
If we were different people, these events could have encouraged a playful, inviting attitude towards the rest of our night. But we were not different people, and our discomfort had turned the date into something stiff and formal. It would have been rude to leave, but to stay meant to endure a flat conversation that jumped abruptly from topic to topic. As we finished our drinks, he tapped his phone and said, “Well, I should get back to Butler.” He reached for a backpack that had been hiding behind his chair, and I realized that this—that I—was his Butler study break.
Before I knew it, I had escorted my date to the Columbia gates where I wished him good luck on his studies. I was confused and embarrassed, walking back home to an audience waiting to hear how it went. I returned to my friends holding nothing but an empty coffee cup and what I can most accurately describe as a sagging, tarnished identity.
Weeks passed. My potent regret turned to unexpected delight on the corner of Broadway and 112th, where I heard my friend advise someone on the phone to “Go Muff it!” in regards to their feelings for someone. My nickname is Muff (at four years old I mispronounced “muffin”—the juvenile mistake follows me). And here it now lived, inside a phrase used to inspire friends to ask people out. Unbeknownst to me, they had been using it for weeks. My namesake entered the ranks of such timeless clichés like Carpe Diem, YOLO, and “Fuck it!”
These expressions assume an unserious attitude for life; they interrupt any bout of hesitation. “Go Muff it!” offered me a charming reminder to take things lightly, perhaps especially when they go awry. My friends continued to use the phrase despite the date that it led to, which gave it an aroma of resilience. It seemed to say, “Yes, not every date will go according to plan, but to dismiss a bad date or try to avoid them in the future would be a loss.” The particular embarrassment of it all tapped me into a somewhat universal sense of humiliation at Columbia: The Bad Hungarian Date. And during one of these, life pulsates with a raw and confusing energy, and to ignore that is to ignore life itself.
So yes, I went on a bad date. I also learned that he takes espresso shots with his mom before bed, and that he looks good in warm orange light. First dates, though they make for a sour cocktail of exhilaration and unease, will always leave you with something valuable.