Advocate This

Submitted by Nicholas:

Gina was a girl I met online. I wrote her a short introductory message and we chatted back and forth for two weeks before I decided to ask her out.

Dinner started off simply enough. We talked about work, schooling, family, the usual.

Then, when I said, "I'm thinking about going into law school to do environmental advocacy," something I said must have contained some sort of magic spell that completely changed her personalty and sanity.

She said, "Oh, so now someone has to go to law school to be an environmental advocate? I'm an environmental advocate and I've never been to law school. Thanks a lot for trivializing me."

My first instinct was to go into defuse mode. I said, "I didn't mean to come across as trivializing. I'm sorry. What I meant was that I wanted to do environmental work from a legal vantage point..."

She interrupted me by saying, "Don't you patronize me! I can do whatever I want, without some expensive law degree," she put on a snooty impersonation of (what I guessed was) myself at the end of that phrase.

"Sorry I brought it up," I said.

"Why?" she pressed the issue ever further, "You wanted to keep it secret?"

"No, I—"

"Too late! How are you going to patronize me next? What else aren't I good at?"

I didn't want to feed her anything else, so I kept my mouth shut. Of course, this was also a mistake, as she pointed out, "Now you're not talking to me? That's real mature. What a great date you are. No wonder you're single."

I flagged the waiter down and asked for the check. We had only ordered our dinners five minutes earlier.

"What are you doing?" she asked, then when I didn't reply, she again asked, "What are you doing?"

"I'm getting out of here. I don't want to be around you."

Her mouth dropped open. "You? You don't want to be around me?"

She picked up her pocketbook, stood, and stalked off, muttering, "Asshole," as she did.

I asked the waiter to box up both meals.  I figured that there was nothing wrong with grabbing at least a couple of dinners out of that debacle.

When I left the restaurant with the bag, though, she was outside waiting for me.  She came up to me and said, "What the fuck?  Who do you think you are?"

I ignored her all the way back to my car, climbed in, and left her there.  She texted and called me constantly for the next week, but she eventually got the message.