It’s official! I’ve given away my HAW v-card. I went on a date last Wednesday with a handsome real estate guy named Ryan. And what a first date it was!

How we met online to get offline: Ryan came up on “people” page on my mobile app.

Anyways, back to Ryan. He looked handsome in the thumbnail pic, so I clicked to peruse. All in all, good profile. One problem: only a single photo. Why do people do this? Don’t they know that everyone is looking for consistency between photos? Anyone can take one good photo in their life. I want to know that you can take at least 4. Anyways, handsome, 6’3”, clearly loves his mama. (In a nice, non-creepy way.) So I picked a random date of his and said I was intrigued. I didn’t really care about the date, I was just on an “I’m intrigued” clicking spree. Ryan got back to me with: “Ok, when do you want to go?” This threw me off a little bit. Like, oh shit, I really go meet up with him just like that? Without texting a bit first? I don’t like this idea much, so I give him my phone number instead and tell him to text me. We text for a couple hours and then he asks if I want to get together tonight because he’s leaving for a week-long wedding.  I say yes and we make plans to meet up later.

What we did: Like a total gent, he “picked me up” from work at the Hancock tower and we walked to Navy Pier to watch the Wednesday night fireworks. Along the way we bought tiny bottles of champagne and chatted pretty steadily. He’s nice, confident, and looks like a very strange mix of Jimmy Kimmel and Bradley Cooper. Yes, I realize that sounds odd, but it works on him. Once the fireworks were over, we hung out at the end of a pier until we got kicked out by a security guard. Walking back towards the city, I could tell we both didn’t want the date to end quite yet. So we took a pedicab to a bar to grab one last drink. I just have to say, God, pedicabs are weird. You pay a person to haul your ass up a hill on a bike while you just sit and relax. So odd. Anyways, the drink at the bar was fun. Ryan’s a pretty intense guy and seems a little too good to be true, but I’ll just go with it. After the bar, Ryan took me home in a cab, kissed me goodnight, and then went home.

Favorite part: When Ryan had to ask a hulk of a man man on the pier to open our tiny bottles of champagne with twist off tops. Pretty emasculating, but I loved it.

Total $$$ I spent: $0. Which was awesome because I’m poor, but it was also awesome because the majority of the night was free (or could have been if we had taken public transportation.)

Total $$$ he spent: About $60 – mostly on transportation (the pedicab and the cab home = $30.)

Rules broken: Absolutely everything — we talked about money (he’s rich!), politics (he’s moderate!) and sex (he’s not saving himself for marriage!).

How we left it: He texted me within half an hour after we left: “Thanks for a great date.” My friend Ellie always says, if you don’t get a text within the night, you’ll never see that guy again. And I find that to be pretty much true. The old three-day rule is out the window. If you don’t get a text, he’s probably not interested. After a good date, I almost always get a text within half an hour. Obviously there are exceptions, but this is how I see things happening now days.

Something I learned for the future: Ryan is the first guy to admit to Googling me before we met. And the way he did it startled me a bit. He simply Googled my phone number, which brought up my Facebook. From there, he could see everything I hadn’t privacy protected and ended up knowing way more about me than I knew about him before we met up. Note to self: change security settings immediately!

All in all, great start on HAW! Looking forward to more.

Love,
Lakey
Lakey Lumin is a gender sociologist who is determined to live up her 20’s in Chicago. She is inordinately impressed by good trivia skills and witty banter. Follow her on Twitter at @LoveLustLakey and check out her other blog at www.chicagonow.com/love-lust-lakey.

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