That Time I Wasn't Kidnapped

Do you know this from the dating apps?: "Dating me is like..." Ok. Well, dating me is like dating a beached whale. There are lots of concerned citizens hovering around me and I am life-threateningly lost. I'm new on the dating scene and, to stick with the ocean metaphor, completely out of my depth. I'm going to tell you the story of the first date I've been on with a stranger in 20 years.

About six months ago, I left a beautiful relationship that had turned into a real horror show. I turned 40, stuffed my clothes into garbage bags, and moved across the country to live with my mom. Life is going exactly as I'd always dreamed. I am a total disaster—too skinny with my hair falling out and heartbroken and basically a constant worry for my mom and sister. So that's been fun.

And I am in no state for it, but I want to go on a date because I need to feel loved again. But, I have no idea how dating works. Every relationship I have ever been in was with men who had been my friend first. And every date with a stranger I've been on happened when I was in college and never amounted to anything. I was a particular favorite among the Indian and Chinese young men who would swing by my table in the library with some pretense of needing their pencil sharpened or thinking I looked like their cousin before they would ask me out for a meal at their family's restaurant. I know live in a teensy tiny town and there are no Indian or Chinese restaurants. So I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. I am not on the apps. It is my opinion that screen writers for horror movies and people looking for dates should pretend that cell phones don't exist. But I was telling anyone who would listen what was up with me - moved in with my mom, starting over, I'm a cool chick, hook me up. The postal workers, the bank ladies, the check out gal, everyone. I've no shame.

But this has, unsurprisingly, not resulted in a single date.

Until one day, out of the blue, I get a Facebook message from someone purporting to be a friend of a friend of a friend who invites me to go, not for coffee, but out in his boat for a sail.

I click his Facebook profile and it is essentially blank. There are no photos of him. There are no photos of anything. It looks like he set up this account and then messaged me.

So I wrote back, "Let's do it."

I'd spent the last ten months or so nearly unable to eat and waiting for the sweet release of death, so heading out with a random stranger on a boat sounded like at least my untimely demise would make headlines. And really how much cooler is it to be murdered by a freaky stranger than to waste away like a Victorian spinster. So I said yes to this maybe-a-date, maybe-a-murder. I didn't know. I didn't care. Something had to change.

I show up at the appointed time to a random empty stretch of beach that this photo-less man identified to me via a pin drop on my phone. No address. Very clever of him. Should have been my first clue.

But I arrive and he's there and there is a boat and we do go sailing and it's great! We have a great time. We sail around this remote section of beach and we only discuss how easy it would be to murder me a couple of times.

Ha! Ha! Modern dating is so fun.

He wasn't an unemployed gamer and I was old but not too old and so we agreed to meet again for a second date. Yeah. The plan is to cook out at the same remote stretch of beach. So a few days later, off I drive at 6 p.m. to meet him there in my mom's minivan—and this becomes important to the story. Because I am now living a hobo life without a single asset to my name, if I am to go on a date, I borrow my mom's car.

So date number two is going great. We're sitting by the fire enjoying talking to each other and the lovely view and perfect weather. Wine is involved, which is not something I am used to, and so while I'm sitting there on the sand I just start vomiting out all my previous relationship garbage to him and he does not run screaming down the beach, so that was cool. And perhaps should have been my second clue.

But time is elusive under these circumstances and I have now been on a dinner date for nearly 7 hours. It is 1am and we are down a rural one-lane dirt road so when I hear a car door close, it draws my attention.

"Who could that be?" I ask.

It hits me.

Now let me pause for a moment. Any savvy dater would understand this for what it is. I have been lured to the beach, am en-sozzled on wine, and am about to be kidnapped. His accomplice has just arrived. I can only imagine how much a forty-year-old assetless anorexic missing clumps of hair goes for.

But as previously described, I am not a savvy dater and so I ask, "Who could that be?" and it hits me. This is something so much more terrifying than a kidnapping. This is my mom.

I find my cell phone which I have lost track of because I am in a rural place on the beach with no signal so it is as relevant to me as cash is to an astronaut. I find my phone in the dark and give it a shake so the flashlight turns on and I go running up through the forest to the parking area to intercept whatever is about to happen and as I am running through the woods, my phone starts binging as it gets reception. I look at the screen and I have three voicemails and the most recent text message says "Will you just give a quick call? Or Something? Anything? We are driving along the road looking for you."

And it is from my sister. Now this is especially terrifying because my sister lives in another town 45 minutes away. And then it dawns on me. And maybe this has already occurred to you. I drove to this date in my mom's minivan. So if she has found me, that car that arrived was not hers, she found herself a ride. With my sister Cait, as it turns out.

So Cait gets a call in the middle of the night from my mom. Cait is a realtor and she pays for this service called People Finders. It lets you look someone up in a light background check kind of way. You can find their phone numbers, their email addresses, their criminal arrest records, and more crucially, their address. So sometime after midnight, Mom called Cait and said, "I need you to People Find this motherfucker."

Actually, this is my mom. Her biggest swear word—reserved for only the truly horrible demons who walk amongst us—is "butt head." So I'm sure she said, "Cait. Hi. I'm so sorry to wake you. Jen hasn't come home yet and I'm worried. Can you please find me this motherfucker's phone number?"

So apparently, Cait finds his phone number and my mom calls my date, but there is no answer because we are on the beach...right where I said I'd be.

At this point, I need to introduce another character. That is my sister's boyfriend, Ben, who is an Eagle Scout. Ben has also been awakened by this phone call and upon over-hearing the potential for danger has begun collecting items of importance around the house as if he is on a elven quest.

Cait gets off the phone with mom and he says, "We're going, right?"

And so this is how my mom has a car.

But it is not as if she waited for them to get the 45 minutes to her. Oh no! It is 1am and a full moon (bloody beautiful moon, at this point I am lying on the sand by the fire looking up at the sky and sharing my soul with another human being), but my mom is running, running, along the highway to get to me. She is not even sure where she is going, but she will get there because she is my mom.

She gets picked up on the highway in Ben's Prius and they proceed to the road where we are. They drive down every driveway looking for mom's minivan, until they finally arrive at the beach and I hear the car door slam.

So I'm running through the forest to get to them and I've got my cell phone flashlight and I reach them and Mom is glad to see me. And Cait is glad to see me. And Cait is checking my eyes to make sure I am not blinking because we both know that if I am under duress, I should blink twice. We've worked this out ahead of time. She is scanning me to see if there is a laser bead on me from a gun in the woods. She hugs me to see if I'm going to whisper any warnings in her ear. You see, while I may not be a savvy dater, I come from a long line of people paranoid enough to escape a zombie apocalypse.

But then I see Ben. He is leaning against his car with a bat over his shoulder holding a police light bar flashing red, white, and blue. I don't know what he planned on doing, but I am certain that if this story had been different, if this friend of a friend of a friend had been a previous guest on Dateline that my mom in her running shoes, my sister with her codes, and Ben with his police ruse would have saved me.

And that is how I felt loved again.