Really Hideous Moments in the History of Dating

Now that we've all admitted, here at the Candy Rant Halfway House, whom we were desperately in love with as smitten and lobotomized teens, I think it's time we cleansed our souls further.

Tell me, what kind of unforgettably bad moments have you experienced in the dating world? I have so many I don't know where to begin. So I'll go with an old favorite:

In college, when I was 19, I was lounging on a couch with my first uber serious boyfriend, Rob. We were talking about impossibly deep subjects and listening to a 45 of Justin Hayward singing "Forever Autumn" over and over and over. I had on a soft, fuzzy, dark green sweater and felt like the hottest babe on campus. Or at least in that particular dorm room. We had safeguarded our alone time by bribing Rob's obese and surly roommate Brett. For a jumbo bag of Taco Flavored Doritos, Brett would take his sagging ass and go downstairs to watch TV in the dorm lounge for a few hours.

Rob, the perfect mannequin boy, 6'4", blond, blue eyes, and who finally bored me senseless a few months down the road, was targeting the green sweatered chick for romance. Rob also had a really, really bad cold. He was sniffling and snotting and was one of those guys who would not blow his fool nose. He chose instead to sniff and snort and make that liquidy, annoying sound that makes you want to take a ball bat and make of their head a snot pinata. Maybe blowing his nose would have turned him into some kind of pansy in his own eyes. Or maybe emptying your nose holes in front of someone had been deemed uncouth in his remote part of northern Indiana. Whatever the reason, he had one big-ass head full of snot.

Enter: the peak moment of romance. All cuddled up together and deep into our steamy undergrad love for one another, our moment was molding itself into a magic one. I was on my back. Rob slowly leaned over me to kiss me. He must have felt it coming on, this thing that was about to happen. This thing that would stick with me for all time. Just as he was about to kiss me, he slowly turned his head to the right, to take another juicy sniff. But not in time. And I was watching him. Which made my fate much worse when a giant ball of snot, a perfectly formed sphere of mucus, dropped directly into my wide open left eye.

The horror that I felt at that moment was somewhere between finding out I have lice, and having a hot poker rammed up my sphincter. I could not move, could not scream. For 10 seconds I was as immobile as a family dog in a yard at Pompeii, preserved in lava, mid-yip.

I was not the woman I am now. I was too embarrassed for myself and for him to provide even the slightest hint to Rob that he had mercilessly snot-douched my retina and made me want to projectile vomit and dance a foot-stomping Jed Clampitt jig at the same time. I calmly got up from the couch, said I had something in my contact (which didn't exist) and coolly walked down the hall, to the stairwell, all the way down four flights of stairs to the women's bathroom, all the while looking as though I had lost my monicle.

Once safely behind the locked bathroom door, I shot enough water into that gel-filled eye to dilute 600 gallons of sulfuric acid into a harmless summer drink.

So, Rob, if you're out there, what I really wanted to do was heave your too-tall lanky ass off the couch, wipe my dripping eye onto your cherished high school letter jacket, and, while making for the door, bitchslap you while screaming about your senseless fear of blowing your sopping honker into a friggin' kleenex, you socially crippled dillweed.

But I didn't. I am left only with my memory. And every time I hear the Moody Blues, my eye fills with tears. Just the left one.