Deal Breakers: As a single person, staff writer Xela Quintana has had the pleasure and displeasure of trying to foster romantic relationships
Pick up lines
Stop using them whether ironic, as a joke, with complicit intent, just stop using them. They are tacky, unoriginal, and incredibly dull. As soon as I receive a pick up line I am cancelling the app while I scoff and roll my eyes to the gods of mediocrity and monotony.
The amount of times I have received an ironically sent pick up line followed by a “lmao” is maddening. I am not lmao-ing.
Kept Birds
As soon as I walked in, one, two, five. Five birds is too many birds. Two birds is one too many birds but she had five. She would incessantly sing with those whole five birds and those beautiful aggravatingly irksome nonsensically chattering and chittering birds were eternal in the sound they produced.
She ate it up. She adored their endless fluttering and chirping over any movement, sound, stillness, anything at all. She loved those five birds so dearly and I hated those five birds so ardently.
Breathing too loud
It was all night. It was not quite a snore. I can deal with snoring. A good kick in the middle of the night will wake a snorer long enough for me to sneak into a deep sleep during the intermission of the worst white noise a human can unwittingly make.
It really was only loud when it was quiet. Never noticed it until it was just us and her fast, shallow, labored breathing.
Bad Dreams
I wake up early. She did not. I decided to make breakfast. She rose as I finished preparing said breakfast. I am immediately questioned as to where I was when she was having a bad dream. She called for me, why didn’t I answer? She said my name several times what had happened.
Yes, exactly, no credit for making her breakfast. Absolutely, no gratitude for cooking the quietest breakfast in the world to allow her to sleep, which by the way was very late. As if I did not have any plans for the rest of my day which I did not but she didn’t know that.
It was not a complicated meal. I did not labour over popped poached eggs or the ratio between wet to dry ingredients for the full fluff of pancakes. It was a vegetarian version, in order to accommodate her dietary restrictions, of a chilaquiles recipe I had perfected from the age of fourteen. It is a meal I can and do cook while half asleep.
I cooked that breakfast slowly too, so she would catch me in the act in what I thought was a very romantic gesture but she just kept right on sleeping. And once she rose I was in trouble, because a grown woman had a bad dream.
Litter Bug
I am in her car. It is the Normandy beach landings equivalent of garbage. She apologizes for the debris of old fries from late night McDonald’s runs, layers of empty water bottles, old assignments from a school she did not even attend anymore. Honestly, I don’t really care.
It is Southern California and most people spend more time in their cars than in their actual homes, so there is an expectation that cars are going to get disorganized quickly. I understand that it is a small space, whatever.
She parks at our final destination and she starts to clean her car. Too little too late but it is endearing that she is trying.
I really did not mind the mess, it was how she dealt with it that my fondness of her started to diminish. Her process of cleaning her car was to just push the trash out of the car. Letting the limitless supply of dated copies of Cosmo, receipts and crumbs dusting every horizontal surface of her car hit the ground instead of taking it all to an actual trash can.
There was one available. Okay, so it was not an arm’s distance away but with our combined efforts it would have taken two trips at most to get the trash in its appropriate vessel. She just swipes it out straight onto the concrete. Her car was surrounded by a grimace inducing halo of months long accumulation of crap.
I offer to help to avoid the littering of public spaces and she brushes me off in some valiant effort of chivalry, which was a disorienting gesture because the real chivalrous maneuver would have been to have a clean car from the outset.
In that moment I am in conflict. I do not want to nag anyone especially a potential romantic partner. I am struggling between shaming her car cleaning habit versus trying to be a charming date that finds the whole situation terribly funny.
But as adult beings living on a slowly dying planet of our own making, other adults should not have to remind their peers that littering is unacceptable. It is destructive to an environment that is already in a bad way and ill-mannered first date etiquette.
Tweet us @Logosmag with your dealbreaker stories!
