Meet a Meet Market Survivor: A Queen Worst Comes Clean

I re-introduce you to Jenny, who is about to be vindicated in a big way.

Jenny, as it stands, is our "Queen Worst the II", a label given because Jenny seemed to have conducted herself very rudely on a date with a nice man, therefore ruining the date and making the man question his noble purpose in pursuing romance. This type of bad behavior does not go unpunished 'round these parts: I gave her that awful nickname, printed the words "Jenny sucks," and openly pronounced that she deserved a case of genital crabs.

Thanks to Gawker (note: contradicting anyone's misperception of my sarcasm, I know exactly what it is; I'm as obsessed with it as much as I am with the Meet Market), my harsh criticism of Queen Worst the II was pushed directly into the heart of the Internet media complex, along with every other criticizing word in this blog since last September. So, it was only fair that I respond to Jenny when she left a note on the original entry that criticized her, herself describing a date experience that mostly contradicts the official report in the Post.

It's easy to disbelieve anything printed in the Post: just ask Dick Gephardt. Still, this was rather incredulous. Did Red Ryan, our reluctant hero (well, he wasn't the reluctant one; I was reluctant to make him the hero after reading his sad-sack story), indeed fabricate many of the key details that night to discredit Jenny after a date that did not go entirely as he expected?

Well, somewhat, but not entirely, as I would find out.

I had my initial doubts. For one, someone supposedly named "Jenny" responded to one of my blog entries, and did so in a rather anonymous way. For all I know, I could have been pranked. Second, we were proceeding into he-said-she-said territory, and who am I to declare the truth when I wasn't present for the date? Third, I truly hate backpedaling. I wished she simply had left a "Fuck you" message so that I could return the favor and get back to eating Corn Pops straight out of the box.

Still, I had to assume this was the real deal, and that I was being served notice of yet another interesting twist in the Meet Market column on a silver platter. How could I not sink my teeth into this? And, unlike Emily, my last interviewee, Jenny had actually gone out on a date sponsored by the Post and experienced the entire selection and rating process. I needed to know about all of this! My curiosity exploded like a gasoline truck dropped onto a dynamite factory. I just had to hear everything. This would be better than sex. (sort of an unexpected result when you're obsessed with a dating column. Or, as Foxy Jess called it, a "fucking column". Anyway...)

I led off with a sincere clarification - that is, I admitted that this blog was completely non-factual in relating the real-life stories behind every Meet Market column participant and blind date situation (and that’s the honest truth). I only believed Jenny did wrong to Ryan because it had been published in the Post, and the basis of my writing were facts that were only as good as the Post’s reputation for complete and unbiased information. (I’m cackling as I type this. Is this a cheap stab at the Post again? Let’s use a shotgun this time; all the New York papers have had recent credibility disasters. I could have written that Jenny also won Scratch n’ Match.)

Also, I said I’d retract the Queen Worst title; starting now, each of you reading this blog should now consider that designation completely nullified. I added that I never seriously hoped that anyone would catch a case of crabs for any reason. I then moved the conversation into email, where I groveled some more and invited her for an interview over a free cup of coffee to "set the record straight". She agreed, and we were in a Starbucks on the Upper East Side the very next morning to discuss exactly what went wrong and why she did not deserve all this negative attention.

(above: Jenny and I meet together)

Let me tell you about Jenny: she is a nice, polite young woman, originally from Dix Hills, NY, who currently lives in Manhattan and works as an assistant in the television industry. She spends a good deal of time with friends, often in bars, much like any other woman her age in Manhattan. She dates actively, participates in social events geared toward matching singles, and is looking to find a great man - and maybe a part of herself along the way. She is a friendly person who has a down-to-earth outlook on life; she does not carry herself with pretension or willful ignorance. She is intelligent, thoughtful, and daring. She is generally a happy person, easy to like and easy to please.

She is human, though, and makes mistakes. She is sometimes afraid of hurting other people's feelings, but can also be afraid of messing up her own life in revealing the truth when needed. She's afraid of being "too nice" and not direct enough with hopeful (or disappointing) romantic partners. She's young and vulnerable. At times, when we discussed something she did that could have been done better, she hid her face in her hands and made a regretful sound as if everything wrong in the world was coming down on top of her. Like many young people in New York, she is progressing, but not quite finished maturing.

Presented with the real life Jenny, it was apparent to me that she is not the monster that I made her out to be. That was a relief, not only because I wish not to find women like that in New York, but also because I wasn't tricked into this meeting just to pay for a Green Tea Frappuccino that would be dumped on my head in return for the insults. She really did wish to set the record straight.

Which brings us to that fateful night.

The restaurant portion of the date was fairly harmless, although certainly not ideal. Jenny's worst accusation is that Ryan tried some funny leg-touching business with his hands while the Post's freelance photographer was trying to get a shot to use in the resulting article. Given that things didn't really get worse than that overall, I'd have to say that the meal wasn't an overall disaster, but it wasn't exactly comfortable either. Jenny admits that, from the beginning, she did not really find sparks between herself and Ryan, which was due to (a lack of) physical attraction and mental connection. Apparently, Ryan's not as interesting and sharp-witted as Jenny would like, and she attributes this to the difference between being raised on Long Island and being raised in the Midwest. (sure, that's an unfair shot on Ryan's Midwest origins, but it's true that those are starkly different backgrounds). Jenny fully confesses that, as mentioned in the original article, she ran a half-hour late to the date and needed to call in ahead of time to let Ryan know. There was some pleasant smalltalk throughout the date, except at the point when Ryan mentioned a friend's observation that Jenny looked crazy in the pictures provided by the Post for review. That was indeed unflattering for Jenny, and quite stupid of Ryan to mention.

Jenny also admits that details after this are a little hazy, which might be due to servings of a strong liqueur that followed the main courses – and that she consumed a fairly large meal that made her tired in the first place. Still, all parties seem to have been lucid following the restaurant portion of the date. What followed, in a nutshell, was this: Ryan continued to accompany Jenny further into the night even as Jenny was rather weary of continuing the date, and Jenny protested only in subtle ways. She was not direct with him, but she did try to weasel out of the date by pretending that she had met a usual friend at the bar (when, in fact, this "friend" was someone who was a just familiar bar patron who she cajoled into posing as a friend). It seems that Ryan, however, took a very long time to "get the hint."

He did buy her a rose out on the street along the way, but failed to mention the fact that he asked her for the money to buy it first without telling her what it was for. This situation sounds very, very lame.

What followed that night is the part that is of most importance to Jenny's overall forgiveness. Ryan apparently called her a bunch of times after the date to ask her out again, and she did not return his calls. That was boorish behavior on her behalf, which she admits, and it would have been best to let Ryan know directly that she did not wish to continue seeing him romantically. But Ryan then committed a heinous foul: he changed his opinion of Jenny as a reflection of his disappointment in not being received well by her, and then delivered a scathing (and somewhat pathetic) assessment of his blind date to Tom, Mackenzie, and the Post's entire Sunday circulation. Dirty pool, my fellow man. Jenny, in the meantime, tried to take the high road with her own assessment and left out the scathing criticisms in favor of a rather bland recollection of the experience. That was her final mistake; the Post ran what they had, and it didn't make Jenny look good at all.

Ryan somehow continued this show of lameness in a subsequent encounter, but the details of that incident are hardly relevant. You just need to know that Ryan is clueless, cloying, and clumsy if you are to at all believe Jenny's account of the evening. As for Jenny, she knows in her heart and mind that she was clumsy herself, if only to try to avoid an unpleasant ending to an already disappointing evening. She had tried to justify it to herself, but she did the face-in-hands thing when I confronted her with it.

As I said earlier, Jenny makes mistakes. Each of us would hope not to be publicly crucified for our own mistakes the way Jenny was for her own. I found enough contrition in her recounting of the event to accept her sympathetically. I also engaged her with a lot of amusing and interesting conversation, and she seemed like a very nice and polite person; this leads me to believe that she would not have done these things in better conditions.

Now, the Meet Market dirt:

* She applied through the contest form on the website; no Friendster necessary.

* She at first got along really well with Mackenzie over the phone; they even discussed hair salons. You know, girl talk stuff. Apparently, this didn't continue after the date.

* A check mistakenly arrived at the end of the meal, and was soon afterward retracted by the management with sincere apologies. This was not before they had a look at the bill, which was around $200 before tip (a price Jenny balked at). This is what two young twentysomethings get when they win a contest from the Post! That’s excessive, don’t you think? Meanwhile, Ryan was so pleased with his free meal that he childishly bragged about it to everyone, during and afterward.

* "Imaging specialist" roughly means photocopier salesman in Ryan-speak.

* The questionnaire after the date includes questions about the meal and atmosphere at the restaurant. As with the profiles, responses are printed almost verbatim without the questions, just as I suspected. And Tom, who called almost two weeks after the date to provide the questionnaire, wanted the answers emailed rather than spoken.

* The Post is apparently desperate for worthy participants. (oooh oooh oooh!)

* And Ryan, it is rumored, might get a second chance at picking a date! (ick!)

Obviously, I got my coffee's worth out of this meeting.

We parted, and it left me pondering what this means for all of us. I've now seen up close that we truly have no idea what's going on behind the scenes at these dates. As I said in my original "clarification," this is a he-said-she-said story and I'd like to believe both of them, yet would be naive to fully accept either story. True, Jenny's story sounds more plausible because she doesn't contradict Ryan's unflattering facts about her behavior – yet did Jenny make any other mistakes that weren’t mentioned? Naturally, this applies to every other story we've heard about every date (except for Pamela and Ian, who, according to the freelance photographer by way of Jenny, really do love each other to pieces and spend lots of time together). I now need to consider a whole world of deeper possible motivations when reviewing a date gone wrong - unless I choose instead to continue being a callous bastard. (Yeah, probably.) And, from a wider point of view, we can see more ways in which love's fragile house of cards can fall apart. This both saddens and fascinates me.

Love is not nearly as fascinating as all this dirt on the Meet Market column, though! How crazy is all of this? I've met with TWO participants in the contest now, and I have all the inside info I could ever want, and then some. We have a Queen Worst dethroned, plus a BRAND NEW KING WORST in Ryan! Yes, it's Vikas no more! And we might have a sitting king reappear in the column, which should be LOADS of fun!

Soon, we’ll hear from two more Meet Market participants. One is Dena. The other: myself.