Some bad dates go down in history

I was talking with a woman at 10 Mercer the other night and, as often happens when I mention that I write about dating and singles issues, she began to regale me with stories of past bad dates. One guy was too rude, one guy was too married (after a while I swear it's like listening to a dating version of "Goldilocks"), and another guy asked her to meet him at a grocery store where instead of buying her a coffee, he tried to sell her vitamin supplements.

"It wasn't a date; it was some kind of pyramid scheme," she said. "Dating is just so weird these days. I wish things were simple like they used to be back in the good old days."

Ah, the good old days. When no one had to worry about deceitful agendas or 10-year-old profile photos or married sharks swimming around in the online singles sea.

What a bunch of malarkey. At least that's what Minnie Humphries might say.

A cute 30-something single from Lincoln, Neb., Minnie began corresponding with George Hoagland, a handsome young doctor from New Jersey, after running across his profile in one of those newfangled dating thingamajigs. The two exchanged notes and photos and seemed to totally click, especially when George asked Minnie to head east so they could take things to the next level. Excited, she packed a bag, hopped on a train (hey, she was an old-fashioned kind of gal) and before long, she was stepping onto the platform where George said he'd meet her. She scanned the crowd looking for the man she hoped would be her future husband and then swallowed hard as a white-haired septuagenarian hobbled her way, a picture clutched in his hand.

Horrified, she realized the picture was of her.

"Minnie?" he asked, his rheumy eyes twinkling.

"Uh, George?" she replied, her stomach dropping like a freshly greased guillotine.

If you've been on a bad online date before, I'm sure you recognize the scenario. But this little drama took place in 1904, when singles sought each other out through matrimonial ads in newspapers like The Correspondent, The Matrimonial Register, The Wedding Bell, and The Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser.And then, as now, many ran into characters like dear old George, who had no qualms about posing as a doctor when he was actually a carpenter or fobbing off a 40-year-old photo as au courant, since spinsters (as most single women over 22 were then known) weren't really in a position to quibble.

Of course, things could have been worse. Consider Julia Reis.

In 1903, this 24-year-old New York waitress stumbled upon a matrimonial advertisement that read: "Young man, bright, refined and ambitious, desires to meet young woman who has a little money of her own. I have a good position, but need a good little wife to help matters along; girl must be refined and gentle."

Your standard Gilded Age dreamboat, right?

Julia thought so, so she dropped the fellow a note. Within hours, he swooped in, flowers and chocolates in hand, and after just two dates, she was not only engaged but touring a pretty little cottage that her brand new fiancé, Charles, had just bought for the two of them.

A week later, Julia met dear Charles outside City Hall, where she dutifully handed over her entire life savings of $700 (standard operating procedure for brides back in the day). He ducked inside to "arrange for the mayor to conduct their wedding ceremony" and that was the last she saw of him (although she did revisit "their" cottage shortly before going to the police station, where she learned her betrothed hadn't bought the place so much as rented it for the day).

Like many others before her, Julia had fallen for a "matrimonial swindler," a con artist devoted exclusively to bilking the lovelorn of their hard-earned cash. Tales of these smooth operators -- some of whom would marry and mulct 40 or 50 times -- filled the newspapers from the early 1900s well into the 1940s.

Not that romance scamming was strictly a man's game. In 1913, police arrested two Long Island women who systematically swindled dozens of bachelors out of their savings by placing matrimonial ads in various newspapers and then milking every respondent of railroad fare and an imaginative array of "travel expenses."

All of which is to say the simple good old days of dating weren't all that good or all that simple after all. Just like today, they were fraught with all kinds of complications -- and all kinds of creeps -- although when you consider the economic hardships of the '30s, the war losses of the '40s, the double standards of the '50s and the really bad hair of the '60s, '70s and '80s, you might argue singles are much better off now than they ever were.

Granted, we're still wrestling with issues like sexuality and gender and who the hell is supposed to pay for what. And, yes, there are still a few jokers who lie about their ages or their agendas or the fact they've got a spouse and six kids sitting in a Winnebago outside the Starbucks where you're having coffee.

But we have one thing going for us that Minnie and Julia and the rest of them didn't have back in those so-called good old days: options.

Nobody has to marry anymore -- not for financial survival, not to create a family and certainly not for sex -- which means none of us has to turn a blind eye to those flapping red flags or funky personality traits and settle for whatever comes down the pike.

Sure, dating these days can be weird and full of annoying characters -- the slimy vitamin salesman, the socially inept computer programmer, the smart-alecky singles columnist -- but the next time you're tempted to wax poetic about the good old days, remember they were also a time when a wretchedly bad date didn't culminate in a funny cocktail story with your friends as often as it did a lifelong commitment, for better or worse.

And thank your lucky stars those days are history.