What cologne does one wear on a date? Smell can make or break a date, let me tell you. I walked into the coffee shop to meet my second date of the weekend with high hopes that this guy was going to be a good time. We had communicated a bit via text and phone and he had a solid personality, a career in real estate development, had been divorced for a while and seemed pretty confident, a quality I have been finding more and more attractive lately. He walked into the coffee shop and I recognized him from his photos. He was a little shorter than I expected but had impressive arms and flashed me a smile of very nice teeth. He walked over confidently leaned in to give me a hug, and this is where the date took a nosedive. Yep, it was over, before he even finished the hug, I knew I needed to get the heck out of that coffee shop. Why you ask? What in the world could he have done? I’ll tell you exactly what he did, he wore my ex-husband’s cologne. That was it. Game over, I couldn’t even focus on getting to know him because every cell in my being smelled familiarity and this man was now linked, olfactorily at least, to my ex. His smell was so distracting and elicited such a somatic reaction there was no amount of charm this man could turn up to rebound from this epic fail he didn’t even know he committed.
I sat through the date as long as I could, 45 minutes later I told him I needed to run to my next appointment and flippantly mentioned him “taking care”. He texted 30 minutes later asking if I’d like to join him for dinner, he couldn’t stop thinking about me. Ugh, what do I tell him!? Take a shower and throw out that cologne as it just cock blocked you in the worst way ever?? How do you even explain that to a guy? I opted to tell him “I didn’t feel like we had any physical chemistry” a line I had been using a lot lately for a blanket of reasons why I didn’t think I wanted to date the guy.
Ultimately I decided not to tell him anything. Some people may say I could have been missing out on a good connection just because of a poor choice in cologne that day, but it didn’t feel right to me. One of the things I have learned post divorce is just to be me. I don’t want anyone trying to change me and I don’t want to have to change anyone either. He needs to find a woman that enjoys all parts of him, including his taste in cologne and I wasn’t her.