Kim Wetter

A Date with a Mute Girl

I struggled with whether or not to write about this for quite some time. Morality or something kept on telling me that it wasn’t right. Luckily, I’m easily peer pressured. So here it is, in all its glory, the story of the mute girl:

As many of you know, I’m on OKcupid. Many of you might also know that I hate it. The selection is slim and, lezbehonest, I don’t translate well online (har har, look at this blog). One night, I sat down determined to find some cute ladies to message. That night I messaged five girls. I had four responses (3 dead ends) and of those four, there was a girl things seemed to be going well with.

From what I remember of her profile, she was small, cute, and eastern European. In her profile, she made a lot of jokes about world domination but who doesn’t make world domination jokes?

We message back and forth for a while and finally she asks me if I’d like to go to coffee. I agree. She responds back that she normally waits for the other person to bring it up because of, you know, the mute thing.

Mute thing? Excuse me? Color me confused.

How did I manage to set up a date with a mute girl? I went back to visit her profile and there was a line near the top that read “I’m empathetic, thoughtful and aphastic” or something along those lines. I knew two out of three words and what they meant. The third word, a curveball, nicely tucked in the self descriptive sentence, I had to look up. It means mute.

Well shit. Now what?

I figured I had to do it. I’ve never met a mute person before and considering how much I talk, it seems like a bad match, but whatever, I couldn’t back out now. I’d already agreed and that would be rude. Plus, who knows, it might be good for me to have to stop and wait for someone else to give a response. Then maybe I’d actually think before I speak.

We scheduled the date for a Thursday. I was going to meet her at a coffee shop in West Seattle. The night before, I was at trivia and everyone was imagining how horribly this would go. I’d talk the whole time and inevitably continuously stick my foot in my mouth. They asked me to pull up her profile on OKcupid so they could see how I missed something as obvious as mutism.

Turns out, she had updated her profile. The original elusive sentence remained but she had put in a lot more about how she was mute and relied heavily on sign language. But there’s more…

Upon further investigation, we learned:

She doesn’t like people that swear excessively
She doesn’t like people that make crude jokes
She doesn’t like people that are too full of themselves
She likes people who would be into a “triad” relationship

Well fuck.

If you know me, you know I’m the opposite of all those things. I’m a self-obsessed romantic who swears and makes crude jokes. This was going to go even worse than I thought.

The day of the date, I texted her a confirmation. I then asked if it would be a problem that I didn’t speak sign language and she told me she had a tablet that she could write on. She then told me that she could speak to people that she had known for a while or people she trusted. And sometimes she could whisper.

I made some jokes about being in speech therapy for a while and that was that. We were all set up and it was going to happen.

An hour and a half beforehand, she texted me to ask if we could reschedule. She didn’t want to go out in the rain.

Phew.

The next day, I decided it would be best to send her a link to my blog. That way, she’d learn that she wouldn’t want to date me before we actually went on any date.

That was three weeks ago. I haven’t heard from her since.