He showed up sort of drunk on our first date.

It was a late Sunday morning, and he had apparently gone out partying hard the night before.

Nice.

It’s not like we had this date scheduled for a least one week before or anything. Oh, wait. We did.

And if his being drunk wasn’t bad enough, once we sat down for brunch in one of those overpriced London cafés where a small coffee costs five pounds and tastes like sewage, he told me something that really weirded me out.

He said he just had the best week ever, and when I asked him why, he replied, all excited and still slightly intoxicated even after gulping down one of those overpriced coffees — ‘I finally met my role model, Elon Musk.’

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Oh, no.

No, no, no.

I always could’ve picked worse

Look, in my defense — his online dating profile wasn’t the worst.

It really wasn’t.

He had no pictures posing with dead animals. Or guns. Or poor African children, probably taken during one of those weird white savior volunteer trips.

Instead, his main photo was just him hugging a big, fluffy dog.

Which I later found out wasn’t even his. He borrowed it to have a cute picture for his dating profile. And the remaining photos were just your typical straight guy in his 20s vibe — nothing unusual there.

He also didn’t have anything weird or creepy in his bio.

No ‘work hard, play harder’ quote. No mention of his height followed by ‘because apparently you girls like it, wink wink.’ No specification that he only dates women up until they’re 25 or 30.

Or up until they pass a certain number on a scale.

Yup, some men do put stuff like that on there. And a while back, there was even a guy who asked Tinder to introduce a ‘weight verification’ setting for women. Yikes.

But no, the guy I went out with that day genuinely seemed like a nice guy.

At least online.

Elon Musk is the coolest because memes

After mentioning ‘finally meeting Elon,’ he added that he didn’t actually meet him in real life but over a video call he had together with his superiors at Tesla. Yup, he worked there.

But although it was just a video meet-up, he was just so ecstatic to be able to see him on a little screen of someone else’s computer.

He even showed me a picture he took during that call to prove it. And you could see a small head there that could potentially belong to Elon. At least he wasn’t lying.

But I had to know — where is this obsession coming from? Why Elon Musk?

I could tell he got slightly offended when I asked him that.

‘He is a true visionary,’ he replied. An inspiration to us all. A hero. He is the only guy we can trust. The only person who can change this world for the better.

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And he posts the best memes.

Memes.

Right.

Call me crazy, but ‘posts good memes’ wouldn’t exactly make it to the top of my role model/hero checklist. That is if I had one. I don’t. I think that the godlike glorification of one individual is just silly.

Anyway.

I didn’t respond to his answer immediately. Still, a bit later during our date — we went for a walk to a nearby park — I asked him what he thought about Elon Musk threatening his factory workers that they would lose stock options if they unionized.

And he said those greedy workers shouldn’t complain about that. Of course. It’s the people who don’t avoid paying taxes and who earn in a year what Elon makes in a matter of minutes that are greedy and not the meme lord himself.

Makes sense. 

Is this really how the ‘nice guys’ are these days?

The worst thing about this guy wasn’t the fact that he liked Elon Musk. Or that worked at Tesla.

Although the former was definitely a red flag.

No, the worst thing was that he seemed to have zero emotional intelligence and empathy. And I really mean zero. None. He treated the waiter who served us like crap. He kept making fun of ‘odd-looking’ people in the street. He seriously lacked self-awareness.

And when I challenged some of his views, he acted like a toddler who was just denied sweets before dinner.

Every time the conversation drifted towards topics other than his work or how much he loves hockey — he was from Canada — he’d state his opinion loud and clear and then either didn’t listen to my reply, or if he did, and I said something he didn’t agree with, he’d get all defensive.

And then say I don’t know what I’m talking about.

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I’m not as knowledgeable as he is.

If I listened to guys like Elon more, I’d know how wrong I am.

Right.

If that date took place now and not a few years ago, I would just tell him he’s behaving like an a**hole and leave.

But instead of doing that, I said nothing and wondered — is this really how the ‘nice guys’ are these days?

After all, I’ve had far worse dates before. One time a guy I went out with punched a wall for no reason. And another time, a guy threatened to throw me under the bus if I didn’t have sex with him — while we were walking next to a busy street, I might add.

So in some ways, yes — he wasn’t that bad.

Maybe all the good men have just gone extinct

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the bar set for men these days is generally pretty low.

This is probably why I came home from the date with this Elon Musk superfan with mixed feelings. Maybe this is as good as it gets, I thought. Maybe decent men have gone extinct. Or never existed in the first place.

Maybe humans just suck, generally speaking.

That’s why the world is on fire.

That’s why inequalities keep rising.

And that’s why the likes of Elon Musk can go around being an absolute tw*t, and many people would still defend them to their death while their actions quite literally make this world a worse place.

Maybe we deserve whatever is coming next.

And all the good people are either dead or hiding away, equally disappointed with fellow humans.

So I went out on a couple more dates with him. But after a third one, I just didn’t want to do it anymore, and I told him so.

He didn’t take it well, as expected.

Of course.

A few months after that, and a few existential crises later, I went on a date with another guy I met online. But this time I wasn’t disappointed.

Quite the opposite.

And we’re still together today.

Although the world might seem full of people who couldn’t care less about others and who see no further than the end of their noses, not everyone is like that. And not every ‘nice guy’ is just a jerk in disguise.

And as long as empathetic, kind, and compassionate people still exist, maybe not all is lost just yet.

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Katie Jgln is a writer and activist whose work covers women’s rights issues, pop culture, and news. 

This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.