Page 18 of Experiments in Offline Dating

“Oh, thank God. Yes, please! Um. What do you recommend?”

“Well.” He was already standing, as if he hadn’t expected to have to wait for an answer. My eyes darted to his crotch. “This place is a brewery, and a good one. I like the Burren Blond.”

“What’s that taste like?”

His weight shifted. He was getting fed up again. But he took a second and answered evenly. “Well, it’s a lager, with a hoppy—”

“Nope! Don’t like hops. Hate ’em, actually! Tastes like liquefied potpourri. Huuc!” I mimed vomiting, because that seemed like the best choice for ultimate sex appeal. “Am I right?”

He ran a hand over his face. I looked at his crotch again.

He sighed. “Right. I’ll just ask the staff to pick something. I’m sure it hardly matters.”

He left before I could say anything else stupid. I hunched my back and ripped more paper.

Wow. He couldn’t stand me. I’d barely said anything yet. I hadn’t even mentioned the megacolon. This has gotta be a new record.

Then my hands stilled mid-rip.

Wait. One. Minute. I knew what this was!

So maybe I wasn’t good at picking up on social cues, but I was good at research, and I had researched what I could about Irish culture, dating, and social interactions before I’d left. Irish people were famously rude to people they liked—like their closest friends—or when they were flirting. Flirting!

The one TikTok guy, Garron Noone, said that “if an Irish person respects you, they’ll greet you with devastating insults that make you wish you were dead before you were even alive.”

That’s probably why Tiger was so rude to Jackie too!

I had watched a whole stand-up comedy routine by the hilarious Aisling Bea about two Irish people flirting where the guy said that the woman had tumbleweeds rolling around in her womb, and she said that the guy’s penis was so small that instead of a condom, he had to empty out half of a vitamin E capsule and put that on his penis and could still get his pinkie around the circumference . . . and then they moved in together!

Aisling—an Irish woman—had said that there was no way to tell the difference between Irish flirting and verbal abuse!

Okay! Okay! Okay!

I sat up a little straighter and recalibrated. Protocol for Irish Banter:

Objective: Banter it up!

1. If banter is detected, attempt to match vibe.

2. Energy allotted to this task shall be directly and positively correlated to interest levels.

3. Extreme interest can be exhibited most clearly by escalating banter levels, or “one-upping” the participant in question (see fig. 2).

I could totally do this. This was easy! I was going to be great at this! Snark was my usual modus operandi. Maybe Ireland was the only country in the world where I could be good at dating! Tige, or whatever the hell his name was, wouldn’t know what hit him! I was going to flirt him like he’d never been flirted before!

Chapter 5 An Experiment in Tasting Assholes and Finding Them Surprisingly Bitter

By the time he came back to the table, I may as well have been in chain mail, I was so ready for battle.

He plunked down my pint.

I looked at it, then at his crotch.

“Thanks,” I said, then remembered I was supposed to be rude. “Least you could do.”

“Excuse me?”

I raised my eyebrows and sipped.