Steph Not Stephanie

I went on a pretty good date the other night. I know, I was surprised too! Although the funny/awful ones tend to get more space here, good dates do happen from time to time. Don’t worry, since it’s me there was obviously a bit of a comedic shit show involved. 

I received a message on OK Cupid from a gentleman stating he thought I was smart and cute and we should chat again. Having just deleted a bunch of messages (I was running out of room, the most StephNotStephanie problem ever), I had no record of our prior conversation. However, flattery will get you everywhere, so we started talking again. 

Fast forward a couple days to Drunk Steph at a wedding rehearsal at Canoe: The evening was winding down and I was not. I messaged this young man and he was game to get a spontaneous drink. We met at my local, and had a great time. There was just one issue: I had no fucking clue what his name was. There may have been a moment when he first reached out again for me to say, ‘Sorry I have the memory of a goldfish. Can you remind me of your name?’ That ship sailed long before I invited him out for a drink. 

We did the ‘I had a great time, let’s exchange numbers’ thing after, so I couldn’t even have him enter his info into my phone. I added him as Maybe Bob? as a placeholder and decided to crowdsource the best way out of this little pickle. 

Turns out I have very creative friends. Suggestions included:

• Going to Starbucks so they would ask his name 
• Fake meeting friends so they would introduce themselves and hope he did the same 
• Stealing his wallet
• Playing ‘who has a worse passport picture’
• Saying I lost all my contacts (aka ‘new phone, who dis?’)
• Calling him the wrong name for a correction and saying he reminds me of a friend/cousin/ex-roommate’s brother with that name
• Get a poem describing him using each letter of his name 
• Asking correct pronouciation 
• Using iMessage on my laptop and saying my contacts weren’t synced 

In the end I decided to just cop to what a hot mess I am and hope he saw the humour. Thank fuck fortune favours the bold. Not only did he not judge me, he didn’t know my name either. Apparently we didn’t even exchange names during our initial conversation. He then suggested we try to guess each other’s names. Totally normal post-date activity. 

He initially guessed Christa, which was a total shot in the dark. His next guess was Sophia, at which point I realized we would be at this for a long time without clues. With my helpful hints, he got Stephanie on the third guess. I tried Jacob and then Xavier after he said his was quite unusual, and he let me off the hook by just telling me. We’ll call him Ursa for the blog, but rest assured there was not a chance in hell I ever would’ve guessed. I asked if there was a unique story behind his unique name, and apparently his parents created it out of leftover scrabble tiles while pregnant. My own name story (the actress of a popular husband and wife detective show in the 80’s) is decidedly less cute, but when he asked if I’ve solved any mysteries, I replied that I now knew his name. Maybe they were onto something.