Bad Dates – Monologue (Haley)

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A monologue from the play by Theresa Rebeck

HALEY (late thirties – early forties)

Bad Dates is a hilarious one-woman play about a woman who’s decided to re-enter the dating scene but who is having one bad experience after another. Haley is talking directly to the audience.

So I’m like, OK, this is just a date that’s not going to work out. That’s obvious and it’s not the end of the world, frankly, I didn’t actually think the first guy I went out with would be “the one for me” or anything like that,

I was just trying to go on a date. So I’m OK with the fact that this is largely pretty damn stupid. And then, there’s actually a point in the evening where having completely given up on this guy I sort of perversely got interested in his story.

He starts talking about his ex-girlfriend. And the more he talks about her, the clearer it becomes that he’s still, really, kind of in love with her. And the more I listen to him,

the more I realize that this is more or less a first date for him, too, he’s recently broken up with this woman he really loved, and now he’s trying to get back on the horse. And this thought honestly makes me feel a little warmly toward him,

I sense that we are fellow travelers. And so I say to him, as a fellow traveler, well, why did you break up? And he tells me this story about how — that your relationship with a person is like a movie.

That when you’re in a relationship, you see the movie, in your head, and that you need to see how the rest of the movie is going to go. And he realized that he couldn’t see where the movie was going.

He didn’t know the end of the movie, with this woman. So he had to break up with her. And he looked so sad. Meanwhile, I’m listening to this, and trying to understand, so I say, What do you mean, a movie?

And he goes through the whole thing again, about looking for the end of the movie, and your life with someone, and the relationship, and the end of the movie, so I say, you mean like death?

Looking for the end of the movie, you’re thinking about dying? And he says, No no no, it’s not about death. It’s about the End of the Movie. And we go around in circles like that for a while,

and finally I say to him, I don’t know, is it possible that you broke up with the woman you loved because of some insane metaphor? And then he got mad at me. I don’t blame him.

I definitely was getting too personal. And I honestly had a moment when I thought, if you’re siding with the guy’s ex-girlfriend? It’s not a good date. So then things were uncomfortable,

and they kind of went from bad to worse, and by the end of the evening we were really annoyed with each other, and I let him stick his tongue in my mouth, anyway.

Read the play here

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