5 Win a Date with a Professional Tennis Player

When I was a senior in high school, I met this guy named Marcel through a mutual friend. Marcel was a year older than me and looked like the soccer coach from the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Needless to say, Marcel was extremely physically attractive. His level of physical attractiveness was what originally drew me to Marcel (I know, I know, but everyone can be a little shallow sometimes). He also seemed to be a really nice guy, so when he asked me out for a dinner date, I was thrilled. Soon after, we decided to be exclusive. A few weeks later, Marcel had to go back to Miami. See – Marcel is a professional tennis player and trained in Miami for the better part of the year. He lived in Long Island whenever he caught a break from training and tournaments.

At first, this arrangement didn’t bother me at all. I mean, he promised that he would come home every three weeks or less to see me, and at first he did. It was great every time he was home. I enjoyed spending time with him, and when I couldn’t see him, I would speak to him on the phone almost every night of the week. Obviously, I preferred seeing him to speaking to him. There is always some level of reassurance as to why you care about a person and why you committed to them when you are physically with them.

Eventually, distance got the better of me and Marcel’s relationship and we stopped talking as frequently. He was always traveling. He used to be the one who called me all the time, but as time went on, I started calling him more. I missed him a lot and he was always preoccupied with tennis. To top it off, his trainer, Dale, was a real jerk. Whenever Marcel was working out or playing a game, Dale would pick up Marcel’s cell phone and rudely tell me to learn his training schedule, and hang up. Because Marcel was so far, Dale’s frequent hang-ups made Marcel seem that much farther away.

Marcel was scheduled to go on a tour of Asia a few months after we started dating, and I didn’t feel like dealing with the physical separation of him being halfway around the world. I called him up right before he was supposed to leave. Of course, Dale picked up the phone. I had been apart from Marcel for so long that I didn’t feel too guilty about ending our relationship through Dale, since Dale refused to put Marcel on the phone. I didn’t speak to Marcel for months after we broke up. It was definitely for the best that I ended things before he went away for a few months. While he was certainly attractive, and had other great, less shallow qualities, it was not enough to beat the incredibly powerful force of proximity. Oh, and one more thing totally unrelated; I clearly didn’t like Dale at all, and I found out after me and Marcel broke up from Marcel’s brother that Dale used to be a porn star. I find it funny.