Tuesday, 16 December 2008

• How My Romantic Plans Became An Epic Fail

  This is a guest blog submitted by roadlesstaken.
  

  In my previous Datingish post "Things I Miss About Being in a Relationship", you may remember my mentioning something about an a cappella surprise I planned for an ex that ended up not working out. I don't remember if I ever wrote about it when that happened a couple of years ago because I was so disappointed at myself for not pulling it off.  Previously, all my other silly romantic plans I'd concocted went as planned, so I was extremely confident heading in.  How could I have known all the extra variables that were going to show up to rain on my parade (literally)?

  I don't remember why I decided one day to do this, but perhaps it was after watching Love Actually (which, btw, was also where I got my idea for the thing I did to win my ex back later on in the relationship, but that's a story for another time .  Hint: it was similar to what went on in the Love Actually scene above). There was a scene in the beginning where all those band people popped out of nowhere to play "All You Need Is Love" at Keira Knightley's character's wedding. 
  

  "Hmm, that seems like a good idea!" I thought, so I went out to prepare for this surprise.

  Initial Plan:

  First thing was to figure out who would be the ones to pop up to sing for my then-girlfriend.  At the beginning, I was actually thinking about doing it myself.  I had even talked to two friends of mine who agreed to play guitar and violin while I sang Collide by Howie Day.  I quickly scratched this route because...well, no one wants to hear me sing, haha.

  Instead, I decided to ask my college's all male a cappella group to sing for her. Apparently, I was the first person to ever ask them to do something like this, so they agreed for the hell of it.  So far so good.
  

  I gave my girlfriend an alibi for coming up to my college. I forgot what it was, but it involved meeting up with a few friends at my student union first before heading out. When she walked into the cafeteria area, I would give a signal to the a cappella group to come out from random places.  I wanted as many people to be there to make it even more embarrassing for my girlfriend, so I figure I would get a lot of my commuter friends to hang out at the cafeteria when this happened. After the group had finished their love song medley, I would take her out for a lovely date instead of going out with a group of friends.  Perfect!

  [Puts on a gleefully evil smile] 

  Or so I thought.

  What Actually Happened:

  A lot of the guys in the a cappella group had to be somewhere afterwards, so they could only perform between 4 and 4:30 p.m. Now, that wouldn't normally be bad, but my girlfriend had to drive from her college to mine, which takes about 45 minutes without traffic.  Her last class ended around 3 p.m. that day, so the time table was very small. What made matters worse was that the heavens decided to open up and pour, which, in turn, created tons of traffic.

  You starting to see where this was heading?  As 4 slowly turned into 4:30, everyone I got to take part in this surprise was growing restless. I kept on telling them, "she'll be here any minute!" but alas, that didn't happen.  The group ended up just doing a few performances for the crowd (because they were already all there) and left around 4:30, but not before the main guy put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a sullen "sorry, man" face. I guess I wasn't doing a great job hiding my disappointment.

  She ended up arriving close to 5; as I waited outside in the rain for her, I was debating whether or not I should tell her what had just happened. I ended up telling her after I couldn't come up with an alibi for why we weren't meeting up with friends anymore. She felt pretty bad about missing the surprise, but she still felt extremely appreciative of me anyway for going through all the trouble to plan that surprise for her. She later told her parents about it, which gave me a lot of brownie points with them.  So yeah, it wasn't a total loss, I suppose. 

  Maybe one day I'll try something like that again.  I pretty sure I'm foolish enough that I would try something like that a second time, haha.  At least I know now what to watch out for next time!

  Have you ever experienced an epic fail romantic plan similar to this?

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