The Un-trainable Trainer

One of my favorite bloggers contributed this today! You can follow her other stories here and here.

From an early age, my mother taught me the importance of being well-groomed and always looking presentable.

When I was in college, I dated a guy who wore unattractive jeans (like not a good-looking wash) and old 80s hair metal band shirts. No, not the vintage-y kinds from Urban Outfitters. I’m talking about the kind that you can get from Target for $5. And they had holes in them from wear and tear. And they were faded. I eventually trained him to look nicer by introducing him to the American Eagle store. Baby steps.

Flash forward a few years, and I’m a single girl living in San Francisco. After I moved into a bigger building, I kept running into a really, really hot tall guy, and he’d smile at me every time and say hi. I’d smile back and then continue on with my life, because everyone knows that someone this attractive is definitely not going to be a “nice guy.” He liked my dog, so I think he used that as an “in” to every conversation we ever had. Our conversations were pretty limited, and they included him telling me his name, which I would promptly forget, resulting in me asking him and the doorman multiple times what his name was. How embarrassing.

Finally one day he told me that he wanted to hang out. That’s nice, sure. We’re neighbors. So we hung out, and I noticed that every single time I ran into him in the building and whenever we hung out, he’d be wearing sweatpants.

Oh, he’s a personal trainer. That’s understandable.

One night, we went to dinner after work. He’s a picky eater, and I eat everything, so I let him choose. OSHA Thai in SOMA? Sounds great. Meet you downstairs in 10 minutes.

When he showed up in the garage, I thought I was going to die. He was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a zip-up sweatshirt. I was wearing nice jeans and a top I’d worn to work (read: nice). I finally decided to ask if he owned anything besides sweatpants.

“Yeah, but no one’s ever seen me in non-sweats. I have about 70 pairs of sweatpants.”

Okay. Psycho.

I wrote this wardrobe mishap off as a one-time thing, because you know, it was late, we’d both been working a full day, yadda yadda.

Then one morning, he wanted to go have brunch. What does he wear? Another pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. This is getting kind of ridiculous, especially since we were in a super cute restaurant.

It was at that moment that I decided that dressing this guy was going to be an unattainable goal. It was actually borderline mortifying to be seen out in a nice restaurant with someone in sweats and sneakers. This project wasn’t worth tackling, despite his cute face.

I didn’t need to tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore; he was eventually arrested for threatening an ex-girlfriend, and then he was forced to move out of the building due to his sketchy record. Stay classy.