@steinman I like that "first date" idea. I might have to figure out how I can work that one out, sometime.
I never really "dated," per se. I met my first "serious" girlfriend online through a friend, she stayed with me long-distance all through boot camp, until I realized that there just wasn't... anything there. Like she was a check mark on a list of things "to do" (so to speak - she was a good little Christian girl, and I mean that with absolutely no sarcasm, she was a sweetheart), and the giddiness from the initial phase of the relationship wore off to show that I didn't have any feelings to back it up.
So I did the honest thing and told her.
It.... did not go well.
I puttered around for a while after that, met a girl who I thought was pretty cute at Starbucks while I was working at the Mall. We met for coffee a couple times, then she took me back to her place... her parents place.
It went for a while, we did okay together. Then one day she told me that she quit taking her anti-depressant, cold turkey. She had been on Paxil, which in my experience through the department has shown me to have some of the most serious side-effects when one quits taking it.
She went completely around the twist. After I got activated, she broke up with me (on Valentine's Day, right when I thought I was getting geared up for deployment - classy), then tried to extort money and a laptop from my sister, who was living with me at the time. The sister who carries a large pipe wrench for personal protection.
When I was hanging out with a buddy in the Corps, we goofed around with accents at a bar, just playing around, not really going anywhere with it - his was Irish, mine was Scottish. The only one who bit on it was the bartender, who asked where we were from. Glenn said, in his best County Cork accent "He's from Scotland... I'm German." We had a lot of fun together, Glenn and I.
My wife, I met in the Corps. Time with her was about the only time I've "dated," and even that was pretty non-standard. When she got discharged, she didn't really have anywhere to go, so I invited her to live with me. Bear in mind that we'd only been going out for a year at this point, and that was almost entirely long-distance, too.
I wouldn't know what to do with the standard "dinner-and-drinks" date if it was gift-wrapped to me.