“After my heterosexual date took me to a queer bar, I went home with another woman”

Welcome to Kiss and Tell, a series about the steamy, surprising and frequently absurd world of Toronto dating. Send your most memorable stories from the pursuit of love and lust in the city to submissions@torontolife.com.

—As told to Juliann Garisto

I wasn’t looking to date anyone when I met Raffy. I was content with my job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic (where I now work as a technician). I had a healthy amount of social activity with my friends from college. My cup was full. I only downloaded Hinge because my parents had started hinting at an arranged marriage with a family friend I hadn’t seen since I was a child. I knew they would never force me to go through with it, but they were clearly anxious about my being single, which made me anxious. I lied and told them I was seeing someone but that we’d only been on a few dates. Thus began my search for a suitable boyfriend.

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I met Raffy not long after downloading Hinge. He was 32, but he looked like he was still in his 20s—in a cute, endearing way. I thought he had nice teeth. He was also Indian, like me, which was a plus. When he messaged me on the app, he cracked jokes about our culture that made me laugh and feel seen. He could tell from my photos that I’d been raised traditionally, so he messaged accordingly. A lot of his jokes revolved around parental expectations: in response to the photo of me in full Indian attire, from sari to bindi, he said something about his parents winning the daughter-in-law lottery. He stood out.

After around three days of messaging back and forth, Raffy asked me out. He suggested we meet at a bar on Queen Street West called the Beaver. I did wonder whether it was a lesbian bar, but I didn’t think too much about it. We were in Canada, after all, so “beaver” signified more than just the body part. I also figured Raffy would have known the first thing about where he was taking me.

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It turned out, of course, that the Beaver was indeed a queer bar. Everyone we saw upon arrival seemed openly gay. There were at least a dozen lesbian couples plus a few gay men. I chuckled to myself, realizing that Raffy had likely chosen a lesbian bar by mistake. Or was he trying to be funny? In any case, it wasn’t a bad spot.

I ordered a drink and sat at the bar to wait. Fifteen minutes went by, and Raffy still hadn’t shown up. I tried texting him, but my messages weren’t going through. I thought that I was getting ghosted, but we were still matched on Hinge. When I tried calling him, it went straight to voicemail. Either his phone had died or I was getting stood up. I didn’t have to work the next day and had nothing else planned for the night. If he didn’t show up in the next hour, I decided, I would leave.

Related: “My Earls hookup turned out to have a diaper fetish”

I ordered another drink and started chatting with a girl who was also alone at the bar. I’ll say her name was Lina. She was also meeting someone for a first date, but she was certain she’d been stood up: she’d been there for over an hour. When I told her I was also waiting for someone—who was now over twenty minutes late—we formed a bond.

Lina was from the West Coast, but she knew the city well and was a regular at the Beaver. “Every month or so,” she said, “a straight couple stumbles upon this place, totally confused.”

Although I was embarrassed to be included in this demographic of clueless heterosexuals, I didn’t feel out of place. Lina was easy to talk to and non-judgmental. She asked thoughtful questions about where my family was from in India, what it was like to work with animals every day, whether I preferred cooking over eating out and what kind of music I liked. The only awkward moment was when she asked me if I’d ever been with another woman.

The answer was no, but I felt nervous saying so. I was afraid of coming across as a prude. I wanted to impress her. She was cool and sexy in an intimidating way. She seemed knowledgeable and self-assured. I’d never met anyone like her.

Lina and I had been talking for about forty-five minutes when Raffy arrived. He was dressed in a white button-up and blue trousers—date attire. When he noticed all of the queer couples, he seemed lost. I thought about pretending I hadn’t seen him. The bar was dimly lit enough to pull it off; he’d figure I’d already left. But Lina spotted him and pointed him out to me. He happened to glance in our direction at that exact moment and made his way over.

I was a little tipsy by this point, so the meeting wasn’t too awkward (for me, anyway), but I could sense that Raffy was uncomfortable. After properly meeting for the first time in person, he remarked that the vibe of the Beaver wasn’t what he was expecting. “Well, it is a lesbian bar,” I said, bluntly addressing the elephant in the room. Lina laughed at this, but Raffy looked annoyed. He wanted to leave and go to another bar, but Lina wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re here now,” she said.

I was having a good time and didn’t want to leave, so we ordered another round. Raffy seemed sincerely apologetic about being late. His phone had died right after his shift, he said, before he was able to plug the bar’s address into Google Maps. Then he’d gotten stuck in traffic. He’d parked at the nearest main intersection but had to walk around Queen West asking strangers for directions. He seemed exhausted by everything, which was a bit of a turn-off. If he couldn’t handle even the most minor disruption, I didn’t want to be his partner through life’s actual challenges.

It was hard not to compare my experience chatting with Lina to chatting with Raffy. I had nothing against him—he was charming—but Lina was more sincere and endearing. Therefore, I decided that she was the one I’d be going home with. When it became obvious that I was choosing Lina over Raffy, he seemed angry. He was like, “Are you serious?” But I tried not to let it bother me. Lina and I finished our drinks and left.

We went back to Lina’s since she lived closer than I did. We fooled around a bit, and I did find her very hot, but we never ended up dating—at the time, I had a lot of anxiety about my sexuality conflicting with my parents’ expectations. It was hard, but Lina and I worked through it and are still friends. We see each other often. Raffy, on the other hand, I haven’t seen since that night. I had no desire to resume communication with him, and it seems he felt the same way: he unmatched me on Hinge.