This one time I met a guy at a club. He was kind of good looking but he was also a little rough around the edges. A little creepy, but cute, still. He asked me to dance and I was like, sure, why not? I didn’t have anything better do to. So we danced. The music was annoying. It was that boomp chh boomp chh techno rave kind of music. The kind that’s hard to dance to anyway unless you pretend you’re having some kind of epileptic seizure and especially with this guy cause he had one of those cones on his head. Like those dogs wear? When vets don’t want them to lick their wounds? Which was weird, but I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable or anything. Plus, you know, the lights shining on it made it really bright and hard to look at. I had to squint when I looked at him. I kept looking for an incision over his nebulum or something, but I couldn’t find anything. So, I just tried not to look at him very much. I looked everywhere but at him. I looked at all the sparkly, spandex-clad booty and all the the goth-clad poseurs looking disdainfully down their noses at us from the sidelines.

Well, it’s just difficult to talk about because it ended tragically. We dated off and on for a few months, always he wore the cone. I never mentioned it. Then I discovered one day that he was from an alien race and the cone was a permanent fixture of his race. And then. One day. We had a particularly bad rainstorm. We were caught out in it. No shelter in sight.

He drowned.

Tragic. Tragic.

The leader of his planet sent me a holographic message a few months later. Told me they all pulled up roots and went home. They don’t have rain on their planet. I was all like, look, I don’t want to get involved. I was only dating him because I couldn’t figure out a tactful way to end it. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I was all, “Ohhh the horror! The horror! I’ll never love again!”

In some ways it is very beneficial to date outside your species.