Dates From Hell, Ep. 3: “Bless You”
Warning: don't read this near meal times.
Look, I’m not here to judge what consenting adults do in private.
If your thing is feet, leather, or dressing up as a Power Ranger—godspeed. You do you. I support it.
But there are limits.
And one of those limits is mucus.
Like others in this series, this story isn’t mine—it belongs to my friend Emma (not her real name, because she’d murder me). But I have her written permission to share it, mostly because she’s processed the trauma and now finds it darkly hilarious.
So.
Emma had been seeing this guy—let’s call him Tom—for about six weeks. Nice enough. Good job. Decent conversationalist. No obvious red flags, which in modern dating is basically equivalent to finding a unicorn.
Things were progressing. They’d done the dinners, the walks, the “let me show you this obscure playlist” phase. And then, naturally, they arrived at the sleepover stage.
Everything was fine. Normal. Pleasant, even.
And then Emma’s nose started running.
Nothing dramatic—just a little sniffle. Seasonal allergies. The kind of thing you dab with a tissue and move on from.
Except Tom did not move on.
Tom leaned in.
And licked it.
Let me repeat that, in case your brain did what Emma’s brain did and simply refused to process the information:
He. Licked. Her. Snot.
Not a playful peck. Not a weird joke.
A full, deliberate, tongue-out lick. Like a cat grooming a kitten. Except the kitten was a grown woman with a runny nose and the cat was a man who had clearly been waiting for this exact moment.
Emma froze.
You know that thing where your brain short-circuits and you’re just... buffering? That was her. She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She just sat there, paralyzed, while her mind tried to reconcile what had just happened with the laws of physics and human decency.
Finally, she managed: “What... what are you doing?”
Tom smiled. Not sheepish. Not embarrassed.
Pleased.
“I like it,” he said, as if this explained everything.
“You... like it?”
“Yeah.” He leaned in again. “It’s kind of my thing.”
Now, look. I’m not going to sit here and shame someone’s kink. But there are two problems with this scenario:
Consent is a thing. You don’t just spring a fetish on someone mid-intimacy without a heads-up. That’s not sexy spontaneity—that’s ambush.
Mucus.
I cannot stress this enough: mucus.
Emma, to her credit, did not immediately flee into the night.
She asked questions. Because she’s a journalist and also possibly she was in shock.
Turns out, Tom had a whole thing about runny noses. He’d been hoping she’d get a cold. He had, in fact, been mildly disappointed during the previous weeks when her sinuses remained clear.
He explained this as if it were charming.
Emma, very calmly, got dressed.
“I think I should go,” she said.
“Already?” Tom looked genuinely confused. “But you’re still—”
“Yep. Still going.”
She left.
Washed her face seventeen times.
And now, whenever she has a cold, she thinks of Tom.
Which is, honestly, the worst part.
The moral of the story:
Everyone’s got their thing. But if your thing involves another person’s bodily fluids, maybe—just maybe—lead with that in conversation before you deploy your tongue.
Consent: it’s not just for the fun stuff. It’s for all the stuff.
And Emma? She’s doing great. She’s dating someone new.
Someone who, when she sniffles, hands her a tissue.
Like a normal human being.