Maybe it’s the bourbon, but lately, we’ve been feeling nostalgic. With writing this good, can you blame us? “15 Stories About Dating Potheads” originally ran in 2011.
I once dated this girl who was a complete stoner — pretty much never sober. One day she came to my house to pick me up and started recounting this amazing experience she’d had on the drive over. Apparently, an angel had formed in the clouds and had spoken to her. She then told me, at length, about the “new” ideas she was having concerning marijuana and spirituality. She said she’d realized that the way to communicate with the Holy Trinity was through getting stoned, and then outlined a complicated method of accessing God through prayerful toking. The funny thing was, she was acting like she was privy to these amazing ideas no one had ever had before, and was getting all excited about sharing her religious message with a spiritually deprived world. I was like, “Yeah, that already exists. It’s called Rastafarianism.” — Kelly
The last girl I was in love with was a pothead. We both got really high and went to the opera for my birthday, which seemed like a great idea — until it wasn’t. Suddenly you’re totally lost, at the Met. It’s snowing onstage and you don’t know why everyone is singing in tongues, and all these fancily dressed people are glaring at you. It was the second worst birthday of my life. The sex was still great, though. — Dan
I once dated someone who would smoke a couple nights a week. When she smoked, she’d either be next to normal or high out of her head. I got in the habit of texting “Are you a solid or a liquid?” before I headed over, just to know what I was expecting. When she texted back a weird joke (“I’m a quark! I’m strawberry soymilk”), I’d know she was really baked. — Kevin
A blind date once asked me to meet him near his office. When I arrived, he said he had to go home to walk his dog — an odd start to the date, but why not? We went on a long walk with the dog, and afterwards, somehow he convinced me to enter his apartment. As soon as the door shut, he asked if I minded if he got high. Not my favorite first-date activity, but I said I didn’t mind. And I wouldn’t have, except he hugely overdid it, and curled up on his bed whimpering “I’m so high, I’m so high,” while I watched Mean Girls in his living room with his dog. He still calls me sometimes. — Lina
This is how I’d know my boyfriend is a stoner. I send him out to the grocery store with a list that reads, “Salmon, portobella mushrooms, cous-cous, lemons, and cilantro.” An hour later I’m wondering why he’s taking so long since the store is five minutes away. When he finally arrives home, I see twenty bags of groceries and only lemon juice and frozen salmon from the list. However, we’ve also got tortillas, salsa, pineapples, lots of chocolate, iced tea, granola bars, popcorn, and a stoner grin. “What happened to the list?” I ask, “Aw, man, I lost it…” He takes off his jacket and it’s sticking out of his back pocket. — Ami
I just found out that this guy I dated for two years had been peeing in cups and placing them around his bedroom because he was always too stoned to get up and use the bathroom that was located eight feet away. — Amelie
I’m the kind of idiot who has dated not one but two pot dealers. The upside? Free weed! The downside? A lot of conversations that go like this:
Stoned Boyfriend: “Uh, I’m gonna be late.”
Me: “Okay, how late? What are you doing?
SB: “I’m not sure… uh, just meeting up with some people.”
Me: “Can you give me any of kind of time estimate?”
SB: “Uh….”
It was always unclear to me if these missions took such a long amount of time because my boyfriends were stoned, or if the people they were dealing with were stoned. As someone who smokes weed herself from time to time, I’m gonna say a heady combination of both. — Becca
In college, my girlfriend was a pretty big stoner. On 4/20, we cooked a giant batch of pot-brownies, but then headed off to a friend’s house, since her roommate wasn’t “green-friendly.” About an hour later, my girlfriend started getting frantic text messages: we’d left a couple brownies behind and her date had innocently eaten them. This kid did not smoke weed. Period. So, naturally, he had freaked out in the middle of their dinner, and fled to the restaurant bathroom in terror. She had to coax him out and drive him home mid-meal. The dynamic between the three of us never really recovered after that. — Alex
My last boyfriend considered himself a “dark” guy. He was always stoned, and if he wasn’t eating wasabi peas with his shirt off on the floor, he was having a “dark spell.” Usually a dark spell consisted of a deep stare and a story about various bloodcurdling things. The darkness peaked when he got his hands on some particularly doomy weed. After he smoked it, we were driving around and passed the county cemetery. He gazed over for a while. “The people buried in there have no name. No family. They’re from the prisons.” I said, “Yeah, that’s sad,” to which he responded, “Let’s go dig one up.” I declined, and he got really upset. “Come on, it would be awesome and so intense. Don’t you want to see a body?” Nope. We broke up shortly thereafter. — Marissa
When you’re in a good relationship, people always want to know how you met, probably because they think you have the magic formula to lasting love. I met my current boyfriend because he’s in a band I love. I would go to his shows, tell him that I loved his band, and strongly intimate that I loved him too. He just smiled and nodded. I always thought he was just quiet, or modest… until our first date, when he revealed he’d been stoned out of his mind each and every time. — Dunja
Mackenzie was a smart, funny, laid-back girl I dated in college. She smoked a lot of pot, which wasn’t my thing, but I figured if it didn’t interfere with her grades or life, it wasn’t a big deal. We’d watch Adult Swim and eat pizza. Then I found out from friends that she was in fact, the kingpin drug dealer of the school. To take a line from Lorraine Bracco: I got to admit the truth. It turned me on. — Dan
My ex-boyfriend was a huge pothead. I was really on the straight and narrow until I met him, but as our relationship got more serious, so did my dependence on weed, kind of a pre-req for being around him. Last Halloween was a low: we bought weed from a middle-aged pregnant lady in an Olive Garden parking lot. I just thought, “This is not the life I want for myself.” — Troy
In high school, there was this guy named Carl. He had a motorcycle, and sometimes when I was too lazy to walk to class, would give me a ride across campus. I wasn’t really into him, because he was a stoner and worse, a ginger. But we ended up going to Homecoming together as friends, and eventually, I fell for him. At the end of the year, he was voted Most Likely to Go to Jail. And now, he’s in jail. — Amelia
My identical twin sister and I were hosting our first blowout house party. I was excited that my new thing, red-mustang Ernie, was going to make an appearance. He asked me to meet him out back to smoke a J. A little high, I took him inside to introduce him to my sister and friends but got distracted. Chatting it up with this girl Katie, I overhead Ernie’s distinctive dopey voice mumble the words, “So, you wanna show me your bedroom?” Suffice it to say, I didn’t see my sister for the rest of the night. And I never saw him again. — Nora
My girlfriend had recently been giving me a hard time for driving her around while I was stoned. I asked my buddy about it, and he had a classic response: “Yeah, Liz [his girlfriend] was a little bit shook up about that too. Until I told her that I’ve been driving so long under the influence of weed that driving sober — WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE — would be dangerous because it’s so unfamiliar.”
