Column by Ivy Jenn
…Continued from Oct. 30 issue
At 11:30 p.m. on Friday, I met Angelina, Jane* and Martin (Jane’s Danish boyfriend) at Studenthuset coffee shop. Jane had gone to a jazz bar in Copenhagen and was sitting by herself when Martin invited her to play a drinking game with him. By the end of that night, he was “drunk on love,” but I suspect that he was also just drunk. He was ready to repress his attraction to Jane and stumble home when Jane gave him her phone number, which was a ballsy move. Martin, who had previously only dated Danish women, said that he’s never had a woman make the first move. In his experience, Danish women don’t typically give out their numbers unless asked. Seven weeks after jazz night, Martin and Jane were in a committed relationship and planning to pursue it long-distance. “I knew after the first week that we were in love,” Martin said and then they disappeared somewhere else to continue being in love.
At around 2:30 a.m., Angelina and I wandered into the Meatpacking District in Vesterbro. We went into a neon-bright club named Jolene with a suffocating amount of people. We went straight to the bar so Angelina could set up her man-scanning headquarters, and I chugged my beer to numb what I was expecting to be a lame evening. Jolene was packed—you couldn’t move an inch without accidentally (or intentionally, if you’re a drunk asshole) touching someone inappropriately. The ground was littered with pieces of broken glass. Hanging from the center of the ceiling was a glittered silver sign that said “SUPER HOES!!!” The music was weird. I’m not sure the music even fits into a genre. It sounded like someone put a bunch of small office supplies into a cardboard box and shook it while yodeling intermittently. Under normal circumstances, I would have ditched this tacky, cancer-inducing club but I need to pass my creative travel writing class so I stayed to find a date. After about 20 minutes, Angelina dragged me toward a group of three Italian men by the bar.
As I write this, I am trying to remember what they looked like. Because I’m racist and slightly hungover, I’m just picturing the three copies of the guy on the can of ravioli my mom likes to buy. I apparently took notes on a napkin, so I’ll just transcribe them for you here:
-Students from Italy currently working in Denmark
-Believed Danish people were “cool but hard to approach”
-I am craving a fish taco
That was all I got. It wasn’t a particularly exciting encounter. I danced with one of the men whose name I can’t remember. We didn’t talk because I couldn’t hear my thoughts in that club let alone someone else’s voice. He and his friends invited Angelina and me to another club across town but I was too tired.
Later in the evening, I randomly met another DIS student named Anne*. Anne mentioned that she was dating a Danish man that she met off Tinder. I toasted to the Writing Gods and got drunk with Anne. She was a badass—instead of buying expensive drinks at the bar, she snuck a 700ml bottle of wine she bought on sale from a Netto down the street. Anne tried Tinder because “regular dating sucked.” She was sick of only being hit on by random creeps on the street. Socially well-adapted, intelligent and aesthetically pleasing men don’t just fall into your lap at hipster bookstores. She was in the middle of a drought, and Tinder’s drizzle was better than nothing. In her drunken throes, her insecurities poured out. “I’m starting to believe that guys don’t find me attractive. I only do Tinder because I’ll take any male attention I can get. Am I desperate?”
To find out what happens next, come back in three weeks for the rest of the story but if you don’t want to, it’s chill.
*Names are changed for confidentiality.
