How Gaming Ruined My Dream Date at 17 and What I Learned Since

The short version is that gaming did not ruin my dream date all by itself, but it is the reason I showed up to it with nothing left. I was 17. I had asked a gorgeous girl from my grocery store job for her number on a scrap of paper, and then I spent the morning of our date playing World War II Online, raging at my clanmates and burning through every bit of dopamine I had. By the time she pulled up in her two-door sports car, I was already wrecked. Within a few hours I had asked her to take me home, and she took it personally. I still remember that night intensely, more than 20 years later.

If you are searching this subject, you probably want to know whether a date like that goes wrong because of the other person, bad luck, or you. My answer now is that it was me, and the pattern that wrecked that night ran through the next two decades. I have written about this night twice. My 2025 post, How Gaming Ruined My Dream Date, is mostly about the game: the hours of raging, the empty tank, reading rejection into a phone call and asking to go home. My June 2026 post, How I Ruined My Dream Date, tells the same night with more of what I was carrying into it.

My view has changed in that span. In 2025 I put most of the blame on gaming, and I still think it was the biggest factor. I had spent my feel-good chemicals that morning, so the movie, the car and the girl could not reach me. The 2026 telling adds what I brought in before any game started. Around a girl I found attractive, anxiety flooded my body, desire felt wrong instead of exciting, and I had no positive framework for sex at all, only shame and bad memories from childhood, including early sexual violation. A video game did not cause any of that. I think it explains why a girl who clearly liked me could feel like a threat within an hour.

The part both posts agree on is what happened after. Getting kicked out of my clan that afternoon felt like everything collapsing at once, and I started talking to myself like I was worthless. In the 2026 post I describe that moment as the place where the self-hatred took root, and my dating life went nowhere for most of a decade. The 2025 post follows the same pattern into college, where I drank, gambled online and lost a few hundred dollars on bad nights, and where gaming kept crowding out real life even when I tried to take a break. That night did not cause all of it, but it showed me the pattern more clearly than anything before it.

Below this opening you will find both posts in full. Read the newer one first for the most context on my family, my choice of college and the years after. Use the older one for the drinking, gambling and gaming in college, which the newer post does not cover in as much detail. The two overlap a lot on the date itself, so you will not miss much by reading only one of them. If the video game side of this hits home for you, I wrote about the burnout in why I quit streaming, and the mindset side is covered on the dating mindset hub.

How I Ruined My Dream Date

Originally published June 21, 2026.

This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.

Let me tell you about this girl I went out with in the summer of 2001, not long after World War II Online came out. She was a gorgeous girl I worked with at a grocery store. Drop-dead beautiful, exactly my type. I remember seeing her and thinking, oh my God.

And yet I wasn’t trying to pick her up at all. Every time I was around a girl and felt slightly sexually aroused, anxiety would flood my system. Desire didn’t feel exciting or safe to me—it felt wrong. I had no positive framework for sex whatsoever. The only contexts I had were bad ones: early sexual violation, being punished and sent to my room, or masturbating in secret while feeling ashamed and disgusting afterward. So whenever arousal showed up, fear came with it. My body would tense instead of relax. You can probably already see how that set me up perfectly for alcoholism later, but I’ll get to that.

What mattered at the time was that somehow, because we worked together, I was able to connect with her in a way I never had with a girl before. After we’d been working together for a few weeks, I went through her checkout line on my break to grab some snacks. I put my stuff on the conveyor belt, and while she was ringing up the customer in front of me, she looked at me and held eye contact. Not casually. Not accidentally. She eye-gazed with me. I felt like I was about to pass out. I remember thinking, oh my God, she’s actually into me. She wants to go out with me. She likes me. Holy shit.

I’m still proud of myself for what I did next, because I had never done anything like it before. While I was checking out, I asked her for her phone number. She wrote it down on a piece of paper while customers waited to check out. I called her almost immediately afterward, and we set up a date. Everything felt like it was going great—except I had no awareness yet of how my lifestyle was shaping my nervous system and my behavior.

So what do you think I did the morning of my date with her? I played World War II Online. Of course I did. That’s what I did every day, as much as I possibly could. I spent the entire morning on the computer. My clanmates were mostly guys ten or twenty years older than me, a lot of them former military. And honestly, they sucked at the game compared to me. But they were the ones in charge, issuing orders to someone like me—one of the best players in the world at that point—because all I did was play, and I was in my prime. I was seventeen. My reaction times were sharp. I had cable internet. I was fucking people up.

They kept getting in my way, so I disobeyed orders and went off on my own, dropping bodies. Then I got killed. Then I got pissed. Then I started talking shit. By the time afternoon rolled around, I’d already burned through a massive amount of dopamine and adrenaline, locked in arguments with my clan about how much they sucked and how they were screwing everything up. My nervous system was completely fried before the date even started.

Then she came to pick me up. And this part still sticks with me. She pulled up in a two-door sports car. I was seventeen and didn’t even have a driver’s license because I didn’t have a car. My dad had made that crystal clear. You’re not driving my fucking car. You want to drive, you buy your own. I didn’t have the money yet, so he drove me everywhere. This girl, meanwhile, had a sports car and a cell phone—in 2001. That alone told me her family had money which was normal for the high school I went to. She was dressed up and looked absolutely incredible. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, how is this happening? How am I going out with this girl?

She picked me up, and we went to see Rat Race. Your girl is driving like a maniac too. She’s going ten, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, on and off her phone, driving a manual transmission, shifting gears while switching hands between the phone and the steering wheel. I’m sitting there thinking, fuck, I’m about to die like one of my classmates had in a car wreck earlier that year near my house. Somehow we make it to the theater alive and watch Rat Race. That part of the day is actually pretty good. I’m laughing. I’m sitting next to this insanely attractive girl. On paper, everything is going right.

Then we leave the movie, walk through the mall, and she’s on her phone a lot. Calling people and coordinating things it turns out but I didn’t know it at the time because I have absolutely no context for this given I’m socially underdeveloped as hell. All I do is play video games and jack off. I don’t understand that hot, popular girls like her are often on the phone with their friends, especially when they’re making plans. In my head, I’m translating this into, she doesn’t really like me. She’s not paying enough attention to me. I start spiraling. I’m insecure, anxious, and my internal narrative is going completely off the rails. If your own mind spirals like that on a date and you want to talk through where it comes from, you can book a private call with me and that’s a big part of what we’ll work on together.

From her point of view, everything is probably going great. She’s driving fast, talking to her friends, showing me off. From my point of view, I’m convinced we’re going to die in a car accident and that I’m somehow failing this date. I’m proud as hell to be out with her, but at the same time I’m starting to feel like shit. This was supposed to be my dream scenario. This was my fantasy. And I keep thinking, why doesn’t this feel how I thought it would feel? I assumed it would feel amazing. Instead, I feel flat, tense, and uncomfortable. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d already burned through all my feel-good chemicals that morning playing World War II Online. I had nothing left in the tank.

We end up at one of her friend’s houses. Her friends are gorgeous. I still remember them years later—just stunning. The house is huge. It’s me and three of her girlfriends, and I’m the only guy there. She must have said good things about me because her friends are immediately warm, friendly, and comfortable around me. They like me. They’re welcoming. By any rational standard, this is a perfect setup. You’d think there’s no way I could fuck this up. Watch me.

We get back in the car to go to another friend’s house and I suddenly panic. I tell her it’s getting late. She looks at me like I’m insane. She’s like, what are you talking about? It’s nine o’clock. I tell her I don’t want to be out too late. I say I don’t know when we’ll get home. I ask her if she can just take me back to my parents’ house. She’s confused. She asks what’s wrong. She says she thought we were having a good time. I tell her my dad is really strict. She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. It’s summer. I’m about to be a senior in high school. She’s like, what do you mean your dad is strict? It’s so early and it’s summer. I insist she take me home and then she goes quiet.

From her point of view, this had to be brutal. She liked me. She thought the date was going well. She was introducing me to her friends. And suddenly I’m asking to be taken home early. From her side, it probably felt like rejection. Like she wasn’t good enough. Like she did something wrong. I can imagine her thinking, what the fuck just happened? I’m hot, I’m fun, I’m into him—what went wrong?

She drops me off at my parents’ house. I go inside, already feeling this vague sense that something isn’t right, but also itching to get back to World War II Online. I rush upstairs to check my email. My dad comments on how early I’m home, which doesn’t register at first. He clearly expected me to be out later, especially after seeing the girl who dropped me off. And looking back now, he was right. His seventeen-year-old self wouldn’t have been home at nine o’clock or maybe even all night. If I had to do it over again, I’d stay with her until she was tired of me even if it meant we were out all night.

I get upstairs, check my email, and I’ve been kicked out of the clan. Just like that. I remember staring at the screen thinking, oh my God. And then there’s this brief, brutal moment of clarity. I can suddenly see it. I can see exactly where I fucked up, even though I don’t fully understand how it happened. All I feel is this crushing sense of hopelessness. Like I’ve done something really stupid and irreversible. I’m thinking, how the fuck did I tell her to take me home? That was so dumb. And now I’m kicked out of my clan too. It felt like everything collapsed at once. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, why am I such a fucking idiot?

That moment is where something darker really took root. That’s when I started hating myself. I started talking to myself like I was worthless. You’re a fucking loser. You don’t deserve a good girl. You can’t even stay in a video game clan. You’re a piece of shit. From there, my dating life went absolutely nowhere during my senior year and struggled for a decade afterwards. I could barely bring myself to ask a girl out for another year. I just felt like shit all the time. So I did what I knew how to do: I went deeper into video games. If you recognize that pattern of self-hatred quietly sabotaging your own dating life, you can set up a call with me and we’ll talk through your situation honestly.

I played so much that I barely planned for college at all. And that’s wild, because academically I did fine. I scored 1410 out of 1600 on the SAT. I crushed it. But I was incredibly lazy when it came to applications. I put almost no time or thought into researching schools. I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I’d just do Army ROTC, because thinking beyond that felt like too much effort. All I really cared about was playing games.

So I looked at my mom’s career, looked at my brother—who was two years younger than me and already interested in engineering—and I basically copied them. I thought, fine, I’ll just be an engineer in the Army. That’s honestly how much thought I put into it. I swear to God, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. One day I thought about it briefly and said, fuck it, I’ll just do that, and that was it. Decision made.

I started applying to schools with ROTC programs. I visited Virginia Tech, and that experience was enough to shut that door immediately. The ROTC program there was awful. You had to sign out to go to the bathroom freshman year. Meanwhile, you’re not at West Point or some elite military academy where everyone around you is in the same environment. You’re on a civilian campus, watching other students actually enjoy their college lives, while you’re locked in a dorm like a prisoner. That was a hard no.

One by one, all my ROTC-based scholarship options fell through leaving only the honors college offer from the University of South Carolina. I remember driving down there for the first visit and thinking, you’ve got to be shitting me. We had lived in Alabama and Texas earlier in my life, but still—driving into South Carolina, all I could think was, this is a redneck shithole. I could not believe this was where I was going to end up.

My parents weren’t exactly encouraging me to stay either. They made it clear when I turned eighteen it was time to leave. Go to college. Leave the house. We’re done. Especially after I’d been shouting things at my dad like I wish I’d never been born. So I committed to the University of South Carolina.

Up to that point, I hadn’t drank at all. My dad made drinking look deeply unappealing, and I genuinely believed there was a real chance he’d kick me out of the house if I drank even once. So I didn’t touch it in high school. I remember having an internship with my mom where I needed a military security clearance to work in a secure facility. I answered no to every single question. No drugs. No alcohol. No crimes. Nothing. I was clean across the board. Masturbation doesn’t count legally, and that was basically the only thing I’d done.

What I didn’t understand yet was how primed I was for everything I was about to fall into. The moment I left the protective structure of my parents’ house, all of it was waiting for me. Looking back now, I’m genuinely grateful for my childhood. At the same time, it absolutely set the stage for what came next. And if I’m being honest with myself, I chose it. I chose my parents. I chose my childhood. And I chose where I went to school. So now let’s talk about how that went.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Dating playlist.

How Gaming Ruined My Dream Date

Originally published October 30, 2025.

This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.

Spent Before the Night Even Began

When I was 17 years old, I had a date that I still remember intensely 24 years later. At the time, I was working in a grocery store to save up enough money to buy a car. Outside of my work, my whole life was video games. By contrast, in elementary and middle school, I spent as much time as possible playing sports. At school I’d join every game I could, and when I got home I’d play basketball or football in the front yard, the backyard, or anywhere in the neighborhood. I rode my bike daily and was always active.

Things changed in high school when I got lonely and started playing more video games. We had moved, and I didn’t have as many friends around, which made it harder to get together for sports. While my brother had always been the main person I played sports with, I hit a growth spurt at 13 years old which ruined the fun of playing basketball and football together. Video games swooped in to filled the gap.

By the time I was 17, I was playing games for hours every single day. Some days, it was 10 or 12 hours. My parents tried to regulate it for years, but I was hooked and so persistent that they eventually gave up. My brother, on the other hand, was out skateboarding, making friends, and being social. I stayed inside, lost in games.

The one that consumed me most was World War II Online. It was one of the earliest massively multiplayer online games, and it was immersive in a way I’d never experienced before. You could play as infantry, drive tanks, fly planes, tow anti-tank guns, or even transport other players into battle. It was buggy and glitchy, but to me, it felt 20 years ahead of its time. Sometimes I’d spend 30 minutes just trying to get to a battle, only to get blown up in a second. I loved it because every life felt like it mattered.

Amidst all this gaming, I met a girl at the grocery store I worked at. She was everything I thought I wanted—beautiful, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a slender body with lean muscle tone. She was popular, had gorgeous friends, and drove her own two-door sports car with a manual transmission. She even had a cell phone, which in 2001 was still rare for someone our age.

At work, she and I had talked a little, but one day I went through her checkout line to buy some snacks on break. She looked into my eyes in a way no other girl had before, and I felt an incredible rush of joy and desire. I knew instantly she wanted me to ask her out, so I did. She wrote her number down on a scrap of paper right there while customers were waiting. I called her immediately and set up a date. This felt like everything I had ever wanted—years of frustration suddenly paying off, the universe handing me the perfect girl.

The day of the date, I did what I always did: I played World War II Online for hours before she came to pick me up. The anticipation made me even more irritable than usual. I raged at my teammates for sucking at the game. Many of them were older, even former military, and the game required serious coordination—20 to 100+ players working in a chain of command to capture a single town. I was one of the best players in the world according to my kill death ratio, but I hated following orders. I’d break away, ignore commands, rant when others failed, and get myself killed because I wasn’t cooperating all while taking several enemies with me. That day, I had been particularly toxic, and my squadmates were tired of it.

By the time she arrived, I had already spent hours raging, ranting, and dumping all my dopamine into the game. What I did not understand at the time is the effect that would have on my big date. If I had spent that time meditating, reading a book, taking a yoga class, working, helping someone else, or even just resting, I could have been fully present. I could have shown up ready to listen to her, to connect with her, to choose my words carefully, and to have an unforgettable night with the girl I thought was perfect. Instead, I showed up spent. My brain had already given me every rush of stimulation it had to offer, and I didn’t realize that meant I had nothing left when it really mattered.

When she picked me up, I felt a thrill when she arrived, but it didn’t last. We went to the movies, but that only piled more screen stimulation on top of my day filled with video games. Afterward, instead of being grateful for this one-on-one time with a beautiful 17-year-old girl who was genuinely into me, I felt spent. I didn’t feel proud or excited the way I often did gaming. Social interaction felt strange because I had so little practice with it. I hadn’t gone out with other girls, so I didn’t realize that it was normal for a popular teenage girl to be on her phone during a date. She was calling her friends, trying to figure out what we could do together that night. Instead of asking her what she was talking about or engaging with her, I let insecurity take over. I felt like I didn’t matter, when really she was trying to include me. If you catch yourself doing that — reading rejection into moments where someone is actually including you — that’s exactly the kind of pattern we can unpack together when you set up a call with me.

Meanwhile, my mind drifted back to the game. I worried about what might have happened with my squad while I was gone. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I became upset because logically I knew I should have been ecstatic—this was the dream date I had wanted for years. Why wasn’t I happy? Why didn’t it feel good? That frustration spiraled into criticism.

My mind complained endlessly about how she was on her phone too much and she was driving too fast. Anxiety took hold of me as I thought we were going to die or that I’d be in trouble for not getting home on time. Within an hour of hanging out with her after the movie, those thoughts and feelings turned into action. Even though she seemed to be having fun with me, I told her to take me home.

Why? Because I was anxious to get back to my game. I was uncomfortable, out of my environment, disoriented. I thought real life would feel better than the video game, but sitting next to her, I couldn’t feel it. Even when she took me to her house and introduced me to her friends—girls who were stunningly beautiful, friendly, and apparently already told good things about me—I still couldn’t enjoy it. Yet even surrounded by all of that, I asked her to take me home.

She was devastated. She didn’t understand what was going on with me. She took it personally and believed that if I wanted to leave, it meant she wasn’t good enough. She dropped me off at home, hurt and confused, and after that, she didn’t want to go out again. She didn’t even want to talk to me at work.

When I got home, I found out I had been kicked out of my clan in World War II Online. That moment gave me clarity. I had ruined the day. This date was something I had wanted for a long time, and I blew it. I knew I shouldn’t have asked her to take me home, that I should have stayed out longer. Beyond that, I couldn’t understand much else. I didn’t yet see how the hours I poured into the game had sabotaged my real life. I did not understand how playing first person shooters all day programmed my mind to look for threats and fight instead of relaxing, collaborating, and having fun. If you want to talk to me about unplugging from video games and creating a successful dating life, schedule your time with me at jerrybanfield.com.

Monetizing My Addiction

The pattern that began in high school—being so addicted that I couldn’t manage real life—repeated itself in college and for two decades afterward. In college, I became obsessed with losing my virginity and dating, but everything that might have happened with women was constantly sabotaged by my gaming and fixation online. I had been sober all the way up until freshman year, yet my addiction to gaming and media set me up perfectly to become an alcoholic, a gambling addict, and to sabotage my sex life.

At home, I was too afraid to look for any porn, but once I moved into the dorms, I discovered the world of downloading free music and movies also gave me easy access to all the adult movies I wanted. This plunged me into a dark environment where my first real introduction to sex was through watching downloaded pornos that often took hours from the time you clicked download until the file was ready to watch. Just like video games, TV, and movies, porn delivered instant gratification, but it also layered on shame about my sexuality. That shame fueled further conflict in dating, creating a spiral that eventually pushed me toward drinking when my efforts to date consistently ended in disappointment.

Twice during freshman year, I had girls call me and drop clear hints they wanted to come over and have time alone with me. They were spelling out opportunities that would have probably led to sex—asking where my room was, inquiring as to whether my roommate would be around, and checking on the visitation policy for the opposite sex in my dorm. Yet I was so busy dominating my Counter-Strike server and driving tanks behind enemy lines in World War II Online that I missed the signals. I’d hang up the phone, only to realize after the fact what they had meant. By then, it was too late. They felt rejected, and I felt like a fool. Drinking entered the picture during spring semester and made the spiral even worse.

Sophomore year, I tried to take a break from gaming and focus on real life. For a little while, it worked. I cut back on games and picked sports back up after making new friends who were fellow resident advisers. Suddenly I was at the gym regularly, playing basketball, racquetball, and intramural football. Once again, I thrived physically, enjoyed my athleticism, and felt like I had a real life. Unfortunately, nighttime turned into drinking sessions, and with drinking came video games and porn. My friends made it worse by introducing me to online poker while I showed them how to be addicted to video games. By the end of sophomore year, despite having friends who were supportive and wanted to include me, I was lonelier and more isolated than ever.

By junior year, I was drinking and getting drunk several times a week. Often, I wouldn’t bother to make plans, which left me at home most nights, gaming, watching movies, and gambling online. The gambling pulled me into new lows. I’d get drunk, bet, and sometimes win a little. Occasionally, I won big, but most nights I lost. Some nights, I lost a few hundred dollars which was enough to trigger intense self-hatred. The more I drank and gambled, the deeper my shame grew.

When I first started playing video games and watching movies as a kid, I never considered what kind of long-term effects they would have on my social life and my personality. In elementary and middle school, I had always been popular and able to make friends easily. Now I often felt isolated. I could act like an extrovert, hold conversations, and appear normal, but it felt like I was living a double life. Hardly anyone knew the truth about me—how lonely I was, how much I was in the grips of addiction, and how deeply I hated myself. If you’re living that same kind of double life and want to talk through your own situation privately, you can book a one-on-one call with me.

By senior year, I finally got a girlfriend, but even that couldn’t pull me out of my cycle. I drank heavily, played video games obsessively, and gambled so much that the relationship often felt more like a nuisance than a source of joy. All of this was already in place before life after college even began. If you want the full story of how dark my addictions got, read my book Speaker Meeting 2017. For this book, we will keep things a bit less graphic so we can talk more about being famous online.