Rightfully or wrongfully, (almost certainly the latter) I'd like to put a personal story in response. As usual, this is at my expense and I may well be judged. * Sigh *. It only somewhat comes under your topic, but if it gives any form of entertainment, then so be it.
About a decade a go (get off my lawn), I was enjoying having a lovely night out with the my friends. The entire place had an awesome upbeat atmosphere and nothing could go wrong. Great music, good times, good people.
I came across this lovely girl and we ended up chatting about all kinds of random stuff for about half an hour. We had a blast! She was giving me gorgeous smiles. All the right physical suggestions. She was fairly easy on the eyes, and I think I was well-suited. Simply, I thought she was in my league, and vice versa. She had smarts and was witty. I was admittedly fairly smitten by the fact that she could make me smile like that.
All of a sudden, she was gone. I vaguely remember her friends taking her away suddenly. Not a great end to the night.
The next day, being young, I was well aware of the hollywood-style "missed connection" scenario. I did recall she said she worked for a particular company and she told me that she was the receptionist. Perhaps this was meant to be!
Like fuck.
I called the company and asked for her, and of course it was her at the end of the line. In the sub-20 second phone call, I tried to put forward that I really liked the conversation we had last night, that I remembered where she worked (yeah, like fuck that's not creepy) and that she disappeared before I could ask for her number and whether she wanted to catch up.
Every. Damn. Second. of that horrible, horrible phone call was excruciating. Within the third second of it, I felt like screaming and destroying the phone for good measure.
I had well-meaning intentions. She was lovely and I thought that the aforementioned hollywood-style missed connection was a possibility. I came away from that feeling like the biggest damn creep. That makes me cringe to this fucking day.
No, I didn't call her again. No, I did nothing else afterwards. But fuck me, that was the first and only time I let some fantasy get between myself and reality.