We’ve all been there – a date isn’t going so well and you can’t wait to leave. Normally I have the politeness to finish my drink and say goodbye and give them a hug before I go, but some people don’t even do that and pretend to go outside for a smoke and then just leave.

That’s exactly what happened to imgur user phillyalex who wasn’t that bothered about the initial blowoff, but was bothered that he had given the girl his sunglasses and she had walked off with them. I don’t know what was so special about these sunglasses – I guess they must have been Ray Bans or something – but Alex wanted them back so badly that he texted her every day for a year, in ever more increasingly creative ways, in an effort to get them back.

Here’s the story in his own words:

Okay, so. Last summer, I met this girl at a bar. We hit it off, I end up going back to her place, whatever.

She gives me her number before I leave and I hit her up to hang out again about a week later. I had gone to a football game earlier that day and then later met up with her at a friend’s house before walking to a bar to see a band play.

It was a sunny Saturday day game and I was wearing sunglasses, but by the time I met up with her, it’s about 7pm and the sun was going down. So on the way to the bar, I asked her to hold my sunglasses in her purse for me.

When we get to the bar, I see a few of my friends and I start introducing her while we order drinks. She turns to me and says she’s going to go outside real quick to make a phone call and she’ll be right back.

She never comes back. Which is fine, I wasn’t that into her anyway. But what was not fine was that she left with my sunglasses.

So over the past year, I’ve been desperately trying to get my sunglasses back from her with very little success. That was until last week when I finally made a breakthrough…

So yeah that’s right, even though Alex didn’t receive an inkling of a reply in those 52 weeks, he kept trying and his persistence was eventually rewarded when Anna did reply. You can see a gallery of everything he said in the slideshow below – make sure you read to the end for a special twist ending.

(Click the arrows below to navigate through the slides.)