A male friend of mine, Matt, had a rather sinister experience recently, with Tinder to thank for it. He had matched with a “reasonably attractive” girl and they decided to meet up… at her house… because her parents were away… Now if thats not an invitation to fuck, I don’t know what is. Unfortunately for Matt, on arrival it became clear that he had been semi-catfished. Not fully catfished, because the photos on her Tinder were genuinely photos of herself, but they were craftily taken and very very flattering. I hate to comment on a girls looks as though that is her worth, but it’s important for me to express Matt’s thought processes to get the full comedic value of this story. Painfully awkward Tinder greeting out of the way, they went straight to her bedroom, because, Tinder. After 5 minutes of difficult “first date” conversation, not helped by Matt’s internal panic at the situation, this girl pounced onto him for a propa snog. Next thing Matt knew, he was fingering her.. natural progression? Don’t ask.
It took Matt a further 5 minutes to reassess the situation, and realise he felt a little “violated”. He told the girl he needed a pee, went to the bathroom and had one of those ‘looking in the mirror and wondering what your life has become’ moments. He crept out of the house without saying goodbye.
But the cherry on top of this story is this: On the drive home, a mentally vulnerable Matt decided he needed a fag to calm down, and while rolling, he noticed that the plaster which had been previously located on his finger was missing. Lost forever inside the catfish.
The last time a real life boyfriend broke my heart I was 15. I thought he was the coolest person on earth, my best friend and I used to follow him around town, having a go on his BMX and taking an occasional toke of weed. I was gutted for a week, until GCSE stress took over.
Last night, whilst drinking my way through the Happy Hour cocktail list with a bunch of work friends, I found myself listening to a socially out of depth Doctor verbalise what really should have been a private internal debate, about whether the sexy young women who come and sit with him in casinos are employed by the establishment, or are keen gamblers with a penchant for socially awkward woolly-waistcoat-wearing doctors in their 30’s with betting problems. It got me thinking about the way humans accept it as reasonable that someones physical attributes should be used in exchange for someone else’s resources. Heck, people make a legal living by selling their beauty.
I don’t mean to generalise, but I will. There is something seemingly lacking in every boy that I meet. I have my four core desirable characteristics: Funny, Attractive, Clever, and Kind (FACK). You can’t have all four. Sometimes you find a boy with three out of the four, sometimes you settle for one with two.
This week I witnessed a truly god-awful date in the restaurant where I work, reminding me that not only have I not been on a date in an embarrassingly long time, but also of how painfully awkward they can be. The story is this: I was serving a couple who had met a few years ago, and had then been reunited on the dating app: Plenty of Fish (POF), the boy hand’t stopped pestering the girl for a date and eventually she gave in. I wasn’t fully aware of the situation until Nelson, our lovely barman, informed me that the female half of the date had been coming into the bar at every opportunity to get away from the male half and bitch about how awful he was. Before this discovery I had mistaken the fact that the couple were sat in silence, both on their phones, to mean they had been together for many many years and were bored of each other. When I went to take their payment, said boy scooted off, leaving the girl to pay their bill, and me and her to have a gossip. Apparently he was rude, arrogant, and both a conversation-ender and lazy conversation-maker, and to top it all off, had accepted her polite offer to pay the bill. This girl had been having such a bad time that Nelson had actually found her online on POF during the date itself, and sent her a cheeky “You’d have a much better time with me” message… time will tell if he makes a better impression.
Take a happily single girl and an other-worldly beautiful boy, and watch her walls crumble. I’d been swept up in a turquoise-eyed haze for the last three months only to come crashing down on a wave of reality: hot guys exclusively suffer from emotional deficits.
Armed with the chat up line “Ici pour bonnes temps, pas longtemps” I took to French Tinder on my first trip to Paris in February. For those of you who don’t speak French, that says “Here for a good time, not a long time”. It is a line inspired by the Canadian who I thought I was exclusive with until my pal found him on Tinder with this very smooth line. Anyway, bad “ex’s” aside, it got me a superlike. Nice. This Superliker, Pierre, spent the next 2 months chatting me up via facebook, apparently desperate for me to come back to Paris so we could meet. Well, his wishes were answered because I love Paris and I LOVE my best friend Céline who is studying for her Masters there.
Ok I take it all back, there’s more to Fabio than met my eye on our first date. I wasn’t expecting much from date number two, but I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s a little play-by-play of our date:
So i’m driving to his house to pick him up for bowling. I’m wearing sk
in tight black jeans with a skin tight black top and…. I need to fart. My pre-date logic says, fart-away, having that gas in my tum is only gonna bloat it out into what I call, The Front-Bum (I hope I’m not the only one to experience this). In any case, more farting = flatter tummy.
But, dates don’t lead to relationships, do they?
I had a shocking realisation last week, whilst listening to a radio feature about dating. The DJ introduced the topic, “last week we talked about the end of relationships, breakups, so this week, we’re talking about the start of relationships: first dates” I snorted, how ridiculous to suggest that a first date would lead anywhere. Its 2016 and we don’t live in a rom-com. But as I came out of my cynical, seasoned single twenty-something stupor, I realised, she was right, at the start of all relationships, there has to be a first date. But surely I can’t be the only person who’s constantly going on first dates yet not finding constant relationship offers?
the holy fail 