By Ann-Marie AlcĚÁntara
No matter how great someone looks when you swipe right, it’s all about what happens face to face that cements whether you swear off all those apps for good or continue OkTindering. And of course, anyone who has online dated knows you have to go through a lot of strangers with whom you have nothing whatsoever in common to get to a match even halfway decent.
So to help everyone feel a little less alone about that time they met someone, who, say, spent an entire Tinder date droning on about their ex while pitching a startup, I’ve created another map, this time collecting all of our awful online dating stories. Because community creates catharsis, right?
Here are some of the best stories shared so far:
1. “On one particularly memorable date, I met up with this guy from Coffee Meets Bagel. We grab a drink and things seem great: smart, funny, and cute (other than an overuse of hair wax). Things are going so well we decide to grab dinner. We’ve got our food, we’re chatting, and suddenly he says: “You’re much funnier than my ex-girlfriend.” I look up and see…tears in his eyes. Then he follows that up with: “But you’re much less beautiful.” I was just sort of in shock, and began to collect my stuff to leave. When I stand up, he peers up at me through the tears and says: “Wait…don’t you want to split the check?” I said no. “You cry, you buy.”
2. “The date was great, and afterwards we went to watch a movie. We watched The Skin I Live In with Antonio Banderas. Not exactly a date night movie. But hey, awkward happens. He made some weird jokes about stealing my identity and a while later sent me a picture where he had dyed his hair the same (distinctive) color as mine. I think he just had a weird sense of humor, but there were no more dates after that. “
3. “I met up with a girl from OkC, she seemed fairly normal in our text conversations, but during the first hour of us actually meeting, she told me in detail the story of her losing her virginity, and how over the last year she developed a coke habit. She then went on to tell me about how a nude photo she posted on Tumblr had over one hundred reblogs. Worst part about the whole date: I asked her out on a second, and she rejected me.”
4. “I went on one questionable Tinder date. While the date itself was great and I really liked the guy, he did grow up near Tinley Park and thought he had seen the “Tinley Lights,” aka UFOs. So there’s that.”
5. “It was Friday night and I was alone thumbing through Tinder when I matched on a cute looking girl who immediately messaged me. We almost immediately agreed to meet up at Zeitgeist. I bought her a beer and everything was going great until the subject of gentrification came up — I thought I could find some common ground by suggesting that the core problem is the lack of new housing along the Peninsula, but somehow she wanted to argue instead that Google was saving the world and the city is lucky to have such denizens. While still trying my hardest to be cordial, she suddenly stormed out and deleted me from her match list.”
These stories are all anonymous, so feel free to add your date location and story to the map and keep swiping right — you never know when your next map point will be for the best date ever.
Top photo courtesy of Thinkstock.
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