Local cool and hot woman left deleting phone conversations and unfollowing accounts of a man she met on the dating app because “she honestly just like, doesn’t understand what could have even happened”

The teens (read: grown ass adults) have been engaging in some emotionally damaging dating tactics. It’s called Ghosting—never heard of Ghosting? Congratulations on pretending like you’ve never downloaded dating app/nightmare Silicon Valley project Tinder. This fucking dumpster fire of an app not only crashes all the time, but it will let you build a contrived relationship with someone who will leave you high, dry, and screaming at the tops of your lungs about how you “can’t believe he straight up didn’t even get back” to you!

You know what? I know this was supposed to be like, one of those joke news articles where like, you go “haha” and it’s punchy and totally not real and I say “fucking” in the first paragraph. But Christ! Honestly, this very hot, smart, and super funny joke news writer got capital-G Ghosted! Did you infer, yet, how much of a catch I am? Because I am and if you didn’t, stop reading this because we’re friends now—you’re supposed to be on my side.

Let me break down my ultra-specific, yet still very relatable and publishable, experience with a man who literally dipped off into the sunset after taking me on not one, two, three, four, but FIVE… “Oh, shit did she say FIVE?”… (I did, sentient friend/reader voice)—FIVE DATES. Amazing, astounding, ground-breaking,  hard-hitting, joke news stuff. It’s like a social experiment where the end result is this shitstorm of an article and I am left pacing long hallways dramatically on Saturday nights when I’m supposed to be editing this whole fucking newspaper instead of binge-drinking like most people.

Alright, let me back this up and make this seem like I’m talking about a hyperbolic situation when it’s really just my personal life immortalized in print. You (I) met the Sad Boy of your (my) dreams on Tinder. You’re stoked to go out on a string of dates before the catastrophic misery of being left on pause hits (This story is about me). Sure, he has that Hitler-Youth haircut, but in an updated way that makes you forget that blatant Nazism is on the rise again (I didn’t really forget). He has on……..a beanie on the first date. You fucking die when he is wearing…….. a basic tee under his pea coat. Are those wire-frame glasses? I can’t believe it, I think he went to Sunglass Hut all by himself and bought them without the advice of a woman. Holy shit, it hits you: it’s your future ex-almost-boyfriend in the flesh. (I really hope you, my now best friend, read these with all the right pauses. They’re important.)

Sure, he’s REAL now! But, he sure as hell won’t be for long when you start checking his location on Tinder every morning at 11am and every night at 9pm. He’ll become The Concept of a Man—the skeleton of what was once an average-looking dude whose facial hair made him a weary 7 ½ and knew cute facts about you like that you sleep talk, cut your own bangs, and “haven’t done anything really casual before.” It’s like his lack of attentiveness dehumanized him, or you are literally elbowing your way out of feeling responsible for putting your eggs all in one crew-neck wearing basket.

He likes “hanging with you so much,” but like, he’s just so super busy right now because his “tour starts in a week” and he “still hasn’t even cracked chapter one of Infinite Jest [his favourite book] yet.” You know, the footnotes are the most important part? Someone (a man) told me that in a class (filled with other men). It was after someone mentioned that Hemingway (who cares) is one of the most important writers and someone (same man) needed to counter it.

This 23-to-27-year- old started out conversations like any normal suitor would: “Wow, I love your freckles/fashion sneakers/taste in music.” There was also a bit of, “So, like, what year are you in?” even if he didn’t care because he just took a full-time job at a Major Publication/Firm/Start-up or His Master’s Program Is So Hard :(

He seemed ever so normal! Is this Potential Relationship Material? Your Future itself? Why not build it up in your little head while you wait patiently for a reply to that meme you sent on Instagram.

And yet, when he ghosts you, and you think it’s all been (not) said and (not) done: he will appear out of the blue one month later because he had “a really weird dream about you.” It was a sex dream; you know it was because he told you. Only over text though, no way in hell is he going to link up in this economy—but know that he has thought of you naked when he could be seeing it IRL. It’s just because he literally has so much writing/reading/jerking it to the La La Land soundtrack to do. Sad!

Something about all this hurts more than you can imagine… I wonder… Why…. Is it perhaps, the constant wave of other men littering your surf to success, constantly pooling their uncomfortable personalities and tragic clinginess to the surface? Perhaps.

These Nice Guy Exes appear in your moments of vulnerability as if you crying into your silk pillows (I’m not, like, rich, they help avoid acne—look it up) at night is a Bat Signal for “please text me about how you saw my mom at the grocery store.” Or it’s Christmastime, when he knows you’re back home from school because he still lives with his parents (this isn’t a drag, but it is a fact: all desperate ex-boyfriends live with their parents and think about texting you “Hey listen, you don’t need to respond…” as they play COD on their childhood flat-screen). He asks you to drinks, dinner, or another four years in a relationship.

You politely delete the text and hope the dude who has a mixtape coming out “in a couple months” will text you instead. Then you remember he’s ALSO dead to you because he watched your snap story but HARD flaked on your plans on the very same eve. Fuck. Cue the questioning of your own feminist values when you get stressed about this, but not your upcoming paper. The Discourse in your own psyche gets very real, very quickly—all because you thought the two emojis in his bio meant he was “fun” and “relatable” enough to get drinks with you.

Let’s review, shall we? He’s the whole package: mediocrely dressed, loves something specific enough to define his entire personality by it, and is completely emotionally unavailable. It was all going so well until he vanishes in thin air. You spend weeks thinking, “Wait a minute… Did I do something to ruin this? What did I do to this childish shell of a person to make him disappear?” But the truth is, you didn’t do anything. You shouldn’t be expected to do the emotional labour in order to make someone comfortable enough to spend time with you and/or reciprocate feelings. Ghosting you is to his detriment because he didn’t bother to get to know you and find out how much of a catch you are, like my loyal reader best friend did. Love you, reader. Sometimes a man with a MEC backpack is just a man with an overpriced backpack—not relationship material.

Quoth the prophet of modern dating Carrie Bradshaw, “Maybe some women aren’t meant to be tamed. Maybe they just need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with them.” Bradshaw says this wistfully at the end of Season 2, Episode 18, entitled Ex in the City . She whips her coiffed curls around as the breeze of a sewer grate blows through majestically; Big didn’t get her weird movie reference and left her, but goddamnit , she’s free.

So my question is, O Bradshaw: what the f u c k. Thanks so much for this hot take, 1999 Taylor Swift, it’ll really help me after talking in circles to anyone who will listen about how I am deep in my feelings. You can’t just equate wanting a balanced relationship to being “tamed”—I’m all good with the running free part, but I already checked the box on that. I just want to hang out with someone on like, a semi-regular basis—where can I get me a freak like that?

You know what, no. I’m not upset about this, I have too much work to do. I have to edit this entire fucking newspaper. Honestly, this is just tragic. For him, not me. I’m a Hot, Intelligent, Young Editor and Woman—I really don’t need this to complicate me trying to kill it in this print-regressing world. At least I have my $40,000 liberal arts degree to keep my very cool and very educated self warm at night.

Fuck you, Jeff*.

 *His name hasn’t been changed because once again—fuck you, Jeffrey.