Riding Out My Humiliation Until I Find My Kanye

Before I get into the next date, I thought I’d just clear some stuff up. So if you’re here because you were linked through a news site and don’t know me in real life, you will see that my blog accidentally went viral. By accidentally, I mean a journalist found my last name, took a photo from my instagram (which, admittedly, was public. My bad!) then posted the blog overnight. I probably wasn’t prepared for it to go actually viral otherwise I would have fought harder to have my last name removed and edited more of the grammar on this blog. I said to the journalist who had contacted me at 5.30pm the night before that “It’d be good to have my last name removed just so I can get another job in the future etc etc”. Sadly, it was already off to print and my face was planted on the front page when I woke up the next morning. I was stressed and freaking the night this happened so naturally, I called my ex-boyfriend of three years just so I could be reminded that I wasn’t a big deal, that I was overreacting and that it’ll blow over by the end of the day. Nothing like some inspirational pep talk from your ex ( who came in handy when I needed reminding that no one actually cares about my life).

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Thanks, for once I actually needed that reassurance.

Then the day after the first story was released, it happened again but with a follow up story. I had an over the phone conversation with the journalist who was nice but I wasn’t really concentrating on what I was saying as it was 6pm on a Friday night. Remind me to be a bit clearer in the future, but what people probably don’t realise is that I am very well aware and I agree that my life, let alone my dating life isn’t ‘news’ but the story would have gotten enough clicks on the first day that the editor probably wanted to follow it up with a second story. I was just rolling with the punches at this point.

I got a private message from an Australian journalist who asked me a few questions for their website. I agreed since I thought it would be the same story and if I knew about it and was kind of interviewed, surely it would be okay? I actually really liked the article posted, but the comments blew up and people were so outraged by a social experiment “done for the lols of my friends and family” that you would have thought that I had committed a crime ( I did it seems, it was for being a talentless whore). That article is the one that went viral and I had even joked on the Friday to my colleagues that “You’re nobody until the Daily Mail covers it”.

People started accusing me of being self-obsessed and over the weekend I probably have been and that is a reaction to when your dating blog which remember, was initially written for friends and family goes kinda viral. If I injected a bit more insecurity in my posts or if my cleavage wasn’t as prominent in the pictures then perhaps people would have found something else to be mean about. Truth is, this wasn’t meant to be a ground-breaking blog. I said something about this in the beginning about not trying to invent the wheel, for those who bothered to read that far back. You’re damned if you don’t have self-esteem issues and you’re damned if you do.

My teeth are apparently too big for people’s liking, which was probably one of my favourite hate comments. I rung my Mother hungover on Sunday morning declaring that I spent 24 years being insecure about the wrong thing on my face!  It truly was a revelation. Thank you internet!

The internet also assumed that I slept with all 30 dates.

Not that everyone really needs to know this but I’ll put simply this into bullet points so that it’s clear cut for those who are deeply concerned that I gave out some STD’s during 30 days of Tinder.

  • During 30 days of Tinder, I didn’t sleep with, or have sex with any of them… on the first date.
  • During 30 days of Tinder, I went on second and third dates with some of the 30, which weren’t blogged about as I only wrote about the first date.
  • I went on 44 dates in 28 days.
  • I slept with one of the 30 dates, but it wasn’t on the first date.

Can a woman not have sex before she’s married still? Even though most of the 30 knew about the blog before it was posted and were fine with it as they weren’t having their identities revealed, I’m still the talentless irrelevant, self-obsessed nobody who was trying to get my 15 minutes of fame by going on 30 dates of Tinder in 30 days.

So anyway, this would have been a pleasant experience if I was getting paid for the hate and not my small, irrelevant blog on the internet to get cherry picked for someone to make ground-breaking conclusions about the ‘kind of girl I am’. The truth is that no one really cares, but they care enough to feel enraged about or comment about something like a dating blog but probably stay silent on the real issues that go on in the world.

Funny that.

 

 

 

 

Date #22 Stories with a Bearded-Borderline-Colleague

Have you ever met Tintin in real life? Well, I think have. With the exception that he was bearded and didn’t have a dog.

Other than that, here’s the image I’ll leave with you with so that you can picture Date #22 as you read:

[Edit: I mean the blonde Tintin, not the ginger one as it seems like there are two.]

I swiped him knowing that I recognized him, but I decided to skip pretending like I actually knew him since we had never talked, I’d just Facebook stalked him (I do that quite a lot, actually – pretend I’ve only just met someone when really, I’ve Facebook stalked the shit out of them). I had seen him before, sitting down working hard at a co-working space where we were both based. From a distance he looked inoffensive, shy and the blonde beard gave him a bit of street cred. Yes, another bearded young professional in Wellington.

“I’m so shocked, I literally can’t even stomach another hipster beard” says Mary Cherry.

I believe he made the first move, I can’t actually recall, and since editing this blog he has deleted his Tinder profile and re-joined a few times. Typical bearded men who overthink their Tinder presence…

He had pretty good chat through Tinder, though I had built up this image in my head that he would be extremely awkward and shy in real life. His photos depicted a very blonde, very bearded big kid with blue eyes and a baby face. He wore a lot of checked shirts in various colours according to his Tinder profile. Another classic lumberjack look alike, AKA Date #13. So Hipster. So Wellington.

I’m not insinuating anything here.

After some above average yet still mediocre chat, we agreed to meet for coffee at Stories on Cuba Street. I was running strangely early for my coffee with the blonde-bearded hipster and decided to go and check out more Coachella-themed stationary at Typo to kill some time. I spent about twelve minutes in a store that was hardly bigger than 3 meters wide on either side. I’m embarrassed at how often I’ve mentioned a shop that I haven’t actually spent money in. People must assume I just loiter in Typo in between all my Tinder dates. Which as it turns out isn’t far from the truth.

Is it an assumption when its the truth?
Meh

We arranged to meet during the morning coffee time frame and I made up some excuse at work about meeting a friend early for coffee as a way of taking an early lunch break. Although my dating exploits were hardly a secret to my colleagues (with my casual slutty work attire and the pash rash,) I didn’t want to admit every day that I was meeting a stranger for my caffeine fix.

On this particular occasion, it was a cold morning and my frequent Tinder dating meant that my care factor for how I looked was decreasing at a rapid pace. On this momentous occasion, I thought it was an excellent idea to wear black ponte pants courtesy of the Gla’sons with some brogues I had picked up from Hush Puppies. Not the sexy comfortable footwear that is made fashionable by Taylor Swift or the Kardashians, I’m talking about these bad boys with straight black pants:

 

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These bad boys take me all round town, slayin’ and playin’. Just sayin’

It looked terrible, but I didn’t care, and it wasn’t like checked shirts were making me feel intimidated.

Date #22 was on time and weirdly enough, we were communicating solely through Tinder. Usually I try and upgrade to personal texting devices as soon as possible as a way of storing my conversations for dis blog, but I had clearly dropped the ball this time. He was waiting for me, on the street, in the cold, unaware that I was purposely avoiding him so that I wasn’t the one waiting on Cuba Street like a weirdo. He offered to get me a hot beverage before I had even got there. 10 points to Gryffindor! Take note, Date #7.

He was shorter in real life than I had anticipated. Maybe I imagined this blonde hair, blue eyed guy to be Nordic in all aspects, but he fell short of expectations. We had a few mutual friends according to my Facebook stalk. This stalk also revealed that this guy is/was/formerly engaged within the last six months.

Call me crazy, but this merely intrigued me. One of our mutual friends also told me that he was a left-wing self-righteous twat but this didn’t really set me back either, just made me more excited to meet him. As the icing on the cake, I later found out that a previous conquest of mine told Date #22 that he had dodged a bullet which I found a) so fucking rude and b) so fucking accurate.

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I’m the one who’s got one less, one less, problem.

Date #22/Tintin talked fast and immediately gave off this non-flirty vibe. I think that was his style. It was as though I was immediately friends zoned, or I was having sex with his brother and he was trying to suss me out to see if I was worthy of his bro while politely tolerating me at the same time.

I don’t expect my dates to be drool and crotch-grabbing, but I enjoy a false sense of security when I’m on a date and am constantly reassured every three or four seconds about how great I am.

During our caffeine fix I found out three things about him.

  1. He was engaged VERY recently. I was totally a rebound Tinder date.
  2. He was previously a journalist and worked in media. This pissed me off. He was definitely going to be a better writer than my uneducated, barely comprehensible self and he was going to judge anything I wrote.
  3. He was smoother than I expected. By that, I mean he had a quick wit and talked fast. I liked that about him.

From first impressions, I thought Date #22 would be quiet and unassuming (read: boring loser) but he was a lot more put together than my Tindersumptions had led me to believe. I didn’t expect this and after 21 dates, you would think I’d have it sussed.

There wasn’t much disagreement between (from my perspective!) but I felt like his body-language and chat had friend-zoned me before I could even bring out my adorable-slutty charm on. That, or he took my previous conquest’s advice seriously. Regardless, I wasn’t too gutted.

My free coffee finished after we walked around Cuba Street making small talk about everything and nothing, therefore my time for him expired and I had to get back to work. He invited me later to attend a work event with him later on that night (my adorable slutty charm must have worked) but alas, I had another Tinder date lined up.

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This is Date #22, dodging a bullet.

 

Edit: I had written this blog thinking I was so clever for referring to him as TinTin. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who thought he looked like TinTin. Go figure.