Modern Dating III

Well, it’s a clear sign times are getting desperate when I’m writing a second sequel to an already self-indulgent and conceptually desultory series of blog posts. Yes, it’s time for recent tales of wearisome dating disasters and romantic remonstrations.


Despite the assertion in my last dating post (the critically panned Modern Dating II) that I had retired from the Internet dating scene, I have in fact done the complete opposite. There is only so much crying and masturbating (sometimes simultaneously) a guy can do before the siren-song of the dating profile lures him back.

Dehydration is no laughing matter

The return has given me the opportunity to realise how, even when competing in the arena of the sick and the lame, I cannot pick off even the sickliest antelope (a warning: there are many poorly thought-out metaphors ahead). There is too much competition. I have now spoken online to enough women to know that they are inundated with messages from guys. Approximately 60% of these are dick pictures; another 20% unwitting derogatory slurs; this still leaves the remaining 20% as actual guys trying to meet people. Guys like me. 


It is empirical fact that if there is competition for a girl I like, I will not win. Life has vividly affirmed this fact, ever since my very first crush. I engaged in my usual technique of hanging around her, playing it cool, the sort of thing that in movies results in final reel kissing but in reality bottoms out with accidental asphyxiation while suspended naked from the light fitting by underwear you stole from her bedroom. She promptly shagged my best friend at the time. At university I was wildly in love with a girl who, two days after I confessed this, pulled my best friend (a different one). About a year after that, another girl I was madly transfixed with, and who showed unequivocal signs of reciprocity, subsequently got with my other best friend.


It’s a cheery odyssey of success.


Online dating is a horrible intensification of this competition. For every girl, there are ten guys vying for her attention, like foxes trying to knock over a dustbin (I thought of at least five other similes but they all included the phrase ‘circle-jerk’). We all flaunt our exaggerated and often outright mendacious dating profiles like those monkeys with the hyperbolic technicolour butts.

This is why I'm single

And, if somehow my woefully unimpressive profile makes it through this bestial process unscathed, there’s the date itself. It has come to my attention that I have the personality of a perforated windsock. Even if prior communication goes terribly well, it will all judder to a halt the moment a girl meets me. Even if we seem to get on really well. Each and every time the messages stop dead or peter out, because the girl has lost interest and wandered into the embrace of a finer male with a more impressively engorged rump.

That's man code for 'someone with a bigger penis.'

It can prove altogether disheartening. Some instances, in hindsight, don’t bother me. But sometimes I develop a fondness for someone. It’s not that I expect instant love. I’m not the creepy sort of guy you find on your doorstep at midnight carving your initials into his arm with a ballpoint pen. I’d just like, for once, for that early promise to be fulfilled. And I really don’t know what I’m doing wrong. 


See me whine more about dating! Read Modern Dating I and Modern Dating II!