The Anti-Dating Blog

‘Do you ever worry,’ asked my best friend, ‘that your blog might stop girls from wanting to date you?’

There is indeed a convincing argument to be made that young women aren’t interested in a guy so openly entrenched in depression, so terrified of the sticky exchanges of intercourse, and whose face currently looks like this:

Similarly, I should stress that I’m hardly strapping women down and subjecting them to an endless Powerpoint slideshow of blog entries while I moisten their eyeballs with a syringe. But women have found this blog with alarming regularity.

The very first entry was about my disastrous first kiss. I was seeing an older girl at the time, which cliché dictates made her a font of experience and expectation. I stayed at her flat the weekend after I had posted that entry.

‘Was that all true?’ she asked. ‘About your first kiss?’

When I answered in the affirmative, she blew out her cheeks and quietly went back to watching our inexplicable evening choice of Embarrassing Bodies. I never saw her again.

Because nothing says romance like fungal feet

The next time a girl found this blog she read every single entry in a single day, and told me she thought I was lovely. It was only once she’d met me in person that she lost interest entirely.

So, early evidence is inconclusive.

I’ve brought it on myself since then. The biggest fallacy propounded by this blog is the impression it gives of me as a nice chap blighted by misfortune. I can singlehandedly disprove that with the entry that unfairly insulted a girl I had just stopped seeing. She saw it, of course, and no amount of apologies since have convinced her to talk to me again.

Recently, a girl I was chatting with via a dating site asked me to add her on Skype. I did so with a new account I’d set up for freelance work and anonymous video sex calls. Without my knowledge it had linked with Google and listed this blog immediately next to my name. Five minutes into our first conversation:

HannahK: Aren’t you embarrassed writing such personal things?

Dave: What do you mean?

HannahK: I’m on your blog.

This was particularly bad as the most recent entry was my 26^th birthday post, an entry which Thom Yorke of Radiohead famously described as ‘testicle-stonkingly depressing.’ I immediately went on the defensive to convince her that it was just an off-day, usually I’m an iridescent bundle of raindrops on kittens tied up with string.

Then I smelled my own bullshit. There was no point in lying. She was already looking for a way out of the conversation. So I decided to give her one.

Dave: Don’t worry, you can run to the hills if you want.

HannahK: I’m thinking about it, haha.

Dave: I’d understand. I’m actually thinking about drawing a nice hot bath...

HannahK: I don’t mean to be rude.

Dave: ...break open one of my mum’s leg razors.

Dave: I’m sick of it all, tbh.

HannahK: I hope your [sic] joking.

Dave: I’m riddled with syphilis, too.

HannahK is now offline.

Because why not live up to expectation?

Here's a cat licking my eyeball

I stand by anything I write on this blog, no matter how shameful, raw, or ridiculous. I have a mental illness, yo. My friend was absolutely right; any female with her head on straight should run a mile if she encounters this blog. It is the Anti-Date. Woman repellent. But it’s me. And it’s best they find that out from the start.

Maybe someday one of them will stick around.