Off The Hook!

I can tell you now that I did hit Block Contact this weekend. There’s a whole lot of BS that seems to pervade the online dating world. As much as I “enjoyed” the literary exploration of revealing the cat fishing, or, in the case of this fellow, mining for gems, after several days of being on the hook, or sparkling in the pan, I am quite ready to cut bait.

Here’s where our “love affair” went in the span of a week:

• Unctuous endearments via text message and when we spoke by phone. And no chemistry to report.
• His sharing the need for an emergency business trip to Turkey this week, with apologies that we would not get to meet in person this week.
• Pictures of a ring he’d made for a client
• Sharing an itinerary for said trip to Europe – first class to demonstrate wealth and share his “full name”
• Calls as early as 4:45AM and as late as 10:37 from someone I’d only had one phone conversation with.

• Request for my email address on the eve of European travel so that we could skype while he was gone. This playing on my request to FaceTime multiple times and my attempting to do so only to see two options – WhatsApp or Zoom. His phone number didn’t seem real.

Here’s how the script most likely would have gone – I don’t need the striking WGA writers to help me:

• I send my email – he would then know my name and do just what I did when I got his – search for his digital footprint. What did I find?
  • A twitter feed with about 27 followers and the most recent post from April 2021
  • For someone who has a business in jewelry, his linked in profile seems awfully incomplete
  • A stock picture of a restaurant in Napa (chianti bottles hanging from the rafters) where he’d insisted he’d moved from four years, though a google search of his phone prefix named it as a Saint Paul number, or from an eastern suburb of the Twin Cities
  • Another professional photo of “him” standing in front of an open quarry
  • A brand new social media page with no photo and very few friends
• After receiving my email, he would have emailed me that something tragic had happened in Europe and he was “stuck” in some way and needed my help.

So I did erase his contact from my phone and block his phone number so when he “returns from Europe on the 17th” he will have to cry into his beer.

But my friends reminded me that as diverting as this was, it was just that: diverting me from the actual goal. Meeting someone to spend time with. What experiences like this do, unfortunately, is erode what little trust we have in strangers and the possibility of meeting a match, much less a soul mate. I have much reduced trust that there is actually anything good that come out of the App.

Get out there and do the things you like to do and you’ll meet someone.

Wise Bob and Susan

For the time being, I won’t delete the app, just this diversion. Strike it up to a pretty good writing prompt. With apologies to the poor guy where ever you are, whose photo has been maligned here.