Her Boyfriend Called Her Mid-Date
“I’m not going to lie to you, I’m someone that falls quite quickly, but even that aside, we spoke for ages prior to our meet-up, and I don’t mean flirting, I mean DEEP conversations,” a guy friend tells me. “With lockdown and everything,” he continues, “it was hard to find a good meetup, so it was all stalled, but we spoke on the phone a lot, got away from Hinge, and just started conversing on WhatsApp – I knew everything about her, and she knew everything about me. ”
“Almost two months after our first online encounter, we decide to meet up in person. I’m not really a shy person, but I was more nervous than I thought I’d be. We meet up and she’s perfect, just like I expect her to be. We’re hitting it off, laughing, joking, it’s like talking to her online but just … better? She gazes at me every few seconds and blushes or giggles to herself – this is when both my ego and instinct shake hands and I think ‘yeah, she definitely fancies me’ –but it starts going a bit AWOL after that.”
“Her phone starts buzzing and she apologizes for her bad table manners and goes to the toilet for a bit. When she comes back, she looks a little flustered. I ask if she’s okay, but she just shakes it off. I don’t think too much of it. The same thing happens a few more times, and she starts looking a bit more agitated. That’s when I simply ask who keeps bothering her.”
“‘It’s my boyfriend’ she tells me as my chest suddenly begins to feel a little heavier, I’m not really sure what to say, so I just nod. She had never mentioned a boyfriend before, and it seemed fairly standard that a person wouldn’t use a dating app with a boyfriend. ‘We’re sort-of on a break’, she elaborates, but it isn’t of any comfort or reassurance to me, ‘He rings all the time just to check in. It’s not cheating or anything, he knows I’m out with you’.”
He tells me the date ended quickly after, saying he was far too stunned by the ordeal to actually pick dating services Heterosexual dating her up on it. I later asked if anything followed, to which he says, “We still speak sometimes, it’s never flirty anymore though, still stings a little bit. I know I shouldn’t but I do like her, even after leading me on a bit. I don’t really trust people online, it’s just not really worth it. Technology makes things confusing, it’s so much easier for someone to lie to you.”
The More Common Collection of Stories
Following the detailed conversations with friends, I took to my Instagram followers to ask them their worst dating app stories, and, as I suspected, they were all unsurprisingly (and gruesomely) like one another. The most common complaint was unsolicited nudes stories, which startlingly came from more men than women, though that’s probably more a representation of my following than modern dating reality. One story that came from a predominant number of women was men offering to “pay” them for sexual acts, ones that are generally not acceptable in society.
All the stories just reaffirmed my belief that modern technology, and more specifically dating apps, give people more freedom to be perverted and weird, without having to deal with the consequences that they would by doing and/or saying these things in person. If you ask a girl you’ve never met to sleep with you in person, you’re probably in for a harsh slap or drink-splash. Online, the worst you’ll probably get is a block or a few curse words.