A few weeks ago I matched with this guy on bumble date who was not at all my type. Not only was he not particularly cute, but also he looked much more straightlaced and clean cut (read: bland) than the guys I'm attracted to and was way more professional that what I like. You know the best way to put it? He was a normie, and normies are totally not my thing. I know, you're wondering, probably, why I matched with this not-particularly-cute, professional-looking, normie guy at all. Well, behold, readers, the following screenshot, and you'll see:
Three lines down, did you see?
The lure of anything Chicago related is just impossible for me to resist.
Since there's no point in my making up a fake name for this guy as is my usual thing seeing as it's right there for you to see, we'll just call him by his real name. Darren and I talked minimally for a couple weeks, probably ten messages between the two of us in all, maybe fifteen, mainly about Chicago and what would possess him to leave the greatest city on Earth to come to this nightmare of a place. A week or so into the conversation, he asked me if I wanted to grab lunch one day, and a few days after that, he asked if I wanted a relationship or just a friend to which I said yes and yes, that if a relationship happens, that's fine, but I could always use more friends (I'd provide a screenshot but we're not matched anymore; luckily I had the foresight to screenshot his little bio last week). Days went by after my response, and then one day I got a message from him that, again I wish I could provide word for word, but went something like this:
I'm trying to make the biggest network of young working professionals and would personally like to invite you to join. Click here. And then a link was provided, which out of annoyance I didn't open for a few days, but when I did, I found led to this:
After looking around a little, I clicked on his profile picture, which led to what right this second I'm finding is a now-deleted photo of, I believe it said his queen but maybe it was his reason for being, and what I'll call his longtime, live-in girlfriend. For your viewing pleasure, this is a still-remaining photo of the million-dollar couple here:
(See what I mean about the bland?)
Now, before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I don't think Darren was trying to cheat (but of course, I have terrible judgment and am often so far off, it's-almost-comical wrong). He never said anything remotely suggestive, and other than asking me to a lunch which we never had, he never expressed any desire to meet. What I think instead is that Darren is turning something into a platform that's not meant to be a platform at all. I think he's an opportunist who, while not quite preying on women, is absolutely playing with women, manipulating a system and hope and trust and, oftentimes, naïvete´, and to be honest, I think that's much worse than your garden-variety cheat or at least, for whatever reason we're not going to unpack in this specific post, it is to me.
I don't want to use the term conmanning because that's way too strong, but there should definitely be a term for what Darren is doing; in fact, I suspect that in the day and age of ghosting, breadcrumbing, zombieing, submarining, and benching, there probably is a term because he can't be the only one, he's just the only one I've seen, and if there isn't yet a term, I'm sure there's soon going to be. For now, though, since either there's no official term or I don't know what it is, we'll just go with asshole.
I'm pretty sure that one works.
