Rumble in the Bumble pt.4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I know I promised that I wasn’t going to do another one of these until next week, but over the period of about nine hours yesterday Bumble dragged me on a roller coaster of emotions, potential and of reaching ridiculously over my limits as a physically attractive entity*. I have to assume that you’ve all read Shawn Michaels’s esteemed memoir ‘Heartbreak and Triumph’? Well, that could well be the title of this episode of my delve into the grottiness of online dating. Except that there was very little triumph involved. ‘Heartbreak and Heartbreak’ might work a little better. Except that repeated word is a little functionally unnecessary, isn’t it? Yeah, the book of yesterday on Bumble would be called ‘Heartbreak’. Do you see where this is going?

(* though… maybe… really below… my mental attractiveness…? I don’t want to be cruel… Well… maybe I do, just a little, but as will soon become brutally clear I really need to claw back some self-respect out of this hideous situation)

What’s that? You think I’m far too obsessed with wrestling? Really?? Let’s see if that comes into play.

Do you remember Tyler Girl from Part 3?

Then you might remember that I accidentally ‘super swiped’ her (it’s probably called something far more on brand in Bumble, like ‘make my queen’ or ‘super pollinate’ or ‘sting but pull out not just the stinger but also part of my abdomen, digestive tract, muscles and nerves, and dying from the massive abdominal rupture’), meaning that I was sadly unable to use it on the women who really interested me, namely the one who asked me to hit her as hard as her Dad. It was also a waste as Tyler Girl (TG) was almost offensively attractive, the kind of beauty that would only ever be interested in me if they actually got to know me and happened to be into the kind of perverse and outwardly appalling Manga that I’m peddling. Or if I saved her life or something. Or paid her money. Ideally all three. Then I woke up yesterday to this:

It was from TG. Now, there are a lot of questions here. It’s not such a bizarre thing that she chose to respond to my ‘abdominal rupture’ with a message- by sticking my stinger into her and tearing my body apart attempting to dislodge myself I had essentially not just passed her by in the street and said “Hey! I like you!” as we quickly went our different ways, as so many other people do in Gig Economy Dating, but I had caught back up with her, held her by both shoulders, looked her deep in the eyes and said slowly and carefully:

“No… I really like you…”

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that’s she’s at least intrigued. Speaking from personal experience, there is absolutely nothing more attractive about a person than for them to really like you. Your narcissism sectors immediately start buzzing, as you (perhaps subconsciously, perhaps extremely consciously) start thinking about a life with someone who will adore you unconditionally and let you get away with anything. If we’re honest, that’s all we really want. That’s why people have children.

Also, women like it when you run after them in the streets and grab them by the shoulders to explain to them how much you love them, right?

No, the confusion arises from her choice of opening gambit. It might not seem that strange reading it now that she chose to open with a declaration of love for Tyler- it is the reason we ‘abdominal ruptured’ (AR) her in the first place, and we have given her the name ‘Tyler Girl’. But… she doesn’t know that… does she…? Has she actually read the blog post she’s first mentioned in?? This ‘Rumble in the Bumble’ series has been abnormally popular for this blog (because you’re all sick fucking vultures laughing at my misery and loneliness!!), so it’s not inconceivable that it somehow found its way back to TG, is it?? Maybe the line ‘OMG I love Tyler, the Creator’ is a direct quote from my response? Does that emoji (😅) actually mean ‘LOL! I liked what you said about my dream dinner party guests and now I’m quoting it back to you playfully! #Bantz #YOLO #StaightFire #Paypig‘?

To answer those sequentially: kinda, but not really:

and nope, nope, nope, nope, no:

So… she’s likely saying ‘Phew, I love Tyler, the Creator’? But… I haven’t said anything about Tyler, the Creator to her… Does my general look call him to mind?? This is what she would have seen of me. Indeed, this is all she would have ever seen of me.

Is that a Tyler, the Creator reference?? Has Tyler ever painted half his face blue?? This was going to test all of my journalistic research abilities to the max.

The results were disappointing, although I accept that the existence of another rapper called ‘Blueface‘ did muddy my research. I’m no closer to explaining this. When someone ARs you, do you get to see the exact moment that you won them over? The only way I can say for sure is if I one day get ARed myself. If you’re reading this, I implore you to open a Bumble account, find my gorgeous blue face, and super swipe me like it’s going out of fashion. I will also, most likely, have sex with you. No, honestly, even if you’re really ugly, I’ve got, like, no standards. TG is gorgeous, but she’s very much the outlier. Also, spoiler alert, I haven’t had sex with her. Yet.

You know what? Maybe I’m obsessing too much over this? Perhaps TG just introduces herself to everyone with ‘OMG I love Tyler, the Creator 😅’? Like, ‘Phew, thank God I love Tyler, the Creator, now let’s get down to business’. Anyway, all these questions have honestly only come up today, at the time I was just talking to a beautiful woman, so I obviously just fucking lost it!!

Only joking, come on, I turned on

A decent enough opening gambit. Of course, I didn’t open by asking her exactly she chose to open the conversation by confessing her love for Tyler, but I’m not going to obsess over that. For the rest of my life. We proceeded to have a nice little chat.

I said some pretty funny things that didn’t get the response they deserved, and I also used phrases like ‘low key’ so that TG knew how cool and down with the kids I was. No  obviously alight loins at the moment, no burning passions being lasciviously lit*, but it’s early days and as an opening exchange it went pleasantly enough. I then asked her what her job is:

(*on her end, I mean. I was masturbating constantly throughout, but I know from experience that women rarely appreciate being told that. It’s actually the reason I’ve been legally barred from phoning my local GP’s clinic)

Which is as good a time as any to segway into the rest of her Bumble profile! Now, I’m not going to show you any pictures, as if you want to just see pictures of random people for you to judge entirely on how much you’d like to wipe your genitals around them, then… well,.. just join Bumble, I suppose. I am far too respectful of people’s privacy to do that. Instead, let’s just analyse and dissect everything about her personal description! Whoo! 2020!

She’s twenty eight years old, but my Dad always explained the law of dating younger people to me- half your age, plus seven. This means I am scientifically allowed to go as young as… twenty five?? That’s way too old! That would rule out the twenty two year old ‘Hit me as hard as my Dad’ woman! OK, new rule, the ‘plus seven’ bit is an embarrassing leftover from a bygone era, you can just go ‘half your age’, which quite nicely means I can go as low as eighteen. It’s the law. She says she exercises ‘sometimes’, which honestly tells us nothing. If you never exercised, you would be embarrassed enough to say you did ‘sometimes’, but if you always exercised you wouldn’t want to sound like an overbearing gym freak, so you’d be cagey enough to also say ‘sometimes’. Then if you did, actually, honestly, exercise ‘sometimes’, you’re going t say that you exercise ‘sometimes’. TG saying that she sometimes exercises is a clear sign that she either exercises sometimes, all the time, or none of the time. Fucking useless. Moving on, she says she has an ‘undergraduate degree’, which might be the same as me, I honestly have no idea how that works. She ‘never’ drinks, which is good in the sense that we’re both party pooping haters of fun, but bad in the sense that I can’t really envision any woman ever deciding to have sex with me if she’s sober. There’s a motherfucking dog involved, which- be still my beating heart- is often a clincher, and she also has kids and wants more. This isn’t a problem for me, as I’m not a ultra macho shithead whose superficial dislike of kids is an obvious attempt to disguise his secret desire to fuck them. Yeah. Big statements? I got ’em. Hit subscribe as hard as you can. I love kids, they’re great. Although, as we found out in part three, I also like pineapple on pizza so I’m blatantly a paedophile. She’s a ‘Sagittarius’, which means absolutely fucking nothing, and she’s a Christian, which means she’s likely a fucking idiot. Nevertheless, plenty to work with here, what other answers did she give aside from her- apparently borderline obsessive- appreciation of Tyler?

I mean, she’s not explicitly not my future wife, y’know?

Anyway, where were we? The light comedic flirting continued. Well, from me. We also exchanged our real names (and I did that gross ‘talking like you’re an English gent from the middle ages’ bullshit when we’re introducing each other. Why the fuck do men do that?), and we seemed to be making tiny little connections, especially on the subject of her dog. I asked her about her dog’s personality, which is the kind of question that would sound ridiculous to someone who’s never had a dog, but to dog owners it sets of an alarm which squeals ‘OMG! I’m allowed to talk about my dog’s personality and not sound weird!! Yesssssssss!!!’. However, TG then describes her dog’s personality as ‘greedy’ because she eats a lot, which is… yeah… it’s a fucking dog…

However, shit then got real.

She sent me a picture.

Of her dog.

I’ve obviously had to digitise the dog’s face to protect her identity, so you’ll have to trust me that she looks amazing. Now, here would be the obvious place to make a joke along the lines of, ‘Nice dog, do you have any pictures of your pussy as well?’, wouldn’t it? First of all, TG had given me absolutely no impression that she would appreciate a joke like that in any way, no matter how hilarious it patently is. Secondly, I really, really hate the word ‘pussy’ when used to mean a vagina, I think it sounds both gross and infantile, and… blech! No, any cheap ‘pussy’ puns are beneath me, I’ll instead wait for the perfect opportunity to ask for photos of her stinkwrinkle. Like a gentleman. Anyway, we discussed dogs for a while

Before I made the first major snafu of our relationship. Who could have predicted that it would have come from me making a joke that she was offended by??

Eek. OK, so suggesting that her son was less important than her dog was not appreciated, not even at the level of a simple ‘lol’ or laughing smiley. There are obviously things that you do not joke about with TG. I found myself pathetically backtracking…

…and hated myself for it. I mean, it was obviously a joke… wasn’t it? I hate having to explain that, no, I don’t really think you’re son is less important than your dog (though she does seem to be a little too eager to claim that he’s not…). At the same time, I don’t want to become one of those guys (and it’s almost always guys) who absolves all responsibility for the shit he says, claim that jokes shouldn’t have to explain themselves, and instead put all of the responsibility onto the listener not to be offended. I perhaps should have just apologised for offending her- because she was obviously offended, and I was sorry- and just accepted that it was completely my fault for misreading the tone. And for, y’know, thinking she had a sense of humour. I also, for the first time, became very conscious of the fact that TG is a black woman, and had doubtlessly heard thousands of white men say something objectionable to her in the past before attempting to justify it by saying ‘It’s just a joke!’. Christ, it’s a complicated discussion, isn’t it? Did I have that conversation with TG? No. I changed the subject. Because I’m not a fucking sociopath.

TG talked about being born in Berlin, I was very impressed because Berlin is an incredibly cool city. She didn’t know if I was joking because, understandably, she no longer believes a word coming out of my mouth after my comments about her son. I responded with a Wayne’s World gif, a movie that came out the year she was born so she’s obviously a big fan of. The chat led to me ‘revealing’ that my face isn’t really blue. Then, it was the beginning of the end…

It’s fair to say that TD isn’t being won over, I’ve told her that her son is worth less than a dog, she thinks I’m taking the piss out of Berlin, but isn’t quite sure, so now she’s thinking ‘Let’s have a good look at this slab of hunk meat, see if he’s worth the effort’. I made a stupid, stupid error.

I actually sent her a picture.

Not some expertly posed sexy shot, not some shot of me teaching baby pandas algebra while backpacking through the jungles of Toronto. Just me. Right then. Sat on the sofa. This was dumb. How I look is by far my weakest feature, and I should really turn conversation away from it as much as possible. The first picture was awful, and she didn’t respond for a minute or so that felt like hours, so I panicked and quickly sent off some alternative photos.

Do you spot the schoolboy error I’ve made in that second photo? The error that has been scientifically proven to immediately evaporate any trace of potential moisture from a lady’s foo-foo and weld any opening tightly shut like it was using a fucking smouldering iron? I’ll let TD explain.

Right, well this is fucked, isn’t it? To her credit/shame, she did recognise a far more wrestlers than any sane and self-respecting person should, but who recognises Chris Jericho and not Stone Cold Steve Austin?? Come on, there are red flags going off all over this, aren’t there?

I attempted to playfully suggest that she tell me something really embarrassing about herself so that we were even, she politely (angrily? It’s hard to tell with just text)  declined, and that was the last thing she ever said to me. It was around 5pm by this point, we’d been speaking to each other from about 9am, and it had taken around a full work day for her to decide that I’m not right for her and just… stop talking.

Which, I dunno, is that rude? It seems rude, but I’m new to this so I’m not sure if it’s just the done thing. So, my first Bumble love deserts me. To be completely honest, and to break kayfabe and let the gimmick slip a bit, I was actually quite upset about it yesterday. One of either two things have happened- either TG hadn’t been sufficiently impressed by my personality, which is pretty much the only thing I’ve fucking got, or she was mildly impressed with my personality but massively turned off when she saw what I looked like, which is pretty much my absolute worst fear being proven to be fucking true!! I guess it’s true what the advert says- “Come To Bumble and Have Your Confidence and Self Belief Crushed By Total Strangers”. I mean, fuck!

But writing this has been brilliant therapy, and made me realise what a complete mismatch me and TG were. She didn’t seem to have a fully working sense of humour- which we know is unusual for a German, she was obviously never that into it, just wanted to see what kind of people really liked her (she doesn’t have to know it was accidentally) and I was happy to provide that ego boost. Looking back, I was never really into her personality at all, I was just interested because- and I can’t stress this enough- she’s really good looking. For me to then complain that women aren’t interested enough in my personality is… Well, it’s the way life is, I’m a man, get used to it.

Also, she said she recognised Sting, but there are two Stings on my shelf, so I can’t give her full credit.

But I have learned some things from this doomed relationship. Firstly, women do actually respond to being ARed, so I might do that more in the future. Secondly, Alex, please, only AR women with an obvious sense of humour, or you’ll end up slagging off people’s children again. Also, this heart break (and the wrestling references) have inspired me to add to my personality profile:

Yeah, this is all good. Then, of course, you have Hejjy messaging me occasionally:

But fuck her, right? I’ve got to move on from that woman who loves me and who I love because… erm… That’s the done thing… right…? And I can’t go back to her, because I’ve got to… teach her a lesson…?

Man, dating’s hard…

Also, there are now three weirdos that I can’t talk to without paying!

This series could run and run. Because this will be an endless parade of heartbreak and pain. That’s what the book should be called! Tune in next time!!

 

OK, now I’m really going to take a break for about a week, hopefully coming back with some new ideas for photos. Also, I can’t wait to show examples of the options available again, because I’ve got some corkers!!

 

EDIT 12/04/2020

I’ve worked it out!! This is what Bumble says my favourite Spotify artists are. I so rarely use that piece of nonsense, but I apparently have a pretty cool little selection