The Continuing Saga of Omar & What It's Like Dating Today

This week's post—or I should say last week's post—is coming to you a little late. The reason? Well, I was just so overwhelmed with endless ideas for what to write about that I couldn't decide.

Lie. That was a lie. Just in case you couldn't tell.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I had a few things come to mind: Valentine's Day and Why People Who Complain About Commercialism are Annoying, The Continuing Saga of Omar, Why I Deleted Clover, etc. But the real truth is I was busy, and as much as I would like to say I have a few stories saved to post on weeks when I don't have time to write…I'm not that organized.

For those of you interested in the Continuing Saga of Omar, enjoy:


He continued sending me messages like this

over the course of several days, without ever receiving a response from me. Finally, having taken my silence as encouragement, he asked me on a date:

[Face blurred for doing-the-right-thing reasons.]

Please note the time and location of the date. By virtue of the fact that I am writing this post, you have, I'm sure, concluded that I chose life.

But was he serious? Is he actually that mentally unstable that he was trying to get me to meet him at a Gas Station at 8:11 at night in earnest? Did he really mean to murder me at said gas station? Well, doubtful. Personally, I've concluded that Omar thought he was being humorous. He is either a troll who thought it was funny to mock people using online dating accounts, or he has absolutely no idea how to talk to women and so makes these unfortunate attempts at jokes in the desperate hope that someone will find it funny and respond—hopefully favorably.

Poor, poor Omar. I almost wanted to message him and set him straight. Almost. Engaging in conversation would certainly have been a terrible idea, and frankly, it is neither my desire nor my responsibility nor my right to try to teach every socially inept man in the world how to interact with women.

So what did happen? Well, I ignored the invitation for a full day (except to occasionally show it to a friend and laugh about it), before finally hitting the "Not Interested" button. For the record, I have no idea what kind of notification appears on the other end of a "Not Interested" click, but I assume it is not too defeating, because within a few hours, Omar resumed messaging me things that sounded vaguely like Pokémon and Dragonball Z attacks. Within the next 24 hours, I deleted Clover for reasons entirely unrelated to Omar, without having ever accepted a date or been messaged by someone whose interest I reciprocated. I had the app for, I believe, a total of 6 days and received several hundred notifications from it. Disappointing.

Since then, I have had several conversations with friends and coworkers who are happily in serious relationships or married, all of whom chuckled and said "Man, thank God I don't have to date anymore. I couldn't deal with what it's like now."

Interesting. Although we have made attaining no-strings-attached sex ridiculously easy in the modern world, we seem to have made meaningful dating and relationships steadily more difficult to attain.

…A topic for another day.