As I explained before, I never asked for the photos of people I met online. Photos don’t really transmit how people look. The facial expressions, the movements are absent from them. For the purposes of figuring out whether you’ll be attracted to a person, they are useless.
One of the people I met online, though, (let’s call him K.) really insisted that I visited his site and saw his photos. When I finally went to the site, I understood why he’d been so insistent. The guy was movie-star gorgeous. He was also an astronomer who made super impressive videos of his projects. And he had many cool hobbies. So, of course, I agreed to meet him as soon as possible.
When I got to the coffee-shop, however, the guy wasn’t there. Instead, the ugliest person I had ever seen stood up to greet me.
“Hi, you are here to meet me!” he told me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Yes, you are. This wasn’t my website I sent you. It was my friend’s.”
“Why did you say it was yours?” I asked.
“Well, I’m very ugly, as you can see. I didn’t want to scare you off.”
I couldn’t really argue with these statements, so we sat down to have coffee.
K. turned out to be not only painfully unattractive but also extremely boring. I can chat up a marble statue if I really try, but every effort I made was hopeless. K. was mostly silent. Pretty much the only time he opened his mouth was to tell me he had made dinner reservations.
I grew desperate. All I wanted to do was leave but I didn’t know how to break that to K. Suddenly, I had a brilliant idea. I saw a man and a woman who were sitting a few tables away from us and who looked very much in love. Even though I’d never seen them before, I decided to use them for my purposes.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe this!” I exclaimed in a tragic voice while staring at the happy couple. “I can’t believe he is doing this to me!”
“What’s going on?” K. asked.
“See this man over there? He is my ex-boyfriend. And he is here with the woman he dumped me for. Oh, this is too painful!”
At that point, I kind of almost believed my own drama and managed to burst into very helpful tears.
“I’m sorry,” I wept into my napkin. “I can’t take this right now. Seeing them together is too painful. I need to go.”
Then I got up and ran away.
Lesson learned: if people insist on showing you their photos, something fishy is probably going on.
Clarissa's Blog 
See, See, See, I told you meeting people online was doomed to failure and once again I am proved right š
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Dating is akin to hitting a baseball. Most times will be an abject failure. If you can get it “right” 30% of the time, you’re a superstar.
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Well we have 5 failures in a row. Clarissa needs the next 2 stories to be a success if she is going to get anywhere near an average of 30%
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What would count as a success in your eyes in this context? š
Remember that no story is more tedious than the one of happiness. š
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My batting average was one great success out of dozens upon dozens of failures. š š
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So this series will only have one success? It seems like a spreadsheet might be a better way to present the data. Or at least you should batch them up into groups where the men concerned failed for similar reasons. š Out of interest is there a particular failure mode that appeared more than any other?
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To paraphrase the great Thomas Edison, “I didn’t fail. I discovered what I didn’t want.”
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To quote the even greater Nikola Tesla “Nature may reach the same result in many ways”
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You win. Tesla is by far a cooler quote.
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Exactly. š Statisticians say that negative experience might even be more useful than positive experience.
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Since I’m not polygamous, of course it can only have one success story. How many husbands do you think I have? š š
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What do you mean failure? Do you know how popular these stories are with readers? Where else would I get all this material? š š
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I did note that since I subscribed to email subscription a few days ago you have 7 more email subscribers
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I always feel bad for email subscribers who get bombarded with a crazy number of posts. Often, when I press the publish button, I even mutter, “Sorry email subscribers!”
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Clarissa, you are absolutely precious! I love this story utterly.
And seriously, just not sharing pictures shoule have been fine. The subterfuge is annoying. It leads to disappointed expectations. Most irksome.
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Thank you but I still feel kind of bad about this display of bad theatrical skills on my part. š
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