Non Adventures On Dating Apps

Four years ago my second pregnancy coincided with summer.

I was seven months pregnant and I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum.

I couldn't keep down so much as a glass a water. I was miserable, hungry and very very bored.

Around about this same time. One of my single friends had decided three dimensional men were not cutting it and had ventured into the thickets of tinder, Bumble and OkCupid and come out the other side relatively unscathed.

Save of course, for a further loss of faith in humanity . The addition of an album or three of unsolicited dick pics and a collection of one liners and double entendres which could do double duty as a steel reinforced chastity belt.

At the time I was also watching Mann Mayal- firstly because I was seven months pregnant, and secondly because sometimes I do inexplicably stupid things.

-and I found that I didn't have an ounce of sympathy for the main character-

Maya Ali as Mannu was a wretchedly two dimensional doormat, with the self preservation instincts of a particularly suicidal lemming.

Because I am a supremely farigh Insaan. I decided to write Mannu a dating profile.

The next day, I made her a real one, on Okc.

I sent the husband a link, informed him that I was doing it for "science" and offered him a ringside view of my visit to the circus.

He wearily declined and informed me that I needed to find better hobbies.

Thus having absolved myself of any further need for transparency. I sallied forth.

I reckoned anyone with an ounce of common sense would have the nous to recognize the profile for the fake It so obviously was.

I recall I used a very posey picture of Maya Ali.

Impeccably braided hair, floating chiffon chunni, pigeon in hand.

She was HOLDING A PIGEON for fucks sake. If you buy that. You deserve to be cat-fished.

In any case, Mannu turned out to be quite popular.

Pigeon and all.

There were the few guys who recognized it for the spoof it was and had a good laugh over it before moving on.

Then there were the others who started with the usual suggestive one liners which segued seamlessly into incoherent rage over being ignored.

Then there was the very married teapot collector who declared himself besotted of Maya Ali and her pigeon holding ways.

He messaged using several different handles, killing his wife off in a different manner each time he introduced himself .

That poor woman died tragically during child birth/endured a gruesome car accident delivering aid to disadvantaged school children in the North / and was divorced for cheating on him all in the space of three days.

There was the much older married guy who claimed to be in an open relationship.

Except his wife didn't know it was an open relationship because it was conveniently open only from one end.

His end.

There was the exceedingly decorative man-child who charitably offered to send me shirtless selfies when he learnt that I was housebound, pregnant and married

.

He also offered to sell me weed, asked for a loan and then promptly disappeared on learning that I was more broke than he was.

There was the doctor who didn't want to be a doctor who kindly sent me working links to several books that I'd been looking for and introduced me to the original German retelling of Rotkaeppchen thereby ruining little Red Riding hood for me. Forever.

There was the David Icke enthusiast with a PhD in Internet eschatology who preached his message of impending doom with the frenetic energy of the deliriously drunk or outright deranged.

There was the Harry Potter loving LUMS grad aspiring to an Amriki post-graduate degree, for whom I somehow ended up editing admission essays.

Although in his defense he did offer to pay me.

But.

By the time I reached the fifth essay, I had decided I was done with dating apps.

I have since decided that i'm quite grateful to be married to a man who would not kill me off (even in the virtual sense) in order to chat up random pigeon holding women online.

Im not quite sure what purpose this narrative serves.

Other than that the world is a weird and fascinating place, rife with all sorts of mind boggling contradictions and characters.

Although, if you're the sort who insists that every story should have a moral.

Maybe it's this.

Stay off dating apps.

Sometimes the person at the other end is a seven month pregnant lady heaving over a bucket of puke. P.s.this is intended as a cautionary tale