Crap Dates Make Good Tweets: Book Turns Bad Dates into Serious LOLz

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Oh, the woes of the disastrous first date: the silences, the bad smells, the off-putting comments… it’s all be enough to make someone lie in bed weeping for days while scrolling the pages of “Forever Alone.”

Or it could provide excruciatingly exhilarating stories to share with friends, grandchildren, or the entire Internet community! The date may have been shitty, but it sure is fun to laugh about! That’s the attitude Rhodri Marsden takes with his book Crap Dates: Disastrous Encounters from Single Life, a compendium of tweets he received on his twitter, @FirstDateHell.

In the introduction, Marsden explains, “I’d gotten into the habit of posting idle thoughts on Twitter rather than keeping them to myself, and that’s what I did that Tuesday evening: the story of my bad date, cut back to 140 characters. A couple of people sent theirs back, and I reposted them. Soon, the combined wit of the Twitter community generated a glorious stream of tweets, a cathartic explosion of storytelling.”

If you’ve ever spent some time on an online dating account, you can empathize with these tweets. I certainly went through plenty of incredibly awkward dates from OKCupid, but making people laugh by telling them about my crazy experiences made me suddenly thankful for having had them.

 

That’s a dealbreaker, ladies!

Some of my favorite tweets that made me LOL or scream EW are below:

There are tweets in this book I find difficult to believe actually happened, but maybe that’s what disastrous dates are all about – unbelievable anecdotes that, while disappointing, embarrassing, or even enraging in the moment, provide golden nuggets of entertainment in the future. 

For instance, inspired by the book, I decided to tweet experiences that happened to me from OKcupid meet-ups:

 

While these moments were uncomfortable at the time, they could have been much worse. No matter the outcome, meeting new people is exciting and part of what makes life worth living. Hopefully, nothing that bad happened and you still have all your limbs and all that good stuff after the date – then you can take a few moments to have a little chuckle and spread some joy to the rest of us.

It’s nice to know that with Internet communities like these, no one really has to be “forever alone.” See? Social media isn’t so bad (says the girl without a facebook).