By Sarah Yule
I was fresh on the scene of Tinder when it happened. Desperately swiping through Pittsburgh plugs to find my husband-to-be, I got a notification on Instagram. Alarmed because I never use the app other than to hate-watch the feeds of Bella Hadid and the like, I clicked on the notification banner with fear in my heart. As it turns out, I had reached a milestone in my journey to desirability: I may never match with a single soul on Tinder, but someone had finally slid into my DMs!
Sure that my Prince Charming was on the other side of this message thread, I sent a reply right away, before even really reading what he had written; his name was Brad, and that was enough for me. I wrote something along the lines of “Hey there ;) wanna know what I’m wearing??”
Then I read the message.
My basically-fiancee had initially sent me this: “Hi! I was wondering if you were willing to put your name down to back the red this November.” And that was it. No winky-face, no “u up?”. Nothing. Nada. I had no butterflies in my stomach. Just questions. A metric fuck-ton of questions.
First-off, was this Brad guy referring to the hammer-and-sickle type of “red” or the go-back-to-where-you-came-from kind? The two are quite different, but I’m not sure I’d fancy romantic involvement with either, even at this juncture in my desperation. Secondly, what on my feed would lead Mr. Brad to believe that I would in fact want to “back the red”? Was it the pictures of my cats? If so, which ones? Which cat? I concluded that reading too far into Brad’s inquiry would open a can of worms that would kill any chance of romance between us, so I just kept up my side of the one-sided flirtation, saying “My roommate is away for the weekend ;))”. You see, Brad was all about making the first move when it came to winning a vote on Nov. 3, but now that I was ready to go all-in for him, he was nowhere to be seen. I called him out on this inability to commit and again, nothing in response.
I was just about fed up with my communist/republican e-boyfriend at this point, and I went back to my DMs to break it off. That was when I saw that Brad’s messages to me had disappeared. Similarly, his account wouldn’t show up when I searched for it either. Even worse, my WhitePages Premium search came up empty as well. I guess my cyber-lover had come to terms with his hypocrisy and made the decision to deplatform himself. I can only applaud that choice on Brad’s end, but I am left with the question of what could’ve been to ponder for the rest of my days. I guess it’s back to Tinder for me, wish me luck!
The Pitiful News 