Ok, so it appears that being shallow can actually save you sometimes. 

Remember the guy that Tanya didn’t want to date because he wasn’t cute? Well here’s the backstory. 

This guy, who we’ll call “Trey”, began flirting with Tanya out of the blue which immediately made us think that he and his GIRLFRIEND had broken up. The flirting began with Trey inviting himself on what was going to be a solo outing for Tanya. Then he started randomly telling her and others how nervous she made him, which was a weird line considering he had just tagged along on her day that didn’t originally include him.

Then he started going out of his way to bring her coffee. Behind the scenes, he was asking her out on dates. But he wasn’t cute, so she kept declining and, eventually, he quit.

With her…

This 40+ year old man moved on to a 22-year-old he’d known for a couple of days. Luckily, she is also shallow, as well as the 26-year-old he moved onto next.

As an amateur pro private investigator, I got to work to see if a break up was why he was bouncing from girl to girl like a fucking pinball.

What I found out was that not only did he still have a girlfriend, THEY WERE TRYING TO HAVE A BABY. 

We’re not looking like such assholes now, are we?

On the flip side, here’s when being shallow can go sideways. 

So I get a text from Tanya asking how Facebook determines People You May Know. I gave the answer that applies to everything: the algorithm. 

She sends me a screenshot of a guy that Facebook thinks she should know, which she thinks means date. I do my detective work: he lives 5 hours away, and she’d just been broken up with over long distance text, and that long distance was only 2 hours away.

I tell her no. She sends me another who she shares a mutual friend with. I say fuck it, friend request him. I can’t just be negative all the time – shoot your shot and what have you. 

She ignores me and straight sends him a message authored by ChatGPT: “You came up in my “people you might know” and I thought… Maybe I should.” It ended with a laugh emoji 😂. I was not, and neither was he, because he didn’t respond. 

She asked if I thought he saw it. I said it looked MLMy, so he probably ignored it. Again, I suggested she friend request him. She did, and after he accepted, she went running right back to ChatGPT for DM help. 

“Now that we’re officially “friends” I figured it’d be rude not to say hi to the best algorithm pick I’ve seen 😂.”

-OR-

“Appreciate the accept! Facebook clearly thinks we should know each other… and I’m not arguing 😉😂.”

Those fucking laughing emojis, adding insult to ego injury – the first step in AI takeover. Anyway, she was going to send him one of these. I text-yelled QUIT USING CHATGPT TO REACH OUT TO RANDOM DUDES. I know how this ends!

I didn’t use AI (the world was still scared of being replaced by technology back then) but in my early twenties, following a bad breakup, I tried getting back on the horse using the original dating site: MySpace. I reached out to a guy I went to high school with. I’d just run into him and based on how nice he was when he saw me, I figured he was into me. 

He responded to my DM by deleting his profile and disappearing from the internet.

Tanya just got ignored, but at least it was by someone who she LITERALLY did not know, I guess.

I can’t support these corny as fuck AI messages (which by the way can be used as evidence in court). But I will support Tanya. It’s the wild west out here, and we need to stick together, because it’s not just the People You May Know that let you know you don’t.

As all of this was going on, I was being ignored by my husband. 

We were supposed to be on vacation together (along with his friends) at a place I hadn’t chosen and had to pay my way there (we don’t share bank accounts). We’d gotten into a fight days before, and during it, he disinvited me… from a vacation that I half paid for. Though he rescinded, the damage had been done. I wasn’t going. My dog getting sick solidified that.

He’s been on vacation for a week. I’ve hardly heard from him. It’s my high school relationship all over again and experiencing PTSD from that shit show is both humiliating and painful. And the only thing I can think to do is the opposite of what high school me would’ve done. 

High school me would’ve called on repeat to ruin his vacation, speaking in tongues because I have a hard time articulating myself when I’m feeling murderous. Instead, I’m ghosting him too, just until I can get my feelings and words straight.

Or until I give in and just let ChatGPT tell me.