I still remember sitting front row at Totem Theatre, popcorn and Sour Patch Kids in hand, as the opening credits to the Lion King rolled. I sat in rapture as Carmen Twillie’s deep voice belted: “Through despair and hope/Through faith and love/Till we find our place/On the path unwinding/In the circle/The circle of life.” About 15mins later, I sat in disbelief, crying while Simba prodded his dead father, Mufasa. Twenty-eight years later, and I’m still trying to reconcile that trauma. But I digress. The point is that everything is cyclical, and that includes failed Tinder dates.
Every year, would-be suitors seem to follow a pattern I like to call “the boomerang.” In the early spring, as the winter thaws, the hearts of serial Tinder daters grow colder while they prepare to dump the one they’re with in hopes of an upgrade. The key is securing as many dates as possible during this period so you can hone your ideal dating sales pitch. By the time that’s locked in, it’s summer, and a veritable smorgasbord of horny tourists is ripe for the picking. After a summer of hookups, the boomerang dater circles back to their spring dates to find a suitable one to pass the winter with. And you guessed it, the cycle repeats.
When I met Mike in April, he had already carefully curated his bio: early 40s, about to retire from the military, former pro athlete, well-educated, and well-traveled. Coupled with his chiseled jaw, toothy smile, and obvious omittance of hunting pictures, his profile was like the great white buffalo of Tinder profiles. In fact, his profile was so spot on that I questioned its legitimacy. Surely, someone of his ilk couldn’t exist in real life. But as you’ve probably noticed, I have no impulse control, so I swiped right on the off chance he was real.
The gambling-esque “It’s a Match!” graphic splashed across my screen, and immediately, I had a new message alert. That familiar feeling of excitement coursed through my body as I opened what had to be the most underwhelming message possible – “Yo!”
I sat staring at the screen for several minutes, hoping a second message was coming because where on earth do you go from “Yo”? Two days later, and those two letters still sat in my inbox as I wracked my brain for a pithy response. With nothing coming to mind, I responded in kind – “Yo!”
Our chat, now filled with four letters, sat abandoned for about a week before I broke the silence.
“So, you’re from the East Coast. That’s cool. What brought you up here.”
“Military. What’s your number,” he asked.
Things weren’t off to a good start, but weirdly, his aloofness was attractive. After weeks of being propositioned for threesomes with married couples, his response was a welcomed change of pace, so I gave him my number. And then my phone rang.
“Yo! It’s Mike,” said what can only be described as a super-hot, deep male voice.
Trying to be funny, I replied, “who is this?”
“It’s Mike. You know, from Tinder,” he replied with a little less confidence.
“I know who it is. I was just fucking with you,” I replied with a laugh.
For the next two months, Mike would call multiple times a day, and our conversations were always flirty, but he never suggested meeting in person. As he became a regular part of my day, I began to develop feelings and longed to meet him face-to-face. He, on the other hand, was still perusing Tinder and using me as an emotional placeholder – something I painfully learned when he called on a sunny day in May.
“Wait, so you just played me for the last two months,” I asked breathlessly as my heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. “That’s really cold, Mike.”
“Nah, it’s not like that. She’s just hot, and I want to check it out. We’re cool, right,” he explained.
“No, we’re not cool! You’ve really hurt my feelings, and I don’t know what I did to deserve being treated so poorly,” I told him as I choked back tears. “Lose my number!”
The summer came and went, and there I was, still single, and still inexplicably thinking about Mike. Then out of the blue, in early September, I received a familiar message on Tinder.
“Yo!”
Like clockwork, the boomerang had returned and smacked me in the middle of my far too forgiving face. We would continue to have periods of nonstop communication, followed by even longer periods of absolute silence. Mike kept me on the hook by occasionally hanging out, and while nothing physical ever happened, he would flirt mercilessly and then leave me hanging. This lasted for two years before I finally resigned myself to the fact that no matter how many times Mike circled back to me, I would never be more than a placeholder. Sometimes I find myself fighting the urge to latch onto his perpetually moving boomerang. Then I remember how much I hate spinning carnival rides, and I reply to his mating call with two letters of my own – “no.”
