By now now I’ll admit I was starting to become a little cynical and jaded about the whole ONLINE DATING thing but I’ve never been one to give up easily so I persisted in my search. I was hoping that things might improve as by now I had moved from Melbourne to Canberra with a 8 month stop over at RAAF Base Richmond. I quite deliberately didn’t Husband Hunt in Richmond as my choices were guys I worked with at the local RAAF Base (and it’s not a big base) or the locals who were all genetically related and just a little nuts.
So once I hit Canberra and got settled I got back into the whole online dating thing. Deleted my original account and found a new site with better reviews than the one I had been on. All I remember is the information about you was a lot more extensive and photos were not compulsory. The pick list options for your perfect person was roughly the same with the added extra that you could tick a box that if they didn’t meet your requirement they couldn’t view/contact you. As it turned out that tick box only worked if you joined as a full fee paying member on the 12 month plan which I didn’t.
As per about 99% of the population of Canberra Mr Ego was a public servant and my first clue Mr Ego had an ego the size of a planet should have been when he asked what level I was employed at (APS 1 to 6 or EL1 up), he was relieved to discover I was a Defence Contractor and therefore not part of the public service employment structure. I later found out off him that if I had of been an EL1 or above he wouldn’t have gone out with me because he couldn’t possibly date a girl who was higher up the employment ladder than he was and thus would be paid more than him.
Eventually we moved on from instant messages via the dating site to phone calls and he seemed like a nice guy so we were at the making plans to meet for coffee stage. However he flatly refused to commit to going out for coffee until we had exchanged photos which should have been my second clue about the size of this guys ego. However I wasn’t looking for “bad” in the situation I was thinking 11 months of online dating with 2 bad dates under my belt this has to be THE ONE it will work. Sigh I was such an optimist back then.
The only reason my profile didn’t have a photo up was simply that I hadn’t figured out how to pull the digital photos off my mobile phone that a friend had taken a few weeks ago. Plug and play wasn’t quite as advanced back then and I actually needed to add some program off the web to make my Nokia phone talk to my computer before I could do the photo transfer. Since Mr Ego also had a Nokia phone which could send/receive photos we did the photo swap thing, I sent him one photo of me and he sent 6 of him mostly with his shirt off showing off his totally ripped body, which should have been another glow in the dark warning sign about what type of lady this guys was looking to go out with. I hate to stereotype but I’ve found that himbo-gymbos tend to like to date bimbo-gymbos not curvaceous women.
We swapped photos on the Wednesday and on the Friday I suddenly get a text message telling me we’re not going to be going out for coffee as I really wasn’t his type. Normally I would have just left it alone and written him off as a space waisting oxygen thief (SWOT) however when I got the message I was a tad drunk and in the company of some guys who I used to work with who egged me on to ring him and get an explanation. I knew what Mr Ego was going to say but for the benefit of my buds I rang Mr Ego and put him on speaker phone so the boys could hear the conversation and hopefully learn something in the process because at least 2 of the guys were single and just as shallow in the views of women.
The conversation went something like this:
Me: Hi …… it’s Nikki I’m just calling to find out exactly what has happened you were all gung-ho to meet for coffee when I spoke to you on Wednesday so what happened?
Mr Ego: I got your photo
Me: AND
Mr Ego: Well you’re fat I can’t possibly date a fat chick, I mean what would my friends think we never date girls larger than size 12 and even then she’d have to be totally stacked
Me: Really so why did you bother even contacting me
Mr Ego: Well your profile was interesting and when I talked to you on the phone you didn’t sound fat
Me: Exactly how much of my profile did you actually read
Mr Ego: I read the tag line it was funny
Me: Maybe next time you need to read the whole profile then you might have found the part where i describe my body type as Big and Beautiful and actually list my weight.
I then hung up on him mainly because I wasn’t entirely sure the guys I was with could stay silent much longer (think band of over protective brothers) and I’m 99% sure whatever they said to Mr Ego was going to be rude and possibly include threats of turning him into a missing person for hurting my feelings by calling me fat. As it was I had to convince them that finding him and beating the living shit out of him for making me cry wasn’t worth the effort.
Oddly the fact he wouldn’t date me because I was FAT rolled off me like water of a ducks back after all I’ve been hearing that excuse since I was in my teens in various forms. What I did wonder is “how are fat people supposed to sound on the phone”?