Dumb & Dumber

Woman Duped On Tinder Inadvertently Inspires Twitter Meme

In a blog post published by the Australian women’s lifestyle website Mamamia on Tuesday, Melbourne resident Alita Brydin detailed a story about how she thought she had met “the one” on Tinder—only to end up with a broken heart. Now, on top of everything else, her heartbreak inspired a meme.

Brydin, a self-proclaimed dating expert—a rather dubious claim, given the circumstances—writes about growing up with a rose-colored ideal of what falling in love was like. Then, she says, she matched with the man who she was convinced was her soul mate.

The pair quickly connected over a brief message about a movie, but her unnamed beau lived a couple of hours away, making it logistically difficult for them to meet up. So instead, Brydin writes, they began an intimate long-distance courtship bonding over food, among other things.

The messages we exchanged were personal, intimate, yet so mundane. My phone was filled with pictures of his cooking—he took me on the step by step journey of making pasta—selecting the ingredients, making the dough, working the half-falling-apart pasta maker. He took pride in his cooking—and I saw it as a sign that he was a man ready to make a home.

Finally, one day (although it’s unclear how much time elapsed between that first message), Mr. Right told Brydin that he was going to be in town for the weekend and that they should get a drink.

The day finally came. I saw him confidently approaching me, striding past the Asian grocer, the dingy Chinese takeout. Without saying a word he laid his lips on me, laid his palm on my lower back and kissed me. It was happening. Everything was coming together.

Brydin later recalls being in bed at 2am, still shell-shocked from the encounter with a man she thought would be her future husband. But when she looked at her phone the next day, she was shocked by the message she saw: “Stay away from my boyfriend.”

The woman on the other end told Brydin that she had met this so-called boyfriend after he had matched with her. But the woman claimed that he had already met her family, they were planning to move in together, and he had bought a ring.

Rather than question this new revelation, Brydin writes that she immediately blocked the guy and ends the cautionary tale with the warning: “Be careful who you trust.”

Now, let’s be real. This is, at face value, a pretty unremarkable story. In the modern age of online dating, both women and men unfortunately get burned in this fashion all the time. As it turns out, a lot of people are super shitty! Hell, there’s a reason why the first Google search result for “catfish” is not related to fish at all.

Yet the Daily Mirror picked up on the story and added this salacious-sounding headline: “Woman’s perfect Tinder date with ‘The One’ shattered by five simple words.”

As the tweet with the clickbait headline began to go viral, people joked about what the “five simple words” that left a woman shattered could possibly be.

A few were pertinent to, uh, current events:

Brydin may be feeling down now, but see? Things could always be worse. Better luck next time.

This article first appeared on The Daily Dot.