How much lip service should you pay to complaining about a bad first date? About 140 characters worth, according to Rhodri Marsden, who has been collecting Twitter summaries of bad first dates on Storify.
“I’ve just walked past the Firefly, where I went on a date in 2002 that was so bad I heard myself say ‘So, what’s Wigan like, then?’” The London-based writer Tweeted on Tuesday. That set off a flood of responses from his more than 16,000 followers who started kicking in bad date memories of their own.
Among some of the best — or worst, depending on whether or not you were on the date — posts as of Wednesday:
“On a soulmates date, date arrives and before sitting down announces ‘I’m Jon. i don’t want kids or commitment’, then went for a piss.”
“Whilst on a date with my friend, the guy had a phone call and said ‘about 7’ then pretended it was the ppl he’d interviewed that day.”
“Then there was the speed-dater who spent his allotted 3 mins talking to me via his imaginary friend…”
“I went on an internet date where 15 minutes in the guy said “If I was my friend Michael I’d do *this*” and promptly grabbed my tits.”
While the thread had failed to make Twitter’s top trends in the U.K. or London on Wednesday, Marsden’s Storify collection had already been retweeted more than 1,500 times and had more than 2,000 “likes” on Facebook.
“Forget #riotcleanup, this is Twitter’s single greatest achievement…All hail @rhodri‘s accidental first-date-hellathon!” London journalist and editor Charlie Ivens tweeted.
Within 24 hours of posting her worst date entry (A date once turned up with one of his “wife’s friends”…) Imogen Thigh’s number of Twitter followers had doubled to more than 7,500, thanks in part to an endorsement from Marsden (Imogen is incredibly funny and you should follow her, by the way) when he added her bad date to the Storify page.
Marsden signaled that he may have created a monster, however. He was juggling real work with an attempt to keep the Storify page up-to-date.
“I have an urgent project deadline of 3.30pm and you lot aren’t helping. A few more gems coming up, Storify updated,” he Tweeted midday Wednesday.