This story starts off pretty typically: Michelle Thomas is a 30-year-old from the United Kingdom who went on a first date with a guy she met on Tinder. The date seemingly went well.
“It wasn’t earth-shattering,” she writes on her blog, “but all in all it was a fairly standard Pleasant Evening.”
The mood changed the next day. Thomas received a message from her date, which she shared on her blog.
“Hey Michelle, sorry, been super busy at work today, hun,” it begins.
“Thanks for a wonderful evening last night. I really enjoyed your company and actually adore you. You’re cheeky and funny and just the sort of girl I would love to go out with if only my body and mind would let me. But I fear it won’t. I’m not going to bull***t you… I f***ing adore you Michelle and I think you’re the prettiest looking girl I’ve ever met.”
“But my mind gets turned on my someone slimmer.”
There was more:
”So whilst I am hugely turned on by your mind, your face, your personality (and God…I really, really am), I can’t say the same about your figure.”
And this gem:
“I would marry you like a shot if you were a slip of a girl…”
Read the full message on Thomas’s blog.
Rather than let the man slide for sending this note (which he apparently considered well-meaning—he signed it, “Please try and forgive me. I adore you xx”), Thomas responded with a lengthy letter of her own after a few days (she was busy, she said).
“I was on another date when I received your message,” she starts off. “He returned from the loo to find me in a flood of tears.”
Thomas tells her Tinder date, “You don’t have to fancy me. We all have a good friend who we look at ruefully and think,’You’re lovely, but you just don’t tickle my pickle.'”
She goes on to say that what’s not OK is that “after a few hours in my company, you took the time to write this utterly uncalled-for message.”
“It’s nothing short of sadistic,” she writes.
You really should read the whole letter on Thomas’s blog.
Thomas explains in her letter that the reason she decided to respond “so publicly” is because her Tinder date has a 13-year-old daughter.
“I want you to encourage your daughter to love, enjoy and care for her body. It belongs to her and only her. Praise her intellect, and her creativity. Push her to push herself and to be fearless. Give her the tools to develop a bomb-proof sense of self-esteem so that if (I’ll be kind. I’ll say “if”.) the time comes that a small, unhappy man attempts to corrode it, she can respond as I do now.”
But it’s Thomas’s sign-off that ought to really put Tinder Man in his place:
“Simon.
Kiss.
My.
Exquisitely.
Unmarriagable.
Arse.”
“P.S. ‘Slip of a girl’? CHRIST ALIVE, that’s creepy.”
“P.P.S. You’re not 5’11”.”
