Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

During this time of sappy holiday movies, I had to arm myself with a healthy dose of cynicism or I won’t make it through Thanksgiving let alone through New Year’s. Yes, the holidays can be an especially rough time of year for all types of people, not just singletons, but as a chronic singleton, I must say that a lot of the holidays seem designed to have a person’s non-plus-one status make that person rock back and forth in the fetal position, shotgunning whipped cream straight from the aerosol can.

In order to combat the idea that being with anyone is better than being alone, I will touch upon one of the many--nay, metric buttloads—of examples of why this is patently untrue. Sadly enough, one of these comes from my own hometown of Charm City. A native son of Baltimore developed an app that helps people cheat. Sadly, when searching for the details on this cheating app, I found even more examples of infidelity being glamorized in the form of websites where customers can meet plenty of cheating wives, husbands, etc. But let’s get back to that app – it lets users hide texts, phone calls, and voicemails from specified numbers in your contact list. The developer of the app says that not all people that download it use it to cheat and that it can actually facilitate communications that can help save a relationship. Seriously.

In keeping with the theme, a friend said I could relay some of her recent encounters with gentlemen who probably could have benefited from using the app. First off, a guy who was a friend with benefits (FWB) type that she had reconnected with via email and was planning to meet up and maybe go on a trip together. The FWB swore that he wasn't seeing anyone else, but my friend was more than a little doubtful that this was the case. Now, FWB was either a complete moron or was trying to break off a relationship, as when he emailed my friend to plan for their trip he sent the email to both my friend and his girlfriend. Oops! The girlfriend quickly responded back to both my friend and FWB saying that she guessed she wasn’t supposed to see that.

Then the next day, the girlfriend sent one of the classiest and iciest emails I’ve ever seen. My bumbling attempt to recreate it will in no way convey how cool this email was. Basically, the girlfriend addressed the FWB (and cc’d my friend) and indicated that she was happy to inform him that his schedule would be free to take the planned trip with my friend, as the girlfriend would no longer be available to travel with him. But she did it in such a manner, where all the etiquette advice columnists would have found favor with the professional and cordial nature of the wording, at the same time so completely decimating the FWB. I pictured her typing out the words, perhaps wearing elbow length gloves and smoking a cigarette from one of those fancy holder thingies, and maybe wearing a hat that partially obscured her eyes. Then she clicked send and went on about her life.

Not too long after this incident, my friend had started chatting with this guy from her gym. Like most singletons, she checked to see that his ring finger was bare, and then they started emailing. They were just about to meet up for coffee and non-gym interaction, when instead of receiving an email from him confirming the time and location, she received an email from his wife saying that if she wanted to go out for coffee, it would have to be with the wife and his child. My friend was shocked and guessed that his wife must have been checking his email. What is even more ridiculous is that a few weeks later, the guy actually had the nerve to email my friend again to see how she was doing.

Now I’ve been approached by guys that I thought might actually have been married before (see Is a Picture Still Worth 1000 Words IfTaken with a Cell Phone Camera?) but I’ve never been confronted with actual proof in the form of a living, breathing, and raging spouse. That’s why my policy is never to contact or respond to a message from guys on dating websites who don’t post their picture because they are likely not posting pictures to prevent their spouses and significant others from finding them on said dating sites, but sadly there’s no way to be sure.

Enter a fantastic, and probably highly impossible/illegal, idea that was thought up by yours truly and one of my best friends from high school. We wanted some way that married men would find it impossible to remove their wedding rings. I don’t think there’s an app for that yet, but here were the following options we brainstormed:

1. When the guy tries to remove his ring, there’s an effect like when you try to steal money from a bank –namely, an exploding dye packet permanently marks his entire ring finger purple.
2. When the guy tries to remove his ring, sirens wail and maybe some sort of flashing light – kind of like the sound that British cop cars and ambulances make.
3. When the guy tries to remove his ring, there is some sort of chemical that is injected into his bloodstream that either makes him unconscious, writhe in pain, or impotent.

Unlike our other idea (the “I-Heard-You-Got-Knocked-Up Bucket,” complete with candy, hair ties to hold your hair back, and the bucket receptacle for when you’re feeling nauseated), we never did build a prototype for the Cheat the Cheater app. This is probably not a bad thing, as we would probably be involved in multiple lawsuits by permanently disfigured cheaters.

With the sounds of a sappy holiday movie playing in the background and with my full intentions to subject myself to the latest installment of the Twilight saga if I can get past the screaming hordes of teenagers, I must bring this post to a close. For try as I may to focus on the dukes of douchebaggery that seem to number in the millions, this is one of those times when I’m feeling more like a mushy, (emphasis) hopeless romantic than a cynic. I think it’s best to be somewhere in the middle: not so naïve that you are unaware of signs of potential sliminess, but not so doubting that you’re skeptical of the extracurricular activities of every happy couple you see.