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Relatively recently I hit it off with a girl I met in person. Got her number, exchanged texts, had a good rapport going which included her sending 'good morning' messages. Which I personally thought was a little forward, but I could roll with it.
Just shy of three weeks into the conversation, on Valentines Day, she just drops, out of nowhere, that she has a boyfriend who was taking her out and had got her flowers, the whole shebang. Not a word of this breathed beforehand.
This is the sort of thing that would have spun me for a massive loop a few years ago. Now, as you say, its sort of unsurprising to find out that you were being held in the back pocket while some other player was being auditioned. Even so, this one felt very '0 to 100 in 5 seconds' in terms of reveals. I can't compete effectively if I don't have any idea what the competition even is.
People using others as instruments for their own emotional fulfillment whilst knowing there's no intent to proceed further is hands-down the worst behavior one encounters regularly out there these days.
As of about two weeks ago they broke up and she's giving off signs of spiraling.
Not too sure what to make of that.
Such is life.
Lots of chicks be out there constantly interviewing applicants on a rolling basis for a position that’s already filled, under the guise of plausible deniability, for the attention and in case they eventually feel like monkeybranching.
Thank you, @faceh, for the time and effort you have put into the candidacy process. While your skills and qualifications are impressive, her feelings have changed and she will no longer be moving forward with your candidacy at this time. Please feel free to keep in touch and reapply in the future. Best wishes in your search and thank you again for your interest in her.
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I would not be captain save a ho in that situation, but yeah the whole invisible parallel dating structure where somebody can have 10 dates a week without any of it really getting back to their own social circle sets up a ton of weird incentives. A lot of behavior from both men and women only really makes sense if you assume there's no particularly effective way of developing a reputation and that there's an infinite flow of future prospects.
The lack of ANY kind of reputation system built into the apps... and the ad hoc attempts to create one anyway (remember the Tea app?) gives away problem, yeah.
The app companies don't want to spend money to build up the whole system that would be required to litigate whether someone who didn't show up for a date had a valid excuse or whether this guy was stringing multiple women along with no intent to commit.
And they probably correctly presume that such a system would, itself, get gamed by certain parties to gain advantages in the app. But they do not admit that people are already gaming the hell out of the existing structure of the apps to everyone's detriment.
Also both can be true in a given interaction/I've been third-person spectator to enough cases of 'person behaves outlandishly but thinks they're the aggrieved party' from both genders that I can see how it's an absolutely untenable thing to police at scale.
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