From the archives [Jan 22, 2022]

 If you follow the internet and aren’t completely living under a rock, you must’ve heard about this viral hashtag  #WestElmCaleb on Tik-Tok. Apparently, this 6 feet-something white male on an online dating site has dated half the women in New York. I wonder if Sex and the City took place now, would he find a mention in Carrie’s lame-ass blog. Don’t get me wrong - SATC was revolutionary for its time - but without the legendary Samantha Jones, it’s just a twenty-minute crib fest.

Anyway, just to give you a very brief background into the fiasco, Caleb, who dated all these women, would first love-bomb them [act extremely affectionate, showering a person with gifts, compliments, the whole shebang] and then ghost them. Caleb works at West Elm, a furniture store in New York that has, ever since become a part of the trending hashtag.

I cannot imagine how it must’ve become for the poor dude who, until now had a really good thing going for him. Apparently, the first woman who uploaded the video describing her experience with WestElmCaleb just wanted to spread the word about why women should stay away from him and more who had dated/gone out with him came forward calling him out.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little torn with respect to who to side with on this. When you sign up on an online website, you also kinda sign up for the experiences you may have with creepy-ass man-children on the website. The internet is a weird place, but you can’t blame the technology when it is people who suck ass and can’t hide their inner garbage and punish other people for their own insecurities for which you can’t really blame them. 

I once went out with this dude with who I had a shitload of car sex in a span of 5-6 weeks, but one time, right after we were finished, he told me he had a crush on his best friend and who disapproved of him hooking up with me. He went on to tell me that if she asked him not to meet me anymore, he’d probably never see me again. Me, a sweet little innocent child unaware of the ways of the world, was taken aback. I had been treating this asshole to my delicious pussy for about a month and he thought he could discard me whenever he wanted? What the fuck? What kind of emotionally retarded idiot does that? 

Another thing that hit me, way harder, was the fact that I was good enough to hook up with but apparently not good enough to date. The first boy I fell in love with liked to pretend that we were just friends when we went out and would always keep an eye out for any people from college we might run into. He wasn’t all bad, he would sit with me in the farther corners of the canteens after class hours but you can imagine what that did to an 18-year-old, [naive, first time away from home] girl’s self-esteem. 

I was so distraught by the car sex dude that after he left that night, I felt disappointed with myself. What was I doing? This wasn’t good for me. I called my best friend and began to cry. 

“Why am I good enough to hook up with but not good enough to be someone’s girlfriend? Will I ever be good enough?”

My friend handled me with the utmost care and love and kindness, more than anyone had ever shown me. He said, “It’s alright. This guy is clearly an idiot who doesn’t see you like the person you are. Someday, someone will. Fuck him.”

I know better now, and the guy did come back once i realised what I was worth and realised I should have better higher dating standards. But it took time and a lot of effort to stop looking for love in all the wrong places. My point is, dating websites are just tools for one to use. They really shouldn’t be defined by the people on it. But we’re only biased pea-brained idiots with a mediocre sense of human behaviour.  

In an expert session on Artificial Intelligence I once attended, Prof. Abhayraj Naik spoke about the many ways we had begun to depend on technology as an agency and how it had reduced our need for human connection. He said that while we now rely on Google Maps to navigate and find places, we would previously speak to passers-by and locals of an area to figure out where we wanted to go. Previously, we relied on our own talents to make connections and leave impressions on people in general and people we wanted to date, but today, we’ve left technology to do that job for us. Bizarre as it may be, it did help cowards like me get out in the world and see how downright cruel and selfish the world can be. 

WestElmCaleb sucks ass, but people, in general, do too. What can one really expect to find on a dating site today anyway? Every dating site is the same, with broken, horny men and women looking for temporary fixes for loneliness. Everyone wants the warmth, the love, the devotion, the adoration of another, but nobody wants to give. We are, after all, the children of the apocalypse. 

And no matter what we decide to do in the privacy of our phones, do we really deserve it to affect our workplaces? Does WestElmCaleb deserve everyone at his workplace to know what a dickwad he is? Imagine his work bestie asking him whether he’s the asshole everyone on Tik-Tok is talking about, especially with his workplace being a big part of his infamy. Imagine if he lied about working at West Elm though. If he could lie about having feelings for a woman, he could lie about his workplace too. That’d be awful though. Come to think of it, what if his name isn’t even Caleb? 

I can tell you this much - the internet, as much as it does the things people say it does, somedays, it feels like a 5-year-old’s storybook. Does that make sense?