The Good Boy Phone & The Naughty Boy Phone
Name: D | | Location: Denver , Colorado |Question: Here’s a kind of amusing/awkward thing that just happened to me last night. I was in the process of arranging dates with two different women. For one woman it’s the first date and the other just the second, so it’s not like any of us have much invested. I was flirting a little with both of them over text, nothing x-rated, and they were both responsive.
For the first-date woman, we scheduled drinks after work. For the second-date woman, I offered her a choice of doing a hike together or going to a trampoline park. She jumped (ha!) at the trampoline idea. I texted back “Be prepared to sweat!”
About 10 minutes later I got a text from the first-date girl. “What do you mean by that?” It was then that I realized I’d sent the “sweat” text to her.
I could’ve tried to explain the situation, but something tells me that it would’ve come across as kind of skeezy. So I just texted back “Dancing!” i.e. to suggest that maybe we’d go dancing after drinks. It apparently worked, as the conversation picked up fine from there.
Thing is, the place we’re going doesn’t have dancing. When I see her, should I come up with a plausible idea of somewhere to go dancing, just pretend I never mentioned dancing, or fess up? |Age: 43
*Post title comes from the brilliant comic Jim Norton of the Opie & Anthony radio show
Don’t fess up. That’s would be a huge mistake. You could have a back up plan in place to take her dancing should she ask. Hopefully, she’ll be content with just hanging out over drinks. If she asks, you can say you had believed the spot you chose had a cool DJ. Your bad. Whatever.
There’s nothing wrong with juggling. However, common sense would tell you not to text multiple women at the same time. That’s just opening yourself up to possible drama.
What you should know, however, is that people – men and women – are becoming hip to certain tricks and tactics purported via cell phone. Such as:
1. The Mass Text – Have you ever received a text from someone, sort of out of the blue, that read something like, “Hey…how are you?” or “Hey, long time not talk. What’s up?” Too often, those texts are sent out to multiple people at the same time. The sender is basically looking for someone to hang out or hook up with. Whomever is available will get his attention. If you reply back and eventually share that you have plans that night or at that moment, don’t be surprised if the sender stops replying. If they do, that’s the biggest sign of all it was a mass text. That and the fact that they don’t address you by name or saying anything remotely personal in the first message.
2. The SIM Card Switch – Oh yeah. Buckle up for this one. Some people, usually those actively cheating, will buy a second phone just for the SIM card. On one phone – the good boy phone – is their texts and contacts for their family and friends. On the other – the naughty boy phone – are sexts, messages, and numbers of the people with whom they are cheating. They switch out the SIM cards so that no second phone is found, and to prevent any of their secrets being revealed should their partner snoop. I’m telling you, people, We’re wising up to snoopers! People are changing passwords regularly and know to delete texts and emails.
3. Cell Phone Look Up – Don’t kid yourself in to thinking you can call a number you found in your mate’s phone and not be found out. There are services out there where you can put in a cell phone number, pay a tiny fee, and get the name of the person who owns that number. Not only that, but thanks to Google, all someone has to do is enter in the phone number of the caller and get the name of a company, should you try to be stealth and call from work. Online daters have become hip to this as well.People are now setting up anonymous emails that can not be traced back to their name and not giving out their cell phone number until after they meet someone. Or they’re setting up a completely different number that can’t be traced back to them in order to communicate via text, like Google Talk. Of course, both of these have to be changed every couple of months in case people start Googling your name along with your number, once they learn it.And, as I recently learned, if your phone number is listed on your Facebook page, and someone import their Facebook contacts to their phone, your name will come up on the caller ID along with Twitter handles, email addresses, etc.
I don’t consider it a red flag if, before you meet, someone doesn’t give you a personal email address or phone number. People are becoming more and more cautious about revealing real identities due to the popularity of social networks. But if they continue to contact you via the dating site after you’ve met and ignore your requests to take things off that site, be wary. I can remember going out with a guy who shared that he only accessed his account via his phone. He also never would email me from a regular email address. We initially communicated via text, but after about 2 weeks he said it was best to contact him via the site. Red effing flag. Sure enough, I learned on the third date that he had been dating someone for a few months “but they weren’t exclusive.” My guess is she was out of town or not around during those two weeks we’d been texting. He didn’t want me to text because he didn’t want the text alarm to sound when he was with her, arousing her suspicion. He kept no trace of his online dating activity on his home computer so as to avoid being discovered should she ever look at his cache history or snoop.
D, keep your texting to one person at a time. And be sure to delete all your texts
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