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Jared Freid (@jtrain56) is a comedian and one of the “Bros” at HeTexted.com. HeTexted is a site where girls can get advice on the texts they receive from guys. Every Thursday on PostGradProblems Jared will answer one of the questions from his HeTexted mailbag. These are real questions from real girls visiting the site each day. If you have any of your own dating questions go to www.HeTexted.com and ask Jared or any of the other Bros that fit your particular situation.
Q: We met through a friend two months ago and have been on dates every week. He invited me for dinner on Saturday night but I couldn’t go because I already had plans. So I sent this text on Saturday asking if he wanted to come to the park with me the following day.
ME: If the weather is this good tomorrow, I’m defs going to head to the park so if you’re free you should come with!
He didn’t reply until Sunday night with this…
HIM: Hey I’m sooo sorry. I saw this message yesterday but I was just about to play soccer and completely forgot to message back. Pretty shit on my behalf. How was the park?
Obviously he didn’t “forget” to reply, should I just forget about him?
This happens to everyone. You get a text, you see it, you read it, you ponder the meaning of life and why we even make the effort to take another breath on this cold earth, you fart, you think about Chipotle, you get called into a meeting, and the text you received fades away from your memory. Then there’s a moment hours or maybe even a day later that you’re eating some Chipotle, you see a girl in yoga pants, you start thinking about why you’d even take another breath on this cold earth if you can’t touch the girl wearing yoga pants even by mistake, then you think of sex, and finally you blurt out, “Oh man, I want to have sex with Rachel, I forgot to text her back.” Every one of us has been eating Chipotle with a boner and suddenly remembered that we forgot to text someone back. It could be the girl we just met, the buddy who wanted to get some drinks, or your mom. It’s normal and it happens. You even search for that person’s text and you find a half-written reply. Why did you think a blushing emoji was a good idea at the time? No clue, but at least you have a chance to make things right (and send the poop emoji instead).
I call these types of occurrences the “one percenters.” Things like forgetting to text someone back, or a phone dying, or a text that you didn’t get until a day later–they really do happen every now and again. We’ve all experienced an, “Oh shit, Rachel!” moment, so although we understand the excuse, we’ve also all used them as lies, so we don’t believe the excuse. A girl handles the one percenters in two different ways. She will either go into “he’s not into it” mode and drop the whole thing like he just showed her his troll doll collection that he called a “401(k).” Or she might do something a little worse. She could believe that the guy she’s dating only acts in one percents. She makes excuses for him and believes he happens to be the only person on Earth who’s bad at texting and has a phone that dies every night. She buys into this scenario of a person who exists every now and again but never every day. The answer to the reality, like most things, lies somewhere in between.
This girl seems to be leaning toward the “drop it” side of things. I’d advise her to take a deep breath and read the first line of her question, “We met through a friend two months ago and have been on dates every week.” There are girls reading this who just had to look up the word “date.” We put so much emphasis on texting that we often put it side by side with actual dates. Texting takes a few seconds and the ability to edit yourself into the person you’d like to be. Dates take hours and the vulnerability of a live experience shows the person who you actually are. A good dater should always supersede a good texter. She should text him that it’s no problem and tell him she’s up to go out whenever he is, then let him make a plan. If he makes a plan, it means he made a mistake that we’ve all made. No plan means he saw your text and thought, “Parks? I can’t fuck at a park.” Then he finished a burrito with his boner tucked into his waistband.
Jared Freid is a comedian and HeTexted “Bro” based in NYC. You can ask him dating questions at HeTexted.com or find him on Twitter (@JTrain56) for weekly columns, podcasts, and videos.
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JTrain
Jared Freid is a NYC based comedian. He has been featured on Tru TV's "NFL Full Contact" and more recently on MTV's "Failosophy." He is also a writer for The Huffington Post, The Fan Hub, Weekly World News, TotalFratMove, BroBible, and HeTexted. If you're not the reading type, Jared created the "Frat Dude Goes To" series where he travels the country interviewing "Bros" at wild events like the Carolina Cup and the AVN Awards. Follow him on twitter @JTrain56 for all of his weekly content.
@JTrain56
Run dude, run, she’s going crazy over one forgotten text to goto the park.
I dig a girl who likes to go to the park.
“Every one of us has been eating Chipotle with a boner and suddenly remembered that we forgot to text someone back.”
And I thought I was the only one.