Photo of the author. Article written under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons.
Each time I get dumped, it hits me hard, heralding an onslaught of blackout weekends and self-abuse. When the nausea subsides, all that’s left is dating. And dating is hard – like getting angry at your computer when it’s crashed: you sit there, fervently mashing the same buttons (“What do you do for a living?”; “What kind of music do you like?”; “Tinder’s bad, innit?”) hoping for some kind of spark, but ultimately it takes ages to start up again and all your previous memories are corrupted and messed up forever.
So when I saw this excellent article by Emily Reynolds, it gave me an idea. Maybe my love life is so formulaic, repetitive and upsetting because I’m a formulaic, repetitive and upsetting lover. I decided to email everyone I’ve slept with over the years to see what they thought about me. And whaddaya know: the kindness and patience of others meant I got enough responses to make this love life survey work.
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In the interests of fair play, I followed the same stringent mathematical processes as my pioneering predecessor, giving the nine girls an option to score me out of 10 for each category. Then I added together all of the scores out of 10 for each category, divided it by the number of people who answered and then multiplied that by 100 to get a percentage. SCIENCE. PATHETIC SCIENCE.
Here are the results:
SEDUCTION
As you can see, most of the responses on this subject were confused, as my “seduction” techniques basically didn’t exist. Also, if lugging around a large bag of my personal possessions while smashed off my face isn’t seductive to women, then maybe I’m just not cut out for the romance game.
Rating: 31 percent. Shit, this could be a bloodbath.
WATCH: The Digital Love Industry – our film about the future of your love lifeKISSING
Starting to feel like everyone I get with is just ignoring the fact that I potentially have a drinking/garlic problem. To be honest though, I thought that kissing would’ve been more important to the fairer sex than it seems to be from these comments. Or maybe I’m just excruciatingly old-fashioned. So excruciatingly old-fashioned that I emailed my long lost exes and asked them to rank me as a lover.
Rating: 66 percent. Starting to pick up, but still looking bleak.
Want more bleak? Here’s a story about Thom Yorke’s face being a real-life sad emoji in Iran and Ukraine
LOOKS
Just so you know, the “guy from Papa Roach mixed with the guy from McFly” look was really popular in 2006. And I can’t help it if I look like a Crimewatch E-fit. THERE ARE A LOT OF HAIRY-BODIED NU-METAL CRIMINALS OUT THERE, ALRIGHT?
Rating: 73 percent. Gradually getting less painful.
FOREPLAY
Holy mackerel. After the brief high of the last round I’ve woken up to a cold reality breakfast. The fact that my foreplay is being called “thuggish” is quite disconcerting on a number of levels, especially given the Crimewatch comment. Getting horrific flashforwards of Kirsty Young solemnly reading out witness testimonies of my fingering technique rn (“brief, clumsy, and harrowing”) before opening the phonelines to a record viewer response.
Rating: 44 percent.
Read: A Straight Girl’s Guide to Being Single and Happy
ORAL
*Quickly googles what a clitoris is*. Two things I’m learning from these comments so far: one, all women are individuals who require an open level of communication and dedication when it comes to satisfying them sexually; two, my sex life is an absolute shambles. Two and a half: the clit is vaguely near the goalmouth.
Rating: 45 percent. Really taking a fucking trouncing here.
THE SEX
It’s stopped being fun now. I was having fun before, but I’m not having fun now. The shrug emoji. The shrug emoji has just been used to describe the action my penis makes when doing a sex. And I know which girlfriend that was: she definitely had to google “shrug emoji” and copy and paste it back into the survey. What a humbling amount of effort to go to to describe my apparently sub-par dick-buckling technique.
Rating: Overall, 73 percent. Not bad considering the standard of comments here.
Read: Everything You Need to Know About Dating a British Weed Dealer
OTHER STUFF
There is a reason vanilla is the classic ice cream flavour. There is a reason, alright. Would a Magnum work if it was filled with rum & raisin ice cream? Well, actually, yes. But it would get all over the sheets and you’d have to have a shower immediately after. Vanilla is the flavour base on which the Magnum colosseum is built. Why would you hate on vanilla. It is the gold standard for a reason.
Rating: 18 percent.
WOULD YOU GO THERE AGAIN?
Out of eight that answered, four said yes, two said maybe and one said “let’s not go there”, which sounds quite ominous for some reason. I also think one person actually thought I was some kind of low-life criminal, which my mum wouldn’t be too proud of. Because she’d be proud of the rest of this entire thing, just not that bit.
Overall, I feel I’ve just taken the sex version of the red pill in The Matrix and have been vomited out into a dystopian world of home truth. If only there was some way of getting back into the sweet, oblivious fake reality where I wasn’t aware of my boring vanilla sex, my drinking problem, my diabolical oral and seduction techniques and my face that looks like it should be starring in any given reality programme on Channel Five. But hey, at least no one said anything bad about my dick.
Overall rating: 57 percent.
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I Sent Everyone I’ve Ever Had Sex with a Survey to Find Out How Good I Am in Bed
