Scrabbling for a Boyfriend
I’ve found a new form of online dating. It’s free and it’s foolproof. Kind of.
I’m playing scrabble. Yup. It’s no longer just for grannies and nerds. Some clever so-and-so has rebranded it and turned it into a form of social media. So it can officially be called cool. Because social media is where it’s at? Right?
So I play scrabble with some of my friends and, cunningly, I invite potential dates to play scrabble with me too. This, I decided, was genius. I can use the game to assess their intelligence level, their vocabulary, their competitive spirit and their ability to commit. All essentials in this foggy world of dating. Plus there’s a chat function to cover the other basics. And it’s free.
So. One of the first men I play claims to have been a UK scrabble champion as a child. Big words. I do like a challenge. I win the first game. He wins the second. This is promising, he’s hot, he’s local, and there’s clearly an intellectual compatibility here.
Then he shows me how to turn on the word strength facility (which rates the score of the word I am planning to play against the best possible move I could make). Bad move. I’m competitive. Very competitive. The girls in the school boarding house I used to run will tell you this passionately. There is no voice louder on the side of the sports’ field than mine. No one with as fierce a half-time talk – whether it’s tennis, hockey or indeed, chess. I’ve even been known to yell out answers in a general knowledge quiz. From the audience. I can’t help it; I just want to win. There’s probably some deep-seated psychological reason for it based on my sister having more Lego bricks than me as a child or something, but I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in winning a scrabble game. So now that I know there’s a way of checking how strong my word is, I’m not content until I’ve played the strongest word possible – or at least one jolly close to it. Apparently this is not cheating. An ex-Scrabble champion told me, so it must be true.
Now that I have this function enabled, I win. 10 games in a row. After which, the ex-champion messages me to say that he thinks he’ll give playing a break for a while. That was two months ago. I haven’t heard from him since.
The next guy quit after just one game because I beat him by so much. Serious commitment issues.
The third has stuck with me. He’s intelligent, he plays some impressive words, he doesn’t like losing, but he won’t give up. Admirable qualities. But he doesn’t want to date me. Apparently men don’t like being beaten.
My genius plan is not so genius after all, but I refuse to dumb-down for the sake of a date. So I’m waiting for someone who wins. Not all the time, but often enough. I have a feeling that means I’m waiting for either a granny or a nerd, and I’m wondering which category I fall into…