Do not date me

It's not you, it's everything

• You shouldn’t date me because when I was seventeen I thought if I wanted to impress a girl badly enough I could spontaneously learn how to swim and I was wrong and I straight up almost drowned

• You shouldn’t date me because my eyes are bad, the left one forgot how to be friends good with the right one, I can’t gaze into your sweet face properly

• You shouldn’t date me because when I was twelve my parents took me to Las Vegas and the gutters of the streets were filled with cards that had pictures of naked ladies on them and I furtively collected as many as I could in my pockets like forbidden Pokémon cards while my parents were distracted and that was when the angels abandoned me forever to the 69th circle of hell: “horny jail”

• You shouldn’t date me because I used to play Starcraft with all the cheat codes on

• You shouldn’t date me because during high school math competitions they used to call up the top three competitors in a category and announce third place, then second place, then first place, and if I placed top three but didn’t win first I would dramatically collapse onto the stage as if I had fainted from the sheer indignity, and that was the closest I ever came to acting in high school

• You shouldn’t date me because I’m a vampire, one of the sparkly ones, and you smell really nice

• You shouldn’t date me because I died in that crash and you need to let me go, the accident wasn’t your fault

• You shouldn’t date me because once upon a time I offended a witch and she placed a terrible curse on me and if we kissed you would turn into a frog or an ogre or some other greenery. She turned my lips into a poison apple and my teeth into rose thorns and if you pricked yourself on me you’d fall asleep for a hundred years and a briar would grow out of you and then I’d finally learn what a briar is

• You shouldn’t date me because the forests are ablaze and the glaciers are disappearing and I am a soft city boy who has never slept under the gaze of the stars and in the post-apocalyptic wilderness I’ll have nothing to offer you, I command no herb-lore, I have not mastered the secret of fire, I’ve never heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned, I do not know who let the dogs out, and our hypothetical future children deserve better than that