GET IN THE SEA, TOM (Picture: Offline Dating)

Are you a man? Are you single? Do you think Tinder, Happn and OKCupid are, quite frankly, a bit of a drag?

Do you like the whimsical, poetic idea of meeting people at random, in the street, as if you were in a romantic movie?

Sit down. We need to talk.

A man called Samuel Abrahams shares your opinions and views on the world, and decided to send his friend Tom to get a date “offline”.


Offline here doesn’t just mean at work, at some friends’ drinks, or at a house party: our hero tried to chat up women in public places, because clearly women don’t have anything better to do than being chatted up by some artsy rando for the sake of experimentation.



The point our two friends were trying to make is that we spend so much time online these days that we’ve forgotten how to interact with each other, and communicate with the people around us, and blah, blah, blah.

Projects like these pop up every few months, to broadcast the general idea that The Internet Is Bad, and oh my, aren’t we all a bit nostalgic for a time before we could just schedule our sex lives from our smartphones?

The problem with this video, though, is that it romanticises a fundamentally flawed idea, which is that men are entitled to women’s time and attention, whenever they demand it.

The ‘offline dating’ video is overall sickeningly twee, but the logic is similar to the one used by tedious blokes catcalling women in the street – ‘I, a man, would like to engage in conversation with this woman, whether she wants it or not, because my needs are more important than whatever else she has to do right now’.

MORE: This short film perfectly illustrates why dating in 2015 is sh*t

Tom failing to put on his brave face (Picture: Offline Dating)

And yes, it’d be possible to argue that women could simply tell him to fuck off and move on, but most women haven’t been raised to scream abuse at strangers in the street, which probably is for the best, really.

The other issue – and this is where it gets bleak – is that women have to be nice, or at least polite to random dudes accosting them, as otherwise they may be putting themselves in danger.

If you ask your female acquaintances, most of them will realistically have had an encounter with a man which left them scared, unsafe, hurt, or even worse.

And truth is, if someone comes up to you in the street, you’ll never know if it’s going to be a charming man asking you on a date, or a horrible guy who will scream at you or follow you home if you reply a bit too brusquely.

MORE: 11 reasons the hottest girls are always single

Yeah, this looks so much less awkward than Tinder (Picture: Offline Dating)

We’re forced to be relatively friendly and try to find the nicest possible way out of a conversation for our own safety.



‘But not all men are like that!’, whiney man babies are already screaming. ‘That poor guy was just trying to get a date, and people like us would never be creepy towards women!’, they spout from their sticky keyboards, which they do every time this subject is broached.

Luckily, there is now a useful analogy which can explain why women will assume the worst of men trying to approach them in public spaces, no matter how good their intentions are.

Say there’s a bowl of sweets in front of you, all looking perfectly identical.

The person who put the bowl of sweets on the table tells you that a few of the sweets have been spiked with enough laxative to make a small horse shit itself to death.

It’s only a small minority of them, though – the others are completely fine, lovely, tasty sweets.

Would you risk it and grab a handful of them? Would you risk hollowing out your own intestines for the following 48 hours, just because you’d quite like a sweet? Would you?

And how would you feel about the other person in front of you shrieking – ‘well why aren’t you eating the sweets? Have you not heard me!

Only a tiny minority of them will turn your anus into a remake of Apocalypse Now! The others are completely fine! What do you have against sweets? Do you hate sweets? Why do you hate sweets?’.

This is what women hear when men don’t understand why they’re weary of being accosted in the street by total strangers.


Do you want your life to be a cutesy indie movie where you can start wonderful romances by talking to beautiful women on charming street corners?

Take care of men who are out to rape, beat up, abuse and scream at women first.

In the meantime – please leave us the f*ck alone.

MORE: 47 reasons why you’re really single

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