INGRID DOULTON | Lady Writer | Contact

YOU’RE GOING TO HEAR the term “dank” thrown around in ways that don’t describe the air in your dad’s damp cellar.

My boyfriend spends nearly every waking moment he’s not looking at me looking at his phone. Occasionally, he’ll laugh and smirk – but he never shows me why. He says I wouldn’t get it. On the rare occasion that he does show me, typically in bed, I don’t indeed ‘get it’.

But he’s funny, crazy, wild, unpredictable and above all, mildly autistic. I love him.

You won’t understand the world he lives in, a galaxy made up of shitposting on 4chan and trolling “liberal faggots” on Reddit. A year or so later, you might find his “other” Facebook profile that he uses to make extremely racist and archaically sexist comments on the pages of public figures.

Those other funny boys you know in life, you know, the boys that seem to have their shit tied together in a neat little bundle – they look at memes. They’re the remora fish of social media, they latch themselves onto a well-spring of autistic creativity, somebody like my boyfriend. Sharing memes is akin to driving to the top of Mt Kosciusko in the summer time, rather than hike it up through the July fog in snowshoes.

Say hello to more time alone

When you date a meme maker, he won’t talk to you until he’s ready. Don’t force him to be social. You don’t know how hard the road is for people who make OC. Maybe he can’t get the exposure right on his latest King Of The Hill deep-fried Bobby Hill meme and he’s getting stressed out? Have you thought about the struggle he’s going through to get the colour balance right? That’s what I thought, honey.

His friends online that he’s never met, or will meet, will always get preference over you.

If you ask him out to drinks on a Friday night with your friends from work, then you’re a delusional bitch who deserves to go out with some “Chad” that knows how to catch a fast-moving cricket ball or something gay like that. People like my boyfriend enjoy each other’s company through the cold comfort of anonymous chat rooms and image boards, the kind that regular Joe’s find pervertedly confronting. So don’t bother asking him to come and listen to you and your friends talk about themselves over fistfuls of $19 cocktails. Just don’t.

They only thing basic about you should be your cooking skills.

Guess what, if you feel the need to surprise him with a Sunday breakfast in bed, just pop some party pies in the oven. Serve them in a brown paper bag with a BBQ sauce bottle and you’ve got him for life. If you try to ambush him with fresh fruit or some trendy socialist dish like smashed avocado and sourdough, you’ll just betray his trust. His gingivitis is something that he needs to address himself when he’s ready.

Don’t be alarmed by the rampant recreational drug use, he’ll grow out of it.

Girls, you can start blaming the government for something else besides the gender pay gap. Thanks to the lockout laws in Queensland and New South Wales, boys like my boyfriend can really do a number on themselves, making them a really big handful when you want to go home. If your boyfriend makes memes, he will do any drug he can get his hands on. This gets worse when he’s got a few Woodstock 440s under his belt. By the time you’re ready to go home, there’s a great chance he’s wet himself or somebody else and he’s trying to bite his own tongue off down the side of his mate’s house. With a little guidance, you can ween him off to the point where it’s only occasional, not every time he goes to the pub.

If his phone goes flat, just go home. He’ll call you wherever he ends up.

A phone running flat is a giant red flag, because it means he’s been cut off from the outside world. With his meme umbilical cord now severed, your boyfriend will now be alone with all of his personal demons. Demons in the form of unbridled anxiety and intense fears of future financial insecurity are very common. If he starts saying things like, “Harriet Wran had the right idea. Life is hard, just smoke ice and scoot around Redfern,” then run away, that’s the first sign that shit is about to get real and I’m telling you now, you won’t be able to deal with the stress.

What you think is going on inside his head: 

 What’s actually going on in his head:

Dating a meme maker is much nicer than it sounds, but I’ve warned you.

Ingrid xoxo

4 COMMENTS

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here