In a developing story coming out of a bar on the Lower East Side in New York City, a man who just very forwardly attempted asking you out before you politely rejected him is now in complete confusion as to why you thought he was asking you out in the first place.
“At first I thought he was just fucking with me,” you told reporters at the scene. “I mean, he literally walked up to me while I was alone, tried to put his hand on mine, attempted to guess my ethnicity for some reason, and then very directly asked if I’d like to have dinner with him this week.”
Sources confirmed that once you politely informed the man that you had a boyfriend, he completely backtracked and started behaving like you were clinically insane.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man said incredulously. “Boyfriend? What do you think I’m trying to do here? Ask you out? I can’t believe you would misread the situation so badly! You’re literally so insane for thinking that. I never even came up to talk to you in the first place! Also, you’re ugly.”
Other patrons at the bar who overheard this exchange found this peculiar, especially since the man was just throwing himself at you less than five minutes ago.
“I’m honestly not that surprised,” another woman at the bar named Melissa told reporters. “I try not to assume that men are flirting with me right off the bat, but one time a guy at a party I was at suggested that we hook up at his place, and when I said I wasn’t interested, he told me that he was actually gay?”
According to dating experts, this is becoming quite a popular phenomenon.
“Despite a lot of straight men today being so horny that they make moves on every woman in sight, they are still deathly afraid of rejection,” Dr. Monique Johnson, Head of the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Cornell University, told reporters. “This leads them to believe that they can gaslight the women they just spoke to into believing that they never asked them out in the first place. The problem with this is that it never works, and it actually makes the women think even less of them than they already did.”
As of press time, the man who asked you out had performed the same tactic on every other woman at the bar, even utilizing his own makeshift memory-erasing “neutralizer” from the film Men in Black, which failed miserably because all the women had already warned each other about him in advance.
