Fish Tales: BackflipSuzie

Love is needing to be loved. John Lennon said that.

Love is dancing at five in the morning, covered in drywall dust, mud, and splatter paint, tackling a six-foot canvas with your significant other. E-Harmony said that.

Love is finding someone who will put up with all the things that suck about you. I said that.

Meet BackflipSuzie. Before you judge her, you must walk a mile in her Chuck Taylors. Suzie is an enigma, wrapped in a scarf, wrapped in flannel, wrapped in tofacon (tofu bacon). She looks into the face of popular culture and spits. She measures the grain, and then she goes against it. And when you think you’ve got her figured out, she’ll change it up. Can’t deal? Too bad! This train ain’t stoppin’ for nobody.

Suzie really isn’t your typical ‘girly girl’. She’s loud. She swears. She drinks. She smokes. She dresses like a homeless lumberjack. She is calculated and ironic. She is the tongue in the cheek of society. She is inarguably original. She is the alternative. She’s a goddamn genuine fake-geek and she is not ashamed to say it. Have you fallen in love with her yet?

Truth is, you wouldn’t be the first. In fact, you’d be just one name on a long list of lonely lads. I suppose I should mention now that BackflipSuzie is not real. She is an experiment gone horribly right. An experiment to determine whether a soulmate can be found on the World Wide Web. An experiment with one regulation: only mess with people who deserve to be messed with. Allow me to show you some examples:

Within five minutes of creating BackflipSuzie’s PlentyOfFish.com profile, she received this gem from Exhibit A: The Rapist.

Awww, how sweet! How could Suzie resist? Answer: she couldn’t! After some casual back-and-forth messaging, Romeo gave her his real name, his phone number, constantly insisted on meeting for coffee, and begged her to phone him so he could “hear [her] voice” before bed.

Although I do agree that answering questions is gay, I was not upset to see his account get deleted. The reason? Who knows? Possibly that he is a rapist. Possibly because he found true love. Possibly because he raped his true love.

Exhibit B: The Rando’.

Interesting. But after the fiasco that was her last relationship, Suzie is looking for someone who can control his bladder.

Exhibit C: The Hero in a Halfshell.

Getting warmer.

But sadly, BackflipSuzie was never able to find the Belle to her Sebastian, the Bleeker to her Juno, or the Peter and Bjorn to her John, because she too had her profile deleted from the site. Will she return? Or will it take a whole new test subject to prove that love can bloom in the fallopian tubes of the Internet? And if so, will he look like this guy?

Stay tuned.