About that trip to California

Vine is an incredible app. Using six second videos as a platform for your talents and skills allows you to connect with a very wide audience. But not just any old audience, these people are almost desperate to interact with one another. Where a business or band may really struggle to gain any “engagements” on Facebook, on Vine people are so connected and supportive that creatives flourish. People have signed record deals, acting contracts, are promoting products and are even selling their own books and jewelry. However, there’s an underbelly to Vine. Connections are now, more often, made privately and you don’t really know about it until two “viners” are in the same video. That’s when the app kicks off. “Oh my GOD YOU TWO ARE TOGETHER??!” It's incredibly voyeuristic, after all, only 5% of Vine’s users actively create content, the rest just watch.

So one day, MATTA_TAT revined (retweeted, if you like) a handsome, bearded guy called Ronald (I have changed his name for this blog post). The natural thing to do was to immediately stalk the guy, go through his feed, try and figure him out. Is he fit? Is he funny? Is he musical? Yes. Yes. Yes.  Before I knew it, I noticed he was doing the same to my feed and a message landed in my VMs (DMs – yaa)

“You seem rad. Are you rad?”
“I’m pretty fucking rad.”

And that was it. It escalated very quickly, Ronald and I spent hours VM-ing, moved swiftly on to Snapchat and then the next day we had our first Facetime phone call. Ronald and I exchanged Whatsapp voice messages too. Due to the time zones we often missed the opportunities for phone calls, though I’d often get up at 5am to call him before work, but those little clips would brighten my day, just silly ramblings back and forth. We’d leave each other 300+ second long Snapchats stories showing each other around our home-towns and what we were up to that day. I was absolutely infatuated with this guy.

The conversation was intense. It was clear from the start that we didn’t see each other as just friends. Ronald sent me flowers via M&S (baby pink peonies) and I sent him a present too, we’d say goodnight and good morning and wish that we were with each other.  Things didn’t get particularly sexy at any point, in case you were wondering, Ronald admitted he’d thought about it but “didn’t want to be that guy”.  There was no denying the chemistry, even over an app, but I admired his efforts to remain a gentleman and frankly, this only made me like him more.

Two weeks later I booked a flight to L.A.

“I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait to hold you. Why do you live so far away?! You’re so beautiful. Your voice is beautiful. I want to squeeze you! I want to kiss you. I’ve watched that video like, a thousand times. <3 <3 <3”

No wonder I started falling for this guy. He had me in the palm of his hand and I, however fantastical it sounds, started to tell myself that this guy could be “the one”. The comments made it into the Vine community too and it wasn’t long before people were aware of “Gina and Ronald” and they bloody loved it. The only way I can translate the situation is to liken it to the latest pop star couple sightings in gossip magazines. It was no longer private and I wanted people to know that I was his girl. His Vine Girl, anyway. For me, the only caveat was that he lived a few thousand miles away, hey, maybe it would work though in some weird and wonderful way?

The journey to CA was long and I couldn’t sleep, I just felt absolute terror at all times and tried to dull it with gin. What the hell am I doing?! I discussed it with anyone who I came into verbal contact with, the poor couple sat next to me on the flight to Las Vegas just had me word vomiting on them for the duration. The connecting flight to L.A. was delayed, which only made my stomach even more sickly. This Waiting Game was getting a bit much. And that’s when Nicole happened.

Nicole sent me a little essay on Vine warning me that Ronald had been sending intimate pictures and videos to her, that they were planning to meet up and have sex after I returned to the UK. She wanted to warn me about the kind of guy I was about to meet. Naturally I was fucking mortified. I immediately sent it to Ronald asking for him to be honest, if he’d been “sexting” some girl then fine, you can fuck who you like, but be honest with me for fucks sake. “Oh my god Gina no, of course I haven’t! I wouldn’t do that to you. This silly bitch is just trying to ruin what we have.” Or words to that effect, I’ve deleted the conversation since. “OK. I trust you, we’ll not talk about it again.” And we didn’t.

The plane landed in LAX. I nervously made my way to baggage collection. And there he was. Stood, beaming, waving a little stars and stripes flag to welcome me.

“Oh my god, you’re real! You’re really here! You’re so pretty oh my god! Can I kiss you?”

Ronald was shorter than I was led to believe, he had a bit of a belly too. Which is fine. But the image I’d created in my head didn’t match up. After all, on social media you can be the very best version of yourself at all times. Physically, emotionally, musically even. You can re-record, re-type and re-word everything. But in “real life” you absolutely can’t hide anything. That initial meeting was always going to be a little strange, we both knew it would be, but the awkwardness melted away fairly quickly and we were soon driving back to the Mojave Desert playing each other music, conversation flowing.

Within two hours we’d pulled up on an isolated, dark road 2 minutes from his house.

No, we definitely weren't just friends.

Our time together in California was generally, great. I’m not going to go into details of the trip because that’s not what I’m here writing about. Ronald was incredibly easy going, I was 100% myself at all times and I say that with every confidence. He was very generous, very kind and absolutely hilarious- I laughed pretty much all the time. I’ve never been in love, but god I was falling for this guy. There was a tense moment when I was a little hungover and emotional in San Francisco and I started to let the crazy out. “I've not felt this way about a guy in, well, ever and you live in fucking California.” (In hindsight, perhaps this was an error but having said that, he let me fly however many thousand miles to meet him, so the boy had it coming, right?) I stopped thinking about it after he convinced me that “girls are like pancakes, pour syrup on them and it goes everywhere. You need to think like a guy, guys are waffles. The syrup goes into little squares and doesn’t overflow and get messy.”  This is where I started to get little twinges of doubt about how Ronald felt, but I “waffled” it away.

I left California feeling pretty miserable, I still genuinely believed that this guy could be everything to me and I simply didn’t want to leave him. After a few tears, lots of hugs and “arghhh!” ridden goodbyes I started the long journey back to Sheffield feeling tired and mardy. I had a long stopover at Heathrow, since there’s only so much you can do in the departure lounge for 5 hours I started overthinking things and decided to get back in touch with Nicole. “Why are you bothered? You two seemed to getting on pretty well?” she asked. Fair point, there’s that social media filter thing again. “I just need to know.” Sure enough she sent me a screenshot of their conversation, I swiftly forwarded this on to Ronald, feeling betrayed and pissed off. I gave him the opportunity to be honest and he’d lied. I can’t help but think that if he’d just been straight with me, I wouldn’t have let myself get so attached. “Oh dang, I know who that is now.” Oh do you now?! Ha. Brilliant! “I’m so embarrassed Gina, I’m so sorry. It never meant anything, it was just silly. I didn’t want to hurt you by admitting it.” Ugh, whatever Ronald.

The worst bit is that this isn’t even the thing I’m upset about. What hurt me the most was that upon my return home, the guy instantly stopped interacting with me on all social media platforms. No voice messages, no VMs, no snaps and definitely no phone calls. Correction, we had two calls, both of which involved me asking why he was being such a dick. Looking back it’s all so pathetic! I got so hung up on this boy who’d let me get so close, who had completely drawn me in only for him to drop me once he was bored. I even got my best mate involved to try and decipher what he was playing at, “I dunno what to say. I do this to everyone.” What kind of sentence is that? Argh! People are not disposable, they are not there to test drive or try on for size!

I don’t invest into people very often, I don’t make close genuine connections easily and when I do make them, they stay there for a long time. So for this one to evaporate without reasonable cause upset me a great deal, I was absolutely gutted. I still am to be honest, though I know he doesn't deserve my time or head space.

Ronald and I no longer speak and I still think that this is a massive shame. He’s still at it though. He’s continued to behave very similarly with another Viner and perhaps yet another and I can only assume he’ll keep doing it. Until someone cuts his beard off, then he’ll have nothing.  I really regret how I spent my time in California; I could have done so much more exploring and met other awesome people. All I can say is “lesson learned”. Don’t fly 6000 miles to meet boys you meet on the internet just because they say you’re pretty.