Fighting with Slightly Dim Strangers

There is a joke in my dating profile that many men don't seem to understand. I have included one of the biggest online dating cliches ever written -- Living life to the fullest!!!!!!! -- which is funny by itself because of its insistent, obvious exaggeration. (Really? The fullest?! How can you be living life to the fullest if you're single, yet you want to be part of a couple? And so much so, that you're willing to subject yourself to the freak show of online dating?!) But the real punchline follows that cliche as a parenthetical, illuminating statement:

I am LIVING LIFE TO THE FULLEST!!!!!!!

(That'll show my jackass ex-husband what an amazing woman I am!!!!!). 

The joke isn't me calling my ex-husband a jackass. The joke is iterating the subtext that I think prompts such overly emphatic statements of living the fullest life. The second line mocks the first one. But it only really works if one recognizes that 'Living life to the fullest!!!!' is the stalest of cliches. And most guys who contact me don't. I usually won't waste my time with the guys who include a comment about what a jackass my ex-husband must be (or what a jackass their ex is), so the joke serves as a filter for my kind of sense of humor. But sometimes I'm trying to figure out if the guy is in on the joke, as I did recently with a local 47-year-old British ex-pat photographer who claims to be transitioning into writing.

British Guy: your husband was a douche...  

Me: Quit flirting.

British Guy: he was an a hole!

Me: Now it's not just flirting -- you're taking off your shirt. Stop it.

British Guy: What do i have to say to get YOUR shirt off?

Me: Well, not *that*.

British Guy: I'm getting that you don't speak English very well. Or that you can't string more than a couple of words together at a time. Maybe you didn't do so well at school. Not sure what's going on, but it's a little weird. Are you a man?

Me: Yes, me is dumb. Me flunky-flunks village skool in old country of youthtimes of mine personage. The face cheeks of me are fired color red, sting like bulgaria village dunce shame.

I should have just walked away without comment. I know. I shouldn't have engaged in what is the online dating equivalent of that chest-poking right before an incomprehensibly stupid bar fight breaks out. But sometimes slightly dim online jackasses need to be chest-poked with their own idiocy. And I'm, more often than not, happy to do it.