If Women Stop Eating Alone, Whom Will We Pity in Restaurants?
CNN.com featured a report Monday about a new website called Invite For a Bite that's dedicated to creating cheerful archipelagos out of sad, lonely women-islands who feel awkward eating alone.
According to the article, high powered Liz Lemons all over the globe are forever dying of embarrassment whenever anyone catches sight of them eating by themselves. Rather than laughing alone with salad, they are crying. Many even resort to ordering room service on trips, though one could hypothesize that they do that, not because they are lonely, but because ordering room service can make a person feel very glamorous, like Eloise at the Plaza.
One businesswoman cited in the CNN.com piece shared a story in which she was busted faking a cell phone conversation while eating alone in a restaurant, after her phone began ringing midway through her elaborate imaginary chat.
A classic rookie mistake. Number one, always silence your phone before faking a call. Number two, if you forget to silence your phone, here's how you play that one off:
Before pressing "talk," say, loudly, "Oh, God, I didn't even realize the call dropped." Then press "talk" and laugh a little bit as you say "Hello?"
No one's gonna know. Who are they? They don't know your life.
Anyway.
Invite for a Bite encourages users to create free profiles that allow them to share (or search for) invitations to dine with other women. And the website is strictly for women. No dudes allowed. Bro-free zone. Amazons.com
Website founder Cressida Howard explains her motivation for making the site unisex (for the fairer sex) as follows:
"As soon as you introduce the idea of men and women meeting for meals, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish it from a dating site. No matter how many times you explained that it wasn't, common sense dictates that it would be treated as such by some people."
There don't appear to be any mechanisms in place to prevent lesbians from turning it into a dating site, apart from a little thing called THE HONOR CODE, LADIES.
And, even though most women, except Theresa, who is a bitch, are perfectly lovely, Howard does encourage her users to read through the website's safety tips before meeting up for a meal.
A couple of the guidelines suggest calling up your new lady-friend before meeting her in person, to see if you can detect any subtle hints of crazy in her voice.
Best of all: if you do the call when you're eating alone in a restaurant, you might not even have to meet-up anyway.
And, if you remember to put your phone on silence first, you can even just pretend to make the call.