Since I started dating I’ve always gone international. There are only a few European countries I haven’t planted my metaphorical flag (yes, this is a dick joke about my metaphorically huge dick). There is only one country whose men (and only men) I try to avoid: Germany. “Why? What have German men ever done to deserve this?” I hear you say, my dear reader. Well, I’m glad you asked…
The fantasy of a German dude sweeping one off of one’s feet and carrying one past the Ausländerbehörde into a future of passion and excitement hasn’t ever had much traction. A friend of mine who has been in a long term relationship with a German man recently told me that if she wanted to have sex with him, she would write him an email informing him of her desire and the two would take it from there. (I wish I was making this up.) In light of this, I’m wholeheartedly convinced that it was a German man that came up with the word Geschlechtsverkehr – a word that takes the fun out of something that is supposed to be the height of ecstasy but has turned into something altogether more bureaucratic the moment a Thomas, Dieter or Malte gets involved. Have you ever tried to talk dirty with a German? It’s the least sexy experience imaginable, and I blame no one that abandons learning German after having suffered through it even once.
In my experience, a date with a German man is like going to an Amt: it’s draining and you feel like neither of you really wants to be there. You fill out the forms, bring all the paperwork, sit down until your number is up and finally, you get a Bescheinigung, and that’s only if you’re lucky. The idea of Netflix and chill has a German version which I call ARD Mediathek & Suffering. It’s free, supposedly fun, and fit in to the narrowly timed parameters (8pm-6am) of the German Jugendschutzgesetz. It’s putting the Ordnung back into the Geschlechtsverkehr. If romance is dead, it was a German man that killed it.
From the offer of money for sex via Tinder to online dating messages consisting of cringe-worthy detailed descriptions of sexual acts, the perpetrators were always the same: German men. My personal favourite features generous tidbits like: “Heute morgen beim erwachen fand sich ein pulsierendes, ein kräftiges, ein forderndes Glied zwischen meinen Beinen” (“This morning I found a strong pulsating, demanding phallus between my legs”). I’m seldom speechless but how does one reply to such a message?
And I know I’m not alone. The Tumblr blog Straight White Boys Texting has a German equivalent called Straight White German Boys Texting. The submissions oscillate between gently cringey to projectile vomit-inducing. It seems the way German men express desire in writing is deeply flawed.
Of course, courting has always been difficult and a recently released map showing which emoji is used most in which country educates us further on this ancient struggle. That the see-no-evil monkey is preferred by Germans is something I blame entirely on German men trying to flirt. They know they’re doing the wrong thing, but German mentality dictates that if they don’t see it, it’s not there.
So dear reader, please trust me that if you ever receive an unsolicited dick pic, followed by an emoji of a monkey hiding its face, the sender is almost certainly a German man. I wish the Unicode developers had stuck with the traditional option of featuring a fourth monkey specifically for the German man: the do-no-evil-monkey covering his genitalia.
Text: Alix Berber, Illustrations: Eugenia Loli
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Alix Berber is iHeartBerlin’s newest dating columnist. The Tattletale Heart tells stories of desire, infatuation and the ghosts of lovers past. They are the dating-chronicles of a hopeless romantic with serious trust issues in the capital of the notoriously unattached.
You can follow Alix on Twitter and Facebook.
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