The Boiled Tomato Technique will not only boost your dating productivity, it will give you a life-long skill to help you achieve goals. Based on more than two weeks of refinement and thinking, it’s easy to understand and highly enjoyable.
You go on a first date, by the third second your genitals establish that the person isn’t physically attractive, by the third minute your brain yawns that they aren’t mentally attractive either. But! You’ve sunk something like 5-10 days of your time texting frivolities with this person; your time investment hitherto is exponentially higher than three minutes. Bailing out of the date means losing that investment.
Now I’ll show you how to cut your losses with the Boiled Tomato Technique.
I tell them about my friend whose neighbour had a noisy dog. An animal that would bark all morning, all afternoon, all evening, at random times at night too. My friend attempted a diplomatic resolution and talked to the beast’s owner. The first attempt got him a shrug, the second attempt got him a pat on the shoulder, and the third got him the door slammed in his face. The dog just kept barking, constantly, infuriatingly. So my friend boiled a tomato, tied it to a string while still hot, lowered it from his balcony onto his neighbour’s terrace where the hound pounced on it, and swallowed it. The tomato gave it a stomach ulcer. The beast died the next day.
People initially react to this story with shock and compassion for the dog. That’s when I clarify that I too feel compassion for the dog, as its rampant barking was mostly a result of its owner’s mistreatment and poor training. Be that as it may, I ultimately side with my friend, because given a choice between one dog’s life and long-term peace, peace wins.
This point is what usually receives the most resistance, but I can retort that when they – the date – are presented with a choice between eating a hamburger or a salad, they go for the hamburger, thus assigning the same amount of importance to the cow’s life as I assign the dog’s. They bring about death carelessly to indulge in the short-lived pleasures of a juicy burger, whereas I do so reluctantly to reduce noise pollution in the short and long term.
The point is not that I defend monsters who kill dogs, that I ought to tolerate all the components of god’s vomit, that I should just buy earplugs. The point is that a polemical topic will extract the most value out of a hopelessly ugly and uninteresting date.
Firstly, it guarantees an entertaining date. You get to debate the sanctity of the life of what’s effectively a barking machine that may as well be put out of its misery. All the while insisting that diplomacy was your first recourse and that it’s so very regrettable that a more special operation had to be deployed to attain peace. Your peace and, let’s not forget, your neighbours’. Society’s.
In fact, sometimes I add that multiple neighbours thanked my friend. This makes your date question whether they are in fact aligned with the Moral Majority. Mention that they call it the Silent Majority for a reason.
I enjoy mentioning that the dog had a choice not to eat the tomato, yet blindly followed its gluttonous impulses. This implies that the dog was bound to eat any other lethally poisonous object, such as three quarters of an old carpet, and die a stupid death. Pursue this line of argument well and you’ll reveal that there’s no such thing as killing a being that has no self-preservation instinct to begin with, it’s a doomed creature that exists to kill itself, Darwin would approve, etc.
One thing that strikes me as odd is that nobody comments on the tomato tactic itself. It clearly shows that your friend can’t be a dog-hating monster given his profound knowledge of canine biology. And if they still don’t acknowledge that knowledge, they must at least acknowledge that the boiled tomato was particularly ingenious, cost-effective, and eco-friendly compared to solutions involving drones or purpose-made chemicals.
By now you realised that the existence of “my friend”, of his neighbours, and of the dog, is immaterial, like my soul or yours. They’re here because if you were to cast yourself as the tomato boiler, you’re exposed to knee-jerk personal attacks. A date with an average capability for nuanced thought will promptly conclude their analysis at “dog dead because person evil” and rain down personal attacks on your cruel anus. That’s not a good return on your investment of ten days of texting food pictures. So your tomato-boiling friend’s purpose in life, other than pursuing acoustic justice, is to protect you from such potential outrage by putting the conversation on an abstract plane. That’s what he boils down to.
Ultimately, this is a classifier. If they side with you on the controversy, then you may revise their mental attractiveness and/or become friends. If they don’t side with you, then you’ve confirmed their mental unattractiveness and can, with your time profitably spent, end the date.
