In a recent essay for HuffPost, author and self-described feminist iconoclast Lisa L. Kirchner narrates how she met her soon-to-be husband. Coming off a decade spent mostly single, Kirchner recounts how the day after Trump was elected she went online to change her dating profile. Right at the top, she added a note: “If you voted for Donald Trump, keep scrolling.” She admits that, living in deep-red St. Petersburg, Florida, she rarely used the account. But she didn’t make the change “to winnow potential partners so much as to announce how sickened [she] was by the president-elect.” Seeing as the headline for this essay is “I’m a Liberal Feminist and Next Month I’m Marrying a Trump Voter,” it’s pretty clear that her note had the opposite effect.
Unfortunately—or fortunately depending on how you view the unfolding romance—Kirchner’s profile started attracting more and more Trump voters, even despite the fact that one of Kirchner’s photos included a life-size cutout of Hillary Clinton. She soon realized that these MAGA-ites were interpreting “keep scrolling” as “keep reading.” An understandable error, but one that prompted Kirchner to seriously consider deleting her profile, especially after discovering her Trump-related anxiety was causing heart attack–like symptoms prompted by “a swelling of the cartilage around [her] sternum.”
However, this drastic step was forestalled by one magical message from her now-fiancé: “Nice use of the parenthetical.” What parenthetical this was we sadly never find out, but the rest…
