Dating Memes

Chemistry grad student suffers existential crisis when date innocently asks about finding "an element between Hydrogen and Helium." That painful pause? It's the sound of years of education collapsing into a black hole of despair. For the chemistry-challenged folks: Hydrogen (atomic number 1) and Helium (atomic number 2) are literally adjacent on the periodic table. There's NOTHING between them. It's like asking a mathematician to find a whole number between 1 and 2. That "Yep" response? Pure self-preservation after the brain short-circuited.

Dating in the chemistry world is brutal. Poor cyclohexane tries to match with someone who's looking for "a guy like this" while showing a boat conformation drawing. The irony? Cyclohexane IS literally that structure—just drawn in chair conformation instead. It's the molecular equivalent of being rejected for wearing different clothes when you're the exact same person. Chemistry students everywhere just felt that burn in their C-H bonds.

Nothing says romance like explaining mass spectrometry on a first date. Turns out, discussing how molecules get blasted apart by electrons and sorted by mass-to-charge ratio creates more moisture than a poorly sealed vacuum chamber. My colleagues insist I should talk about Netflix instead, but I've yet to find empirical evidence supporting their hypothesis.

This is what happens when chemists get on dating apps. Starting with the slang term "Sugar Daddy," each line gets progressively more scientifically accurate until we reach full IUPAC nomenclature nightmare mode. It's like watching someone transform from a casual Tinder bio to their PhD dissertation in six easy steps! The cosmic brain imagery perfectly captures how unnecessarily complicated we can make simple concepts. Next time someone asks what you do for a living, just hit them with "(2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol Homo sapiens, XY" and watch their soul leave their body.

This poor soul tried to be spontaneous by texting "ΔG thermodynamically unfavorable in the dating world. Next time maybe try "U + Me = Us" instead of bringing Gibbs free energy into your flirting strategy!