Twitter's Top 7 Dating Disasters, in 140 Characters or Less

Aug. 23, 2011 — -- Was your date last Friday a complete failure? Tweet it.

Hundreds of disillusioned British daters are sharing their stories beyond their circle of friends at brunch the next morning by posting them on a Twitter page called FirstDateHell.

These humorous -- and often wacky -- stories are rapidly gaining momentum on Twitter, with more than 2,000 followers to date.

FirstDateHell -- and its sister site Crapdate.com, which archives the jaw-dropping tweets -- were founded by London-based columnist and tech writer Rhodri Marsden. The creation of the Twitter page was prompted by Marsden's own tales of dating woes, which began with the recollection of one particularly awful encounter at a local pub.

"I've just walked past the Firefly, where I went on a date in 2002 that was so bad I heard myself say 'So what's Wigan like, then?'"

Marsden's comedic tweets about his incredidbly awkward date, complete with awkward silences and uncomfortable stares, brought such a variety of side-splitting responses with his 17,000 Twitter followers that it prompted him to set up FirstDateHell as a platform for others to broadcast their dating woes.

Since the beginning of FirstDateHell earlier this month, the page has received hundreds of comments and stories about similarly traumatic dating scenarios, ranging from the bizarre ("There was the speed dater who spent the allotted three minutes talking to me via his imaginary friend") to the painful ("I went out very briefly with someone who stubbed a cigarette out on the back of my hand. After asking to. And me saying no.") to the downright illegal ("I went on a date and he took me on a burglary").

Dating Woes Take Over Twitter

Marsden chalks up FirstDateHell's success to a particularly British sensibility.

"I think us British can be so emotionally feeble... we can have such a constipated communication problem. So we have trouble saying to people's faces "Look, this isn't working, nice to meet you, but I'm going home." Instead we sit there for hours with someone dreadful. As a result we might become terribly unhappy, but boy, do we pick up some good stories," Marsden said in an email to ABCNews.com.