Michelle Thomas, a blogger from London, had a killer response to a man she'd met on Tinder who sent her a cruel message about her weight.
After what she considered a fairly standard first date, her tragic suitor sent her a long, rambling message about how much he liked her -- but could not continue to date her due to her weight.
"I'm not going to bull***t you," this Romeo wrote in a message that Thomas posted in full on her blog. "I f***ing adore you Michelle and I think you're the prettiest looking girl I've ever met. But my mind gets turned on [by] someone slimmer."
He continued to praise her personality and wit while criticizing her body, writing:
So whilst I am hugely turned on by your mind, your face, your personality (and God...I really, really am), I can't say the same about your figure. So I can sit there and flirt and have the most incredibly fun evening, but I have this awful feeling that when we got undressed my body would let me down. I don't want that to happen baby. I don't want to be lying there next to you, and you asking me why I'm not hard.
After ruminating on the message (and the particularly creepy line "I would marry you like a shot if you were a slip of a girl"), Thomas responded to the guy in a blog post. She stressed that there is is nothing wrong with not being attracted to someone -- but that this man's response was unnecessarily cruel.
You don't have to fancy me," she wrote. "We all have a good friend who we look at ruefully and think 'you're lovely, but you just don't tickle my pickle.' We wish we were attracted to them, but our bodies and our brains don't work like that. And that's fine."
Thomas then rightfully skewered his behavior, writing:
What isn't fine is the fact that, after a few hours in my company, you took the time to write this utterly uncalled-for message. It's nothing short of sadistic. Your tone is saccharine and condescending, but the forensic detail in which you express your disgust at my body is truly grotesque. The only possible objective for writing it is to wound me.
Thomas explained that she is proud of her body and confident in herself, and that messages like her date's are completely uncalled for. Perhaps the most powerful part of Thomas' response is her hope that her date's daughter will grow up with similar confidence -- regardless of her father's opinions.
"I want you to encourage your daughter to love, enjoy, and care for her body," she wrote. "It belongs to her and only her. Praise her intellect, and her creativity. Push her to push herself and to be fearless. Give her the tools to develop a bomb-proof sense of self-esteem so that if (I'll be kind. I'll say 'if.') the time comes that a small, unhappy man attempts to corrode it, she can respond as I do now."
Thomas told The Huffington Post that the responses to her now-viral blog are overwhelming -- in the best possible way.
"I'm getting thousands of messages from all over the world from women and men desperate to talk about their bodies, about shame, about bullying, and about recovery."
Thomas is starting a movement dedicated to body love, and offered up the following advice to anyone who has received negative comments about their body:
"Enjoy all the amazing things you can do with your body right now," she told HuffPost. "Do things. Look at stuff. Talk to people. Walk around a bit. Use that joy as a propeller aimed at health and happiness."
Preach.