When that seemed too humiliating, I spent a few seconds thinking, Okay. I guess this is where I live now.
Eventually, I managed to corral my boobs, but it wasn’t lost on me that after bravely conquering aqua aerobics, I had almost been beaten by a piece of clothing whose whole job was to support me.
So I left the gym feeling less victorious than I’d felt in class, but still. It was enough that I’d finally had a life-affirming moment in a pool.
It was about time.
1 If you’re under thirty, Cathy Guisewite is the creator of Cathy, a comic that ran from 1976 to 2010 in which a professional lady waded through the complications of single life, ate too much chocolate, and said “Ack!” a lot. She tried on bathing suits inordinately often, especially for someone who claimed to hate doing it. Maybe it was a self-flagellation fetish. We’ll never know.
2 For those of you who aren’t Prius-owning women in their late thirties or early forties, Zumba is a fitness class that incorporates hip-hop, merengue, salsa, samba, mambo, and some martial-arts movements. It was one of my first OFW adventures. I hated it. Then I loved it.
3 Many women are comfortable dating while fat, and I salute them. There are tons of men who are attracted to heavier women; just do a search for BBW on a porn site and then revel in the wealth of thick ladies doing filthy things for money. (Hooray for equal-opportunity filth!) That being said, I was clearly not one of those women, and because dating already made me feel vulnerable, I wasn’t willing to allow one more chink in my armor, since it already felt like a crumpled Diet Coke can.
4 If you’ve been through the doors of a gym one time in the past year, you get to call it “my gym,” right?
5 I’m usually a giant anti-chain snob, but Red Robin’s steak fries dipped in ranch dressing made me fall in love with the strip mall by the airport, and I don’t care who knows it. Except that I sort of do, but now the truth is out there so I just have to live with it.
Adventures in Dating III
Winter Is Coming
After my experience with polyamory and the tortilla debacle at the sex club that I still really hadn’t recovered from, I’d backed away from the online-dating hamster wheel considerably. I thought it was time to either get serious about compatibility or quit altogether, both of which were equally possible given my mood at that point.
OkCupid was still the catalyst for the majority of my dates. I continued my quest, though at a more leisurely pace, sifting through thousands of pictures of men standing on mountains in hiking gear. Or skiing gear. Or “Holy shit is that Everest base camp?” gear.
I wasn’t the outdoorsy type and listed hiking avoidance as a hobby in my profile so in the Northwest, I was an outlier.
Even so, I had managed to find over twenty Portlanders so far who (a) didn’t make me start a fire using two rocks to test my camping mettle; (b) didn’t have gluten allergies; and (c) didn’t already know me. (Portland is a small town, so you will see friends and acquaintances on dating sites. The plus side is that it’s similar to seeing them in a brothel or at an Arby’s—the mutual mortification will keep your secret safe forever.)
I decided that if a person’s profile or message didn’t make me laugh, he wasn’t in consideration.
That tactic got me a date with Taken Guy—another handsome, bearded forty-something who worked at Dark Horse Comics and let me know immediately after our date that he’d just started seeing someone else exclusively. There was also Crying-on-the-Inside Guy (a stand-up comic who teared up when talking about his ex-girlfriend). And then, in late October, my favorite suitor to date, Delayed-Text-Response Guy.
First Date #25, Late October: Delayed-Text-Response Guy
He was dorkily funny, darkly handsome, and bald in that Stanley Tucci–esque sense where it just fits and you can’t imagine him any other way. He was an architect who spent a lot of time on construction sites, and his T-shirts always had what my friend Mimi used to call the “cool hang.” That’s where the shirt looks like it’d been washed a thousand times so it billows slightly at the bottom from stretch and wear. I’ve always had a strange affinity for guys who could achieve the cool hang, but maybe that’s because I could never pull off a T-shirt. I always look like a roadie for a metal band.1
On our first date, aside from the fact that I almost spilled my entire girlie cocktail when I stood up to greet him, we seemed to have fantastic chemistry. There were no cringe-filled conversational lags, neither of us talked more than the other, and we laughed easily at each other’s borderline-TMI personal stories.
His only flaw, I noticed in the first week, was that he never took less than two hours to respond to a text and would sometimes take a couple of days. His replies always seemed interested and engaged, so I tried not to think about it.
Also, the fact that he was funny, even just a little bit, made me very hopeful. More hopeful than I’d been in a while, actually. Since I had started this dating binge months earlier, I’d found that humor was the rarest trait to come across. Out of the hundreds of profiles I read, probably seven made me laugh. And one of those seven was cribbed directly from a Best of Craigslist post from five years prior.2
I started thinking that since funny is at the top of virtually every straight woman’s must-have list, Portland had simply run out of funny men, and we would have to start importing them from Canada.
So after Delayed-Text-Response Guy made me laugh on our first date, I was thrilled when he asked me on a second. We went to a bar in Southeast Portland where we sat at a long picnic table on the back patio surrounded by Edison-bulb string lights and tatted-up millennials who made us feel old simply by existing and being of drinking age.
“They all look like my daughter,” he said.
“That’s not helping,” I said.
We swapped a lot of stories that night. He even told me about when he’d lost his virginity.
“Her parents were out of town so we had the whole house to ourselves for a weekend,” he said.
“That’s amazing!” I said. “You were so lucky.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “It felt that way. But then she lost a tampon in her body somewhere and it started to feel more nightmarish than idyllic.”
“‘Somewhere’?” I asked.
“Well, I knew where it was,” he said. “I just didn’t want to think about it.”
“Did you go spelunking for it?” I asked.
“I did,” he said. “The weekend turned out to be instructive in a different way than I’d hoped.”
“You probably never thought it was possible to see too much vagina.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Turned out it was.”
Even after that nonsexy sex talk, I decided to go home with him that night. It was our second date.
Here’s why that might have been a mistake: There’s an unspoken agreement among the majority of daters, and that’s that the third date is the sex date.
I have no idea how it happened—I must have missed the summit where the decision was made—but it’s a thing now.
For men, unspoken sex rules are not really an issue because they can fuck whoever they want whenever they want and however many times they want, and as long as their bodies don’t become covered in syphilitic sores, there’s not a lot of judgment.
But women need to be aware of things like the Third-Date-Sex Rule, because for some men, a woman’s decision to sleep with him or not flips a switch in his mind, thus:
Sex on the first date = whore
Sex on the second date = whore
Sex on the third date = marriage material!
Some strange magic apparently happens to women in the time between the second and third date that sucks all the whore blood from our bodies and reanimates us with the blood of Donna Reed.
Of course I don’t want to be with a man who thinks this way, but the problem is, some men think this way but don’t realize it. Their penises and degrees in postfeminist lit think women should be able to do whatever they
want with their bodies, but some dark part of their brains that they never visit is playing episodes of Father Knows Best on a loop and wagging a finger at hussies.
Since I’m terrible at game-playing and think the Third-Date-Sex Rule is garbage and that the people who subscribe to it are garbage people, I don’t generally obey it, and I definitely didn’t with Delayed-Text-Response Guy.
Did I sleep with him too soon for him to consider me serious dating material? I asked myself that question as his text-response time got longer and longer, and he became cool and distant on our third date. As we sat in his living room, he stared past me as we talked and looked down at his phone a few too many times.
Oh, is that another woman you’re taking too long to respond to? Do you need me to give you a minute so you can not text her?
After that date, I was pretty sure he was attempting to ghost me, but I was so sure we were perfect for each other that I kept texting him every couple of weeks to see if he might want to go out. He would respond sporadically and claimed he was still interested when I flat-out asked him about it over text. (If nothing else, this dating thing had made me exceptionally good at using digital media to ask uncomfortable questions.)
It was completely bizarre that I continued pursuing him despite his obvious ambivalence. For a person with my paralyzing fear of rejection, this was akin to someone pursuing a hungry bear while decked out in Lady Gaga’s raw-meat dress.
The only way I can explain it is that I really liked him, and that haze of affection made me blind to his not really liking me.3
But then I got a text from him with a vague excuse for why he had to cancel our fourth date, and for whatever reason, the fog lifted and I knew. I knew I was being passively broken up with via text by another guy I wasn’t really dating. I was in the car driving home and when Siri read the text to me, I had to pull over because I was tearing up. (Side note for coders: Would it be so hard to engineer Siri to comfort users immediately following a breakup text? Just something simple like “I never thought he was tall enough for you” or “Do you want me to hack into his bank account and suck out the hundred dollars you paid for the morning-after pill?” You’re the ones who created this easy-breakup technology, so it’s the only responsible thing to do.)4
Yes, crying because a guy you’ve had three dates with isn’t interested in you seems a little over-the-top, but at that point, I was so tired. He’d been first date #25 and one of only about three men over the course of the year that I thought there might be a future with. But that estimation was clearly based on sparks that only I saw. And it’s embarrassing, but I’d pictured myself with him. I pictured him coming to parties with me and putting his hand in the small of my back as we weaved through the crowd. I pictured us going to comedy shows and laughing at all the same jokes. I pictured my friends being impressed by the cool hang when I took him to barbecues. So when he pushed me aside, I wasn’t just mourning three (mostly) good dates, I was mourning the future I’d prematurely imagined with him and, if I’m honest, the corgi I envisioned us adopting. (His name was General Alfred P. Biscuits, and his ears were as tall as a roll of Ritz crackers.)
When things start off so well and end so quickly, I’m always torn about whether I want to know the reason. Of course, on the one hand, it’s way more pleasant not to know what it was about you they disliked enough to disappear on you, but on the other hand, a quick note of explanation could put an end to the obsessing over why. No one wants to hear, “I just don’t think the spark is there,” or “I would’ve married you if you’d just waited one more date to sleep with me, whore,” but I spent a good couple of weeks ruminating on what it might have been, and I could’ve used that time to ruminate about other important things, like how and when I was going to die or suddenly develop schizophrenia or that version of catatonia where you can’t move or speak but you’re aware of everything.
In November, because Delayed-Text-Response Guy had been the straw that broke my already-emotionally-fragile camel’s back, I didn’t actively try to date anymore.
I deactivated my OkCupid profile for the third time in a year, and I felt relieved.
I understood the appeal of having a whole catalog of prospects at your fingertips to choose from, but after a year of it, I just wasn’t sure it was that effective. Or fulfilling. Or worth risking herpes.
I was also concerned about how my psyche had been affected by the illusion of plenty that online dating creates.
Let’s be honest: The idea of a person is almost always better than the reality. When you go on a date with someone you met online, you carry with you the idea of literally thousands of people waiting on a website you can access at any time. So you’re a lot less likely to give the person in front of you the chance he deserves, because how can he compare to all those possibly perfect people?
I wondered if this might have long-term effects.
If I ever did get into a relationship, wouldn’t I keep the idea that I could shop online for another person in the back of my mind? So the moment I got bored or he got an unflattering haircut, maybe my impulse would be to hop back into the digital dating pool.
Part of what keeps a person in a relationship is that inner voice saying there’s no one else out there. Online-dating sites are immediate, constant proof that that voice is full of shit. I’m not saying the lack of perceived alternatives is a good reason to stay in a relationship, but I think too many perceived alternatives can lead to people jumping ship when the ship they’re in is quite sound, it just has a couple of totally fixable dents in the hull.
All of this is to say that I felt really good about my decision to take down my online profile. Deleting dating apps freed up a ton of time and mental space and I was getting a lot more done. I was writing more and spending more time drinking with my friends, which I’d missed terribly.
And, shockingly, I went on a couple of dates (#26 and #27) that were not arranged by an algorithm. Nothing of note, though, aside from a delicious piece of prime rib.
But once Thanksgiving was over, I was reminded again of the shitshow that being single in December is. My birthday. Christmas. New Year’s fucking Eve, which is a million times worse than Valentine’s Day because the whole world is kissing at the exact same time you’re hiding in the bathroom looking at your phone and trying to avoid thinking about the whole world kissing. I’ve spent many first moments of new years in bathrooms.
I reactivated my OkCupid account the second week of December.
That’s when I started getting messages from an engineer who liked cars.
First Date #28, December 26
So what if it was only half the field hockey team? Still too much? How about just one really unattractive midfielder as long as I promise never to do it again?
That was the first line of his message to me. I’d said in my profile that I thought humor was really important and that if a guy was funny, I’d forgive a lot. Not sleeping with a whole field hockey team, I’d said, but a lot.
Smart move, #28. He was letting me know that he’d actually read my profile (you’d be amazed how many don’t), and the concept that indiscretions didn’t count if the person one cheated with was unattractive was a real conversation-starter.
HUSBAND: I’ve had an affair.
WIFE: How could you?
HUSBAND: No, no—it’s fine! She looks like a less attractive Benedict Cumberbatch.
WIFE: Oh. Sorry. My bad. More coffee?
We corresponded for four days, which was a little long for me. Now that I was an experienced online dater, I was more in the “meet in person before you form an attachment” camp. I was amazed at the number of fiery conversations I’d had online that froze over the moment they were exposed to real-world air and lack of physical magnetism.
And #28 had physical magnetism. His profile said he was six five (which I took with a grain of salt but was nice to imagine). He had close-shorn silver hair, a long, Roman nose, and deep-set blue-gray eyes. He looked a lot like Roger Sterling
from Mad Men, which immediately made me imagine our Roger and Joan Halloween costumes.
But I was getting ahead of myself, as usual.
After about six notes back and forth, he asked me on a date. This was on December twentieth, so there wasn’t a lot of open space in anyone’s schedule. My birthday was Christmas Eve and my family loses their ever-loving minds at Christmas, so obviously that was out.
He suggested the twenty-sixth, which fell on a Friday, and I agreed.
We met at a whiskey bar across from the theater where we recorded Live Wire!
Turned out he was six five, long and lanky, and therefore very possibly not a liar about other things. And unlike most of the dates I’d been on during the year, he’d actually dressed up to see me in a long-sleeved blue dress shirt and flat-fronted gray pants. He looked dapper as fuck.
We sat at the bar facing each other and talked for four hours.
He was soft-spoken and ridiculously smart, able to call up arcane facts about whatever subject we happened to be discussing with an unassuming ease.
He was a very recently separated engineer who ran a computer-chip factory in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland. He had two kids, a nineteen-year-old daughter and a seventeen-year-old son who was autistic. His daughter was in college in Florida and his son lived with him.
I hadn’t imagined dating a father who still had a kid at home, but after the year I’d had, I was willing to keep an open mind. When I looked back on my year, I realized it was kind of important that he was too. It had been an eventful year, during which I’d tried my darnedest to make up for my sexless twenties. In that sense, at least, it had been a glorious success.
I had my first and second (!) one-night stands, which shocked me at the time since they seemed so out of character for me, but in retrospect I saw them as a dating rite of passage.5
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