by Sarah Hepola
I was worried men wouldn’t like dating a sober woman. After all, drinking was a part of our erotic social contract. It was a long-standing agreement that we would all drink away our nervousness and better judgment. I’d heard about men who got frustrated when their dates weren’t drinking. “How am I going to take advantage of you now?” one guy asked my friend, which was a joke, but a lot of uncomfortable truth was beneath the punch line. Alcohol is the greatest seduction tool ever invented, and to order a seltzer with lime is to take that shining scimitar out of a man’s hand and toss it in the nearby Dumpster.
I went to dinner again with the doctor. I was torn about him. He made me laugh. He was a great listener. But he cussed out some dude who cut him off in traffic. He told this overinvolved story about his ex and described her with various synonyms for “psycho.” The jeans: Was it shallow that I cared? That old pendulum swung in my mind the entire evening. I’m going to kiss him / Oh hell no, I’m not. I couldn’t tell if the tics that bothered me about him were red flags or convenient excuses to stay in my hidey-hole. I’d lost touch with my own gut instinct.
And I thought: If I could take a shot of Patrón, I could kiss him. If I could suck down the beer (or five) that he does not order on my behalf, then we could do this the way it is done. We could find ourselves wrapped in sheets, clothes in a heap near the foot of the bed, my tricky Grecian top in a tourniquet around my forearm because I was so frantic to rip it off, to be unloosed, to be free. And afterward we could evaluate. Do we work? Is this a thing? We could exchange flirtatious glances over brunch, or we could scatter to other corners of the galaxy and avoid each other in grocery stores. Either one was fine. But at least something would happen.
Something else happened instead. I sent him an email that took way too long to write. I can’t be more than friends with you. The drawbridge, which for a brief moment lowered, snapped shut again. I was so relieved.
When I said I would never have sex again, that probably sounded dramatic. The kind of grandiose proclamation a teenager makes before slamming the door to her room. It’s not as though every intimacy in my entire life had been warped by booze. I’d had quiet sex, and giggling sex, and sex so delicate it was like a soap bubble perched on the tip of my finger. I knew such joy could exist between two people, but I had no clue how to get to it anymore. My only directions involved taking a glass of wine to my lips and letting the sweet release show me the way.
Clearly, I needed a new map.
I KNEW ONLINE dating would come for me someday. It was the fate of all single women in their late 30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum up a good attitude about emoticons.
Online dating was not a bad move for me. It allowed me to inch toward intimacy with built-in distance. It granted me the clarity that “hanging out at the bar” often lacked. One of the great, unheralded aspects of Internet dating was that the word “dating” was in the title, thus eliminating any ambiguity. Were we dating? Was this a date? The answer was yes.
It also allowed me to say up front: I don’t drink. I’d worried so much about how to reveal this. I didn’t want to watch some guy’s face fall when I ordered a Diet Coke and then endure the pecks of his curiosity. So my “ABOUT ME” statement began “I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.” I’ve had stronger openings, but this one was good for now.
I understood that not drinking—and not drinking to such an extent that it was the first detail I shared about myself—would turn off certain guys. I saw them sniffing around my profile. Those bearded eccentrics with their fluency in HBO shows and single-malt Scotch. How I missed those beautiful, damaged men, but we kept our distance from each other. Occasionally I would email one of them, and they never wrote back, and I got it. Back when I was drinking, I wouldn’t have responded to me, either.
My first weeks on the site were choppy, but I soon became accustomed to the routine. The endorphin blast of attraction. The coy banter that allowed you to tease out someone’s personality. Flirting was like any exercise: It got easier the more you did it.
This wasn’t the first time I had tried online dating. About six months after I moved to New York, I signed on to Match.com. I did it for Anna. She’d logged so much time listening to me complain about my ex. “Just try it,” she said, which is a very hard argument to win.
I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc that night and sipped my way onto a plateau of cleverness. I didn’t want a profile that was drab and ordinary. I wanted a personal statement that grabbed every guy by the collar and whispered each word into his mouth. I swear I was in love with myself by the time I finished, a bottle having morphed into a six-pack of beer, and I posted the hottest picture of myself I had: a close-up taken by a professional photographer in which I appeared 20 pounds lighter than I was. I woke up the next day to a kitchen clogged with cigarette smoke, and the memory surfaced in pieces: I think I joined a dating site last night.
I got several messages on the site that day, but two stood out. One was from a successful businessman with silver hair. The other was from an indie-rock type who frequented a burger shop less than two blocks from my front door. Those two men had nothing in common, but their notes had a similar sincerity. They wanted to meet. This week. Tomorrow. Now.
I called my friend Aaron in a panic. “What do I do?”
He spoke slowly. “You write them back, and maybe you meet them.”
“But I can’t,” I said. Having portrayed myself as the overthinking hedonist’s Marilyn Monroe, I could not bear to disappoint them. There was not a pair of Spanx in the world big enough to bridge the distance between the woman on that site and the woman who stood in my kitchen, pacing in jogging pants.
“If you’re worried about misrepresenting your weight, there’s an easy fix for that,” Aaron told me. “Put up a full-body picture of the way you really look.”
“You’re right, you’re right. Of course you’re right.”
I pulled my profile down the next day.
This story was one of a thousand reminders that dating was never easier when I was drinking. Alcohol may have turned me into Cinderella for a few radiant hours, but I would wake up in dishrags again, crying about the messes I’d made.
This time, the process of finding the right person on the site was more honest, but it was also slow. A lot of dead-end conversations. A lot of dudes in camo posing in front of their giant trucks. I was growing antsy. Some days I thought about finding a random dude and just banging him.
What was wrong with me? Why did I think sex was something I needed to get over with?
MY FIRST ONLINE date was with a divorced father who was an immigration lawyer. He was nice, but not for me. No chemistry. When he offered to make me a lavish meal on Valentine’s for our third date, I knew the only proper response was to gently fold up the tent on our time together. He deserved to spend that holiday with someone who felt differently about him. I was starting to learn one of the most important lessons of online dating: the wisdom of saying no.
All my life I fought to say yes. I was shy and ambitious, a terrible mix, and so I tried to dismantle my isolationist tendencies. Yes to this party I don’t want to go to, yes to this person I don’t want to date, yes to this assignment I’m afraid to botch, because saying yes was the path to a remarkable life. I needed to say yes, because I needed to push myself off the couch and into the swift-moving stream of hurt and jubilation. But saying yes to everything meant repeatedly saying no to my own better judgment, or drinking myself to the point I had none. Now my job was to sort out the possibilities with more caution: which risks are not worth it, and which ones deserve a jump.
I said no to the smart guy who wasn’t attractive to me. I said no to the cocky guy who was. I said no to the graphic designer who tried to kiss me one night. Our date was fun. I ran the pool table (twice), and his eyes roamed along my ass as I lined
up my shot, and I was surprised to find I liked that. But he slurped down three bourbons in 90 minutes, and when he leaned forward to kiss me, I was grossed out by the sour smell of his breath, the slump of his eyes, and I ducked. Like in a sitcom, I literally ducked.
It was a revelation to me how unappealing men were when they were drunk. Back when I was dating my college boyfriend Patrick, who was sober, he would pull away from me when I was buzzed and handsy. “You smell like a brewery,” he’d say, and I didn’t get it. I felt so sexy in those moments; it only followed I must have looked that way. Now I realized what a sadistic game drinking played. It built up your confidence at the very moment you were looking your worst.
After the comical way I ducked the graphic designer’s kiss, I was certain I’d never hear from him again. But he texted me the next day. Turns out, I accidentally inflamed his desire. I went out with him again, but something crucial was lacking. “I don’t think this is going to work,” I told him, which was a phrase I was learning to say. It felt foreign on my tongue.
“I have never broken up with anyone in my life,” I used to tell people, as though it marked me as kind, as though it granted me broken-heart status. In truth, it was evidence of my passiveness and my need. I had never ended a relationship, but that was another way of saying I’d never found the courage. I’d let someone else do the dirty work. The dating site was good practice for me. Wind sprints in proper boundary setting.
I went out with a guy named Ben. He showed up in jeans and a ’70s ringer shirt pocked with holes and said, “Look, I dressed up for you,” and already I liked him. He had brown eyes that caught the light.
We sat in a bar that was delightfully sleazy, and he drank a beer and I drank water, and nothing was forced or uncomfortable about this arrangement, which was shocking in itself. He asked me why I quit drinking, and I told him. I asked why he and his wife split, and he told me. We both baby-stepped toward each other, one refusal to lie at a time. When he walked me to my car, he said, “So I’m unemployed, I’m broke, and I still live with my ex. I understand if you never want to see me again, but you should know all that.”
I saw him the next week. What the hell, he was different. We sat outside a gelato store with our feet kicked up on the railing, and we talked about pornography. I can’t remember now who opened the door in the conversation leading to the hallway that contained beaver shots, but he told a story about the first dirty picture he ever saw. Hustler magazine, the hard-core stuff. All these women spreading their labias, six of them stacked on the page like bricks in a wall, and he felt a little ruined by it. Because after that, he needed so much just to get the same scorpion sting. He’d gone to college during a wave of antiporn sentiment in the late ’80s, and he’d learned to be ashamed of his desires. Then he got married. Then the marriage caved. Now all he wanted was to dig himself out of the rubble and figure out who he was.
I let him kiss me that night. A lovely, soft, and unfrightening kiss. “I’ll call you,” he said, but he didn’t, and that was fine, too, because some relationships are good to say yes to for a very short time. It was nice to learn that rejection didn’t have to burn.
I thought about Ben sometimes. I thought about the photo of all the labias, because some part of his description reminded me of the pretty boys I used to cut out of teen magazines and plaster over every inch of my fifth-grade bedroom. Maybe this was my own version of a beaver shot: all those puppy-dog eyes staring at me, boring into me. I wondered why women like me complained about pornography setting up unrealistic expectations for men, but we rarely talked about how romantic comedies—and the entire bubble-blowing industry of teen magazines and obsessive pop songs—set up unrealistic expectations for us, and I wondered if I was a little ruined, too.
Maybe we all were ruined. Porn and Hollywood clichés were like the wooden framework that built dating sites. The women wanted walks on the beach, exotic trips, someone to talk to after a long day at work. The guys claimed to want that, too, and then they would show up in your in-box, demanding a tit shot.
The more I hung around the dating site, the more I suspected a few of those guys could use a little more shame about their desires. I couldn’t believe the things men would ask of a woman they’d never met. I’m in town for a weekend away from my wife. Would you like no-strings-attached sex? Or: I really can’t meet for coffee, but I am willing to fuck. And so I practiced saying no, because clearly these guys weren’t hearing that word enough.
A 23-year-old sent a flirty message one day, and I wrote back, telling him I was flattered, but he was a little too young for me. “Nonsense,” he replied. “Age isn’t nothin’ but a number. All it means is that I have more to cum in your face.”
First of all: He needed to double-check his science. And second of all: No. Noooooooo, young sir, no way in any time or temperate zone. What happened? What warp of etiquette and eroticism had conspired to result in such a blisteringly wrong sentence?
These guys were way too enabled by the false intimacy of the Internet, which allowed you to toss out come-ons you would never utter if you were staring into another person’s eyes. The frightening reality of another human being, the frightening reality of our imperfect and stuttering selves. How much technology has been designed to avoid this? We’re all looking for ways to be close at a distance. Alcohol bridged the gap for me, the way the Internet bridges the gap for others. But maybe everyone needs to stop trying to leap over these fucking gaps and accept how scary it is to be real and vulnerable in the world.
One night in April, I went out with a guy who was studying psychology. We ate at a fried chicken restaurant, one of those trendy places where they served comfort food that used to be trashy. The guy talked fast, and I enjoyed the thrill of trying to keep up. “You’re a contrarian,” I told him, licking grease off my fingers.
“Is that good?” he asked. “I want to be the thing that you like.” And it was the first time someone had said this to me, but I recognized it as my driving motto for the past 25 years. It was nice to be on the other side for a change.
“It’s good,” I said. “I like hearing your mind tick.”
He intrigued me. We talked about bike lanes and Elvis Costello. For months, I’d been going on dates, wondering if something was wrong with me. Why was it so rare to be attracted to a person who was also attracted to you? But maybe it works this way so when it happens, it feels special. What I felt for the guy that night was unmistakable.
We sat in front of my house in his car, both of us staring forward.
“I don’t know what to do next,” he said. “I don’t know if you want me to kiss you, or…” His words trailed off, and I leaned over and pecked him on his cheek before anything more could happen. I was so unnerved by this newfound chemistry, I dashed out of his car, but I regretted my timidity. Later, in the safety of my own pink bedsheets, I could not stop thinking about him. My body alighted imagining what might have happened if I’d been bolder, if I’d opened up again. What good was caution if you couldn’t chunk it into the breeze?
I texted him. “I should have let you kiss me.”
The double beep of his response was fast.
A WEEK LATER, I drove out to his place, and we had dinner, and as we sat on the mattress of his messy bedroom, he turned to me and said, “Do you want to fuck?”
This was my first clue I was not exactly in a Lifetime movie. There would be no soft stroking of my hair. No spray of rose petals across the bed. But in fact, I did want to fuck. I’d gone nearly two years without sex. Two years without drinking, or smoking, or fucking, which was a long spell without the company of your favorite vices. And so I said, “Yes.”
If you were hoping my first time in sobriety would be meaningful and tender, or at least hot and exciting, then we were wishing for the same thing. But it was fast, and efficient, and that was OK. Sometimes it’s best not to wait for the perfect movie moment; those can leave you checking your watch for a long time.
Afterward, we star
ed up at the ceiling of his bedroom as though it contained a moon. “I always think of the worst things to say after sex,” he said.
I know there is a woman who would have left that invitation alone, but I was not her. “What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking: Well, that was free.”
It was a joke. (I guess?) Maybe he thought the sex was lousy, and he was joking that at least he didn’t pay for it. Or the sex wasn’t lousy, but he was joking about what a horrible, self-sabotaging thing that would be to say. Honestly, I didn’t understand the joke, so I won’t parse it on his behalf, because what I discovered over the next week was that the psychology major had some major psychology issues. He was twisted up like a tornado inside. (Also, he was a dick.) A few days after this incident, we had a conversation in which he displayed such casual cruelty I walked away knowing—possibly for the first time in my life—that it was nothing I did. Some people are so brimful with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.
So there it was, my big chance to get sex right again, and I went and screwed an asshole. Maybe I should have felt crestfallen, but I didn’t. I chalked it up to a learning curve. It was fine. I never saw him again, and no one was worse for the experience. Actually, I was glad for the experience, because it taught me that good sex wasn’t a function of sobriety, any more than good sex was a function of being drunk. Good sex was about the person you were with and, maybe more important, the person you could be while you were with them.