The Love Study

by Kris Ripper

  We did some small talk type questions—where are you from (she was local), what do you do (vet tech), what do you like to do (both of us liked cosplay)—and it wasn’t too awkward. On a scale of “watching an embarrassing part in a movie and making a face because: awkward” to “watching an embarrassing part in a movie and leaving the room to play Sims until the scene is over because: awkward,” small talk with Date #1 was probably right around “squirm a little in your chair but still have the presence of mind to eat more popcorn” awkwardness.

  Within acceptable range for a blind date, in other words.

  We had more games in common than we did anime, so we laughed about best characters/weapons/lines of dialogue. You can tell a lot about a person by their favorite lines of game dialogue. Destiny’s favorite Overwatch line was Zenyatta saying, “I am on fire...but an extinguisher is not required.”

  Mine was the ever-cheery Tracer saying, “The world could always use more heroes.” I got the impression from Destiny that this marked me as something of a sap.

  Then came the cosplay conversation, which was where things began to deteriorate. Or okay, where I began to deteriorate.

  Look, I don’t show my Princess Leia pictures to just anyone. Well. There was that one time in Walmart, but it was Halloween-related and thus justified. I may also make sure I have them pulled up at Pride, but who doesn’t want to be a princess at Pride?

  The point is, we were talking about cosplay, and it was totally appropriate to show Destiny my sexy cosplay pictures. And no, I did not go as slave Leia (because Leia’s hot, but that whole scene where she’s chained up being rape-threatened by Jabba the Hutt is super squicky), but I did find a skintight white bodysuit with a hood to go with my Leia wig. And my gun, of course.

  Destiny laughed when I showed her my pictures. “Aww, you look cute as Leia. That wig looks weirdly good on you.”

  “Right? I legit considered growing my hair out. Then I realized that I’d never have the patience to actually do the double-braids-double-buns thing so there was probably no point.” I took back my phone and pushed the last of my nachos to the middle of the table for sharing. “I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. What’s your favorite cosplay character?”

  “In general? Maybe Jessica Rabbit. I’ve seen some not-skinny-white-girl Jessica Rabbits who made me want to go there.”

  “Oh my god, you should! That would be great! But you haven’t done it?”

  She took a chip and scooped up some black beans and red peppers. “Not yet. I like the challenge of reinterpreting a character who’s not meant to be sexy as a more appealing figure. Jessica Rabbit starts there, so it’s less of a leap.”

  “Ohhh. That’s really cool. What’s your favorite character to do that with, then?” Since she was still paying a lot of attention to the chip, I had the impression maybe she didn’t want to tell me. Which was weird? So I did the thing I always do when I get nervous: I rambled. “I mean, not that I’m asking for sexy cosplay pictures of you at all. Obviously. Because I wouldn’t. Photographs not required! I was just wondering how you’d done that in the past because I’ve never thought about it and now that you’ve said it I’m intrigued. Like, I guess you can probably pick any character and sexify it? Not in a creepy way, but in a sort of reclaiming way, or an interpretation, like you said. I’m sure you wouldn’t be able do that with children’s characters or something because that would definitely be problematic but probably with most characters there would be some opportunity to kind of play with how you were portraying them to change the way they were, you know, portrayed.” I cringed and shoved another chip in my mouth. Stop. Talking.

  “A friend of mine did sexy Splinter once,” she said after a minute. “From Ninja Turtles.”

  Still feeling self-conscious, I managed to say that sounded cool.

  We picked at the last of my nachos in awkward silence.

  What if she thought I’d been asking for sexy pictures of her? That was awful. “I really wasn’t pushing for pictures. I mean. If that’s...how it seemed.”

  “No, I got that. I just don’t want to talk about how I cosplay.”

  “Okay.” Because what else was I going to say? On the one hand, why was it a big deal to tell me how she cosplayed? Then again, if my argument was it’s no big deal, then why couldn’t I let it go? Plus, maybe it was a big deal. In which case she should totally not share it unless she wanted to.

  And I was being a big jerk about that decision.

  Ugh.

  “Um, so, any other favorite lines? I once melee’d the hell out of someone as Mercy and she said, ‘You might not want to tell your friends about that,’ which I thought was hilarious.”

  Destiny looked up. “Have you heard D.Va say, ‘Boom shakalaka! She’s on fire!’?”

  “Oh my god, no, but now I seriously want to.”

  “I think I hear it once every fifty hours of gameplay or something, but it’s really funny when she says it.”

  We went back to talking about games for the rest of the nachos.

  * * *

  This time I wasn’t almost late for The Love Study. I was literally late.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumbled to Sidney as they let me in. “I swear I’ll be on time next week.”

  They didn’t seem at all perturbed by me walking in three minutes later than we were supposed to start filming. “No biggie. I once forgot an entire show when I first started livestreaming; being a little late won’t hurt anyone. Everything’s ready to go.”

  I shrugged my bag and jacket into a pile beside the door and slid into the chair I’d been in last time. My mirror image slid into a chair on the screen. Sidney’s image slid into their chair.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.” Still kind of panting from running down the block, but sure, ready.

  They smiled at me before hitting record and turning toward the camera. “Welcome to The Love Study. The series about love, dating, and the pursuit of queer companionship in a bleak and hopeless world. I’m your spinster uncle Sidney, and this is my series co-host, and our volunteer for the dating trenches, Declan.”

  “Oooh, we have an intro,” I said without thinking. Then I winced. “Sorry, forgot we were, like, live.”

  “What do you think of the intro? I’m trying it on.” A glance at the camera. “Comment your thoughts.” Back at me. “Does that accurately represent your pursuit? I meant to run it past you before we started.”

  “Then I was super late.” I experimented by also looking into the camera. “Um, sorry I was late. I haven’t worked out the best way to get here from my job yet.” Shit, was that okay? I did ahhhhhh-eyes at Sidney and they chuckled.

  “You weren’t that late. But the intro?”

  “Um, yeah, I definitely feel like I’m pursuing queer companionship. I hope that doesn’t come off anti-het. I’m not against dating straight people!”

  “I think it is possible to queer relationships even when straight cis people are involved in them.” I couldn’t tell if they were teasing, but I thought the smirk was threatening again. “Should we get to it? You had your first date of The Love Study this week.”

  “I did!”

  Sidney smiled and their smile did that weird thing again where it made me feel all warm and fuzzy. “I came prepared with questions, but I thought you could start by telling us a little about it. No names, of course.”

  “Totally agree on the no names part. It was...it was good...”

  “I feel like I should have flashback sequence music to cue up for this moment.”

  I shot them a mock glare.

  “Maybe start by telling us what went well?”

  “Right. Okay. I’ll... I’ll do that. So our dinner was, like, really delicious...”

  DATE #1: NERDY GAMER GIRL WHO WOULDN’T TELL ME WHO SHE COSPLAYS AS

  I sketched out a little b
it about meeting Destiny and the acceptable level of awkward. “Then came the cosplay conversation, which was where things began to deteriorate. Or, okay, where I began to deteriorate.”

  Sidney cleared their throat, bringing me back to the show. “I’ve heard a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone cite talking about cosplay as a reason for a date going wrong.”

  “Not cosplaying in general! And it didn’t go wrong so much as...get briefly tense? Which I think, with the benefit of hindsight, was entirely my fault. The date itself I would categorize as pretty good.” I looked into the camera. “Seriously, Date #1, if you’re watching, I think we had a good time. Right? Uh, don’t comment. I mean, obviously do if you want to, but if you don’t, that was a rhetorical question.”

  “Have you cosplayed before?” Sidney asked.

  “A few times, with friends.” I batted my eyelashes at them. “I make a very fetching Princess Leia.”

  They laughed. “Do you have a hairpiece of some kind for that?”

  “Yes! I even bought a Princess Leia wig, with the two side buns.”

  Sidney, eyes still full of mirth, said, “Declan, you have hidden depths.”

  I flushed at the roughly ninety-three dirty jokes my brain popped up in response. “Umm...” Say something, make a sentence, any sentence that is NOT about your “hidden depths.” Was all of YouTube making jokes about my ass right now? Probably not, right? “Anyway, I’m all for cosplay, but after I shared my Princess Leia story—and I might have, uh, offered photographic evidence—Date #1 totally refused to reciprocate with cosplay stories. Okay, no, sorry, she did talk about cosplay, but she wouldn’t show me any pictures or tell me about her favorite characters and obviously that’s her choice but I don’t know, it made me feel weird.”

  “Because you had already shown her a picture of yourself?”

  “Umm.” Was it better or worse to say Umm instead of sitting there like a lump on live YouTube? “I guess I just figured we’d both be kind of sharing? And then it felt like we weren’t.”

  “Ah yes. A vulnerability clash in which one person has shared more than the other and feels uncomfortably exposed.” They nodded. “That’s a familiar conflict.”

  It was a little disconcerting to have my seemingly irrational weirdness about not being told someone’s favorite cosplay character so breezily diagnosed. “It wasn’t exactly a conflict.”

  “An imbalance, then?”

  “...maybe?”

  “How did the date go on from there?”

  “Well, I guess I was...more miffed than really made sense. Which I didn’t do a very good job at hiding.” I glanced toward the camera again. “Uh, I’m really sorry, Date #1. Apparently I was feeling vulnerable after showing you my sexy Leia outfit. Anyway, it didn’t end badly, at all. I don’t think there were mad sparks in either direction, but I could see us being Xbox friends and playing Overwatch together.”

  Sidney nodded. “That seems like a positive outcome for meeting a stranger. I thought it might be helpful if we end each episode with the same three questions, in order to have a standard sort of metric by which to judge each date.”

  “Give ’em to me.”

  Another little quirk of their lips. “Question one, if you’re comfortable rating this: Did you feel you had physical chemistry?”

  “Yeah. She was super cute and she didn’t seem to find me repulsive, so yes. Wait, do we have an actual scale?”

  “Say, one to five.”

  “Okay, I’d say four. With five being, like, I was so powerfully attracted to them that I couldn’t stop thinking about touching them.”

  “And one being Find them repulsive?”

  “Exactly.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “Question two: Was there intellectual chemistry?”

  “Oooh.” I paused to think about what it meant to have intellectual chemistry with someone. “I think so? We like a lot of the same stuff, I guess.”

  “I’m trying to get more at a sense of...being interested in the same aspects of things even if you’re not interested in the same actual things.” Sidney straightened their keyboard and brushed a piece of lint away from the space bar, which seemed weirdly fidgety for them. “Like, you can read the same book as someone and still not be intrigued by the same themes. But I think if you have intellectual chemistry you’re more likely to be intrigued by similar themes, even if your scope of experience with those themes is different.” They frowned. “I thought I had a whole concise explanation for this but it sounds confusing now that I’ve said it out loud.”

  “No, I think that makes sense. And actually, maybe not that much?” I considered the Overwatch conversation again. “In a way I’m more into character interaction, even in first-person shooters, than I am in the actual shooting. And she’s big into killing all the creatures, which is cool, but it’s less likely to bring me back to a game than it is a lot of people.”

  They mimed wiping sweat off their brow. “It seems like you somehow managed to understand what I was trying to say.”

  “I get it. So on intellectual chemistry, I’d say maybe a two.”

  “The last question is one I think you’ve already answered, but let’s do it officially: Would you go out on a second date?”

  I shrugged. “Date, no. Game, yes.”

  “Thank you, Declan, for offering your dates up as fodder for our better collective understanding of dating.” They turned to the camera. “And thanks to all of you for tuning in to our second episode of The Love Study here on Your Spinster Uncle.”

  They went into a detailed description of the services offered by the company that was sponsoring the show, and I had to admit, it sounded intriguing. Being able to do therapy without leaving your house was a cool idea and there was an app and a sliding scale and everything. (Which I learned from the ad-read as they talked.) I tried to look politely interested, which I was, so at least that was pretty easy.

  “As always, find all the show’s social links in the description box, like this video to give us a boost, subscribe to Your Spinster Uncle to find out when new videos are posted, and you can always send your questions in by email. We will schedule another live phone show soon. Thanks for watching and I will spinster at you more next time.” They clicked the record button and the little LIVE red dot disappeared.

  I waited through the rest of the administrative bits to posting or whatever, studying the apartment. The walls were blank, whether because Sidney didn’t hang stuff or because they hadn’t had the time since moving, I didn’t know. The only picture in the whole place was a frame on the desk of a grinning kid with light brown skin and big dark eyes, who I assumed was the little brother.

  The window had a dark shade over it, which I figured was for filming. Outside the bright lights trained on us the rest of the apartment looked a bit dim. The screens still kept what I assumed was a bed closed off (there wouldn’t have been room for much more than that), but there were two chairs wedged in between the recording area and the screens with a small rug I could barely see from my spot at the desk. The chairs were armchairs, but small ones. That was the sort of thing Ronnie or Mason might know: what to call a certain type of chair.

  Whatever they were, they looked cozy.

  “Sorry, one more minute,” they said, scrolling through comments. “Uh-oh. They’re going feral on me again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  They shook their head and turned off the monitor. “Any time I have a likeable guest on more than once, they decide that guest is my one true love. I don’t know if you plan to read the comments, but if you do, just ignore them. They’ll stop eventually.”

  I couldn’t help wondering what that meant. “How, um, how do they express this fascination?” And are you repulsed? Not that I thought I was anyone’s one true anything, but I couldn’t get a read on if they found the i
dea of me magnetically repelling or what.

  “Ship names.” They sighed.

  “No. Way.”

  “Oh yes. In my extremely cursory look it appeared that Sidlan was beating out Decney. For good reason.”

  “Deck-knee. Oh my god.”

  “Yep.” They gestured wryly at the monitor. “Behold my public. But seriously, ignore them and they’ll eventually stop. Well, most of them will. Arman—” a gesture at the picture “—will probably keep it up indefinitely.”

  “That’s your brother, right? I mean, I assumed.”

  “My little owl, yeah.” They ran their thumb across the top of the frame. “Anyway, don’t worry about the commenters.”

  I was way more interested in their brother, honestly, but I didn’t want to get too personal if they...weren’t. “It seems a little, I don’t know, bothersome? That people try to ship you against your will.”

  “If I were, say, aromantic, I’d find it problematic. But I’m not, so it’s more that they’re teasing. Do you want a bottle of water or something? You did a lot of talking.”

  As if it took them saying it for me to notice, I was suddenly aware of my dry throat. “That would be great.” I followed them into the little kitchenette. “How long have you been doing videos? I think maybe Mia mentioned it but I forgot.”

  “Three years. Three and a half now.” They pulled two bottles of water out of a refrigerator that seemed to hold mostly bottles of water and vegetables in various states of decomp and gestured to the seating area.

  Yay, I’d graduated to the comfy chairs.

  They settled into the chair facing the kitchen, so I took the one facing the window. Obviously both chairs were, more importantly, facing each other. Today Sidney had on rainbow suspenders over a purple T-shirt with a skinny black scarf around their neck.

  I forced my brain away from rating our physical chemistry on a one-to-five scale and focused on what they were saying.

  “I’d been watching genderqueer and nonbinary people on YouTube for a while and I liked those videos, but I didn’t want to do a gender channel. For one, I don’t feel as though I have anything to say about gender that’s not already being said far better by other people. And for two, sometimes I wanted to see a genderqueer person talking about something else, you know? I realized I was GQ years ago. It’s great that so many people are processing it in real time on YouTube, but I don’t need to do that anymore.”