The next day after breaking up with L, I installed Tinder on my phone, created a profile and started swiping around. Went on my first date three days after that. And so it began. By now, almost ten months after that, I have been on around 25 dates. Some have been good, some have been bad, and at least half of them have been boring and awkward. Still I keep doing it, one after the other.
Hope is the last thing a man can lose.
There is a pattern that’s been repeating over this past time. The girls I’ve slept with -except for Marie- have been very brief in their chats. Just a few messages back and forth, then agreeing on a time and a place and Boom! Another pin in the map. Whereas shitty or frustrating dates come, often, from long and -only sometimes- interesting conversations. Chats that lead to some idealization on my part, that soon gets shaked by the weight of reality.
Then, what the fuck am I doing now? I don’t know. Maybe I enjoy this frustration. Because I frankly cannot explain why on Earth I’ve been chatting so fucking much with this particular girl. Her name, at this stage, is not important. None of this should be important. But it has become important, somehow.
“I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” I said to my friend Charlie, over dinner last night.
She grabbed my phone and looked at her pictures on Tinder. “She looks very sweet… and very Danish.”
“I know. I like her… or, at least, I like her brains. So I told her that, if it doesn’t work romantically, we could be friends.”
“That’s a good strategy,” Charlie said, “it takes the pressure off the date.”
“It’s not a strategy. I meant it.”
My background music, as I write this down, gets constantly interrupted by the beeps of Tinder. Flashes of a tiny joy follow each beep. It’s her.
“Expectations are heavy on us now,” she writes about our date tomorrow.
I know. They are. And it’s scary. And exciting. And just the right amount of decadent.