Really Good, Actually(30)
But as the weeks went on and the novelty of the all-you-can-fuck human buffet wore off, I realized my favorite part of these dates was the hour or so before they started. I liked the ritual of date preparation: showering and moisturizing languidly, trimming my armpit hair (she’s a feminist!) and shaving my leg hair (a low-key one!), working a lightly scented oil through the ends of my head hair while the ice melted in a little pre-date pick-me-up on the radiator.
I’d stream something to get me in the mood to be alluring, singing along as blasé women crooned through my phone’s tinny speakers, eating a light snack to absorb alcohol but avoid bloat. I’d run through the evening in my head, idly rehearsing my dumb jokes, trying to remember if this person was the one I’d already told about the devastating sunburn of 2005, or if that had been someone else who also wore glasses and enjoyed travel.
I read in some grim article I’d googled about dating in 2018 that men didn’t like it when you wore pants on dates, so when seeing them I stuck to dresses and skirts, though I didn’t own many. I worried initially that if I met a man I liked, I’d run out of clean versions of my woman costume, but of course shortly discovered this would not be an issue. The real danger was seeing too many other bi women and going home to spend four hours considering the acquisition of a septum piercing.
Most of these dates were pleasant enough. Only one was terrible—a man who arrived thirty minutes late, barefoot, and lectured me about women’s usurpation of the “natural masculine role”—and two were very fun. We would go to bars or sit in the park at sunset or occasionally do an activity, bolstered by three to seven drinks, relative anonymity, and the tacit understanding that we were equally attracted to each other, or at least equally horny.
It occurred to me—while straining with every fiber of my being to avoid getting my phone out while a girl was in the bathroom—that by your late twenties you could probably have a satisfactory first date with almost anyone: everyone had a big breakup or two under their belt, most had acquired a semi-reliable source of income and could afford a drink or two (or at least knew a bartender) at the kind of place where the servers were resolute in their bralessness and you just knew there was a taxidermied something somewhere.
That the bars all looked the same was not an issue. There is too much data about millennial tastes in the world; everywhere we go looks like math. But although I’d assumed the apps would broaden my romantic horizons, an incredibly homogenous figure emerged as the type I most often matched with, chatted to, and met for dates. The men tended to be bearded and left-leaning and got too excited if you mentioned Harry Nilsson. All of them thought Bernie would have won. An alarming number were thinking about getting into stand-up comedy. None of them had curtains.
While the women were marginally more varied (different haircuts, different styles of dress, different routes to the idea of “finding the Jim to one’s Pam”), the size of the queer dating pool in Toronto meant I also knew a lot of them: saw them in yoga, held doors for them at friends’ parties, passed them in the hallways of the university. The women were too close and obsessed with letting the world know they were “tender.” The men, while strangers to me, had disgusting bathrooms and were bad on text. Tinder was not as fun as nobody had said it was.
It turned out not to matter. Just as I was tiring of the app-based dating cycle (meet, two dates, sex, delay third date, reschedule, cancel, and, finally, ghost), I noticed something else at work. Some kind of “I’m vulnerable” bat signal had gone out to the almost-encounters of my past—people I’d wanted to sleep with at university, acquaintances I’d always found cute, flirty coworkers from old bar jobs—and they were getting in touch in massive numbers.
They would like an old tweet, or comment under a photo, or drop a casual text to say something they’d seen had made them think of me: an ad for a restaurant we’d joked about six years ago, a flower the same color as my hair. A British man I’d almost kissed at a party in 2017 sent me a picture of a bean-covered baked potato with the cryptically menacing caption ur the beans.
Amy, with whom I had stayed in touch and sometimes met for coffee when I’d already complained about Jon too much to my other friends, said these figures from my past could “tell” I was single from my social media activity.
“It’s instinctual,” she said. “That Story you posted the other day? Your nipples were visibly hard. Women in relationships simply do not post like that. And that’s something these people would know.”
She showed me a Boomerang of a man adding powder to a water bottle and shaking it vigorously. “This to me has big single energy,” she said. “The way he’s eye-fucking the camera? And look.” She tapped his profile and scrolled through his photos, tutting. “Hasn’t put the girlfriend on main in three months. I mean, this is Great Wall of China–level single. You could see that this guy is single from space.”
Part of me was horrified to be in the same camp as the hulkingly horny protein man. Was I really so obvious? I felt like a baboon waggling my big, swollen ass at some other baboon I’d attended a conference with five years ago. But mostly I was thrilled by the messages, at the external validation, the chance to try something I already knew I liked.
Meeting new people felt like starting over: daunting and depressing, a challenge for someone fallen on romantic hard times. Reconnecting with paths not taken was easier and seemed more purposeful. These were the people my relationship had been holding me back from being with! The right ones were there all along! It was comforting to think that being with Jon had been the mistake, not losing him or letting him go. If I was supposed to be with one of these near-flames of my past, then breaking it off with my husband had been an important step toward finding real love, instead of what it usually felt like: a failure.