Misadventures in online dating.
I didn’t think it would be easy, but I never expected it to be this… weird.
I am a cautionary tale in Bumble “dating”.
No. Really. It’s bad. It’s comically bad.
*First, a disclaimer: the stories I’m about to recount are real, but the names have been changed, and if by some random chance, any of these men see themselves in this essay, I mean no harm and harbor no ill-will, but you had to know I was gonna tell at least SOME people how this shit went down, so I do hope you’ll understand. And thank you.
It’s important to provide a little backstory here — you see, I’m 49 years old, but as far as “conventional dates” go, I’ve been on around 10. And that total includes the dates I’m about to describe. So, to say I don’t have a real WEALTH of knowledge or experience in that realm would be… putting it mildly at best.
I wasn’t exactly popular with the boys in high school. Not in “that” way. I was solidly in the “friend zone.” I was rather overweight back then, and a total “Tom-boy” and apparently that combination just wasn’t a big turn on for high school boys who wanted to date cheerleaders. Who knew? Nobody ever asked me to dance at homecoming, but I was fun as hell to hang out with. Yay me.
At the end of my senior year, one of those boys, one I thought was my friend, raped me, which has a lot to do with a lot of the choices I’ve made in my life when it came to sex and romance, but that, while an undercurrent in all of this, while being a story I’ve shared before and will share again in the future, isn’t this story.
I was 19 when first starting dating my now ex-husband. The year was 1994 to be exact. We stayed together until 2019. 25 years of not going on dates. Two and a half decades of dating evolution that I was absolutely oblivious to.
And based on the limited experience I had in the 90’s (limited to like, two dates), holy shit have things changed.
Fresh on the heels of being newly separated after 25 years together, I did what I imagine a lot of people in my position do… I found comfort in someone familiar. An old friend also newly separated. And it was fun, in a no-strings attached, ‘we don’t have the stuff to make a go at actually being a couple’ kind of way, but I didn’t yet know how to be alone, and the thought of it absolutely terrified me. So, I found comfort with someone I trusted. But really, it was driven by that all-consuming fear of being BY MYSELF, without a man’s attention to “define me”, without, as I’ve learned in the years since (and through a LOT of therapy and reflection), I didn’t know how to live without a man “controlling me.” I didn’t know who I was post-separation. I didn’t have a clue. And I wasn’t going to let my mind explore any of that. It was too scary. So I filled the time with casual sex with an old friend. Problem solved.
Until Covid hit.
And then I had time. Lots and lots and LOTS of time to sit with my thoughts. To think about who I was. Who I WAS. Me. Alone. No partner. No sex. No one else having control over me.
What did I want? Who did I want to be? What did I want to say?
And none of those answers included being someone’s girlfriend.
But every so often, the old habits would sneak in and I’d feel lonely. I missed the every day stuff, not the sex. It was the sitting on the couch binge watching tv shows that I missed. The hand holding. The human connection.
After the vaccine rollout, as Covid began to “cool” I had a brief fling with a friend of a friend tv writer from California. Also fun, but not at all fulfilling the desire for intimacy I thought I needed.
And that’s when, despite every prior insistence that I would never be one of “those” people, someone who used those dreaded dating apps, blech… I decided to try signing up for one.
Bumble.
And boy, does “bumble” apply here, because that is EXACTLY what I did. I bumbled this whole online dating thing something serious. I didn’t just bumble it, I messed up so badly, it’s almost impressive.
The whole thing felt so… so Fucking weird to me. You put up photos of yourself hoping to convey both who you are, and what you look like accurately, with little bio blurbs about your favorite tv shows or superheroes or movie snacks or some other random dumb shit, and then you hope some dude who doesn’t live a zillion miles away and doesn’t SEEM to be the type to bonesaw women in his garage, wants to talk to you. So, you scroll looking for dudes like that, and then you inhale, and send them a “hi”.
Ugh, I’m sorry for anyone who has good experiences on there, but ugh, looking back at it, holy shit did I hate all of that.
And then you make small talk via text, then a phone call, and after all of that, if you don’t think the other one is a boil your pet bunny on the stove type, you meet up.
And here is how those meetups went for me:
The first date was at a brewery. Let’s call him Brent. We sat outside. He talked about himself and his money the entire time, bragged about outsmarting his ex wife out of alimony and then asked me for the exact dollar amount (with half the tax and my % of the tip) when the check arrived. Which to be clear, I have no issue with, but coupled with an hour long diatribe on the size of his stock portfolio, it was a bit… much.
We never spoke again. But overall, not a terrible first attempt.
In retrospect, it was a high point.
Next up, was a lunch at a diner. With a guy we can call Rocco. I had spoken to him twice and never really thought we’d click in person, but because I’m a fucking idiot when it comes to men, I thought — ‘Yeah, he didn’t like it when I corrected him for saying Hurricane Sandy when he meant Katrina, and he was a little snappy about it and that’s a red flag, but hey how bad could it be right?’
Fuck. That one was awful.
A few minutes into sitting at the table, he reached over and squeezed my arm. (This was after he managed to offend the waitress with some sexist comment I can’t even remember).
“You lift too much weight.” He offered.
“I’m sorry?” I said when I wanted to say “what the fuck did you just say?” And recoiled from his hand.
“You’re bulky when you shouldn’t be. Women aren’t meant to have muscles. They’re meant to be soft. Men have muscles.”
You’d think I’d have thrown my iced tea at the fucker and left.
But I don’t know what the hell happened to me. I sat there. I think it was shock. Or maybe just some twisted desire to see JUST how much douchebag I was dealing with. So I stayed. And it only got worse. Until, it was finally too much.
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