Fear and Devotion Part Two

Last week, there was an app guy who got mad at me when I wouldn’t come right over, that I wouldn’t change out of my pajamas and drive across the city to see him,  a stranger I’d just started chatting with that afternoon.

Before I blocked him, he said something like “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I work hard and I want to be loved in my off hours.”

(Dude, don’t we all.)

There was a language barrier, but still. After I deleted the app guy, I didn’t feel like he was gonna come get me or anything, I just felt like—what am I? Am I anything? Can anyone see me here? Disembodied. So small as to slip through the cracks of existence and just dissolve into the ether. This is a pretty regular emotion of online dating, of dating in general.

So, my devotion to The Shy One was a safe place. I wanted to, not pine, exactly, just live cozily in my fake-chaste fake-platonic love for The Shy One. I wanted to be just as unobtrusive as possible, and free as can be, just able to pull my love for TSO up over me like a weighted blanket. Loving someone who loves me, but who I couldn’t have—the safest possible place. I’m tired of putting my body and heart and mind and soul in the path of strangers, I wanted the soft touch of something known. Embodied and of-the-soul, safe, safe, safe.

But then, TSO wasn’t in touch for a few days, normal friend rhythm that left space for that old quest to creep back in—how could I get him to see me? How could I try again to get his unavoidably divided attention? I wanted to send him a sweet-hot picture from last January and say, “I think these two deserve a chance.”

(The young people have a phrase for this: “down bad.” So apt it makes me queasy.)

I wasn’t really gonna send the picture, but looking at it made me surge with sadness. With anger! With abandonment and betrayal. He will always, no matter how much we love each other, no matter how much I empathize with his reasons, be the boyfriend who dumped me right before a trip, Valentines Day, and a minor-but-fraught surgery.

As good as it felt (still feels!) to rest in devotion, it felt terrible to be going backwards. My heart doesn’t know how not to think of him as The One, even though I don’t even really subscribe to the concept of The One. I hope that will change someday, but I don’t think texting the darling every few days is the way there.

So I said goodbye to The Shy One again, trying to be honest and kind but feeling unhinged and toxic. It felt horrible, but I felt better the next day. Reality is scary. Forward motion is scary. Strangers are DEFINITELY scary. It’ll take time and patience and breaks and chocolate and weed gummies and tears, but being at home in myself and in hope-for-love is worth it.

Sudden Hotel Date Part Two

 

As I left my lucky parking space and set off toward the hotel, I felt off balance. I should have probably turned around and gone home. Even though I was in the gridded middle of the city, I got turned around and blew a few blocks off course like a leaf.

When I walked into the hotel lobby, it seemed entirely fictional, a piped-in version of artsy, like a set on some tech-bro sitcom. There he was in the middle of all the primary colors and fake Lichtenstein vibes, wearing something like a Captain America t-shirt. Definitely cute—Black, bespectacled, with that adorable combination of sculpted arms and soft tummy.

I complimented his butt on the way to the elevator, and he made an extremely dreary remark about parental weight gain. His daughter was twelve.

“That door’s mine, and so is this one!” He said proudly, ushering me into his suite. It was...two rooms.

Okay, I am Toxic Romcom Girl. When he’d enticed me with his “upgraded suite,” I pictured fluffy robes, snacks, okay yes I may have pictured some champagne. I wanted to be spoiled. It was shallow and silly but I kinda stand by it.

But! The bed was big and the pillows were many. The guy was cute. I took off my work clothes, brazenly walking around in my workday, go-all-the-way up undies and comfy utilitarian mint green bra. I pulled the blue-rose bobby pins out of my hair and put them in the pencil case I’d pulled out of my work backpack and drafted as a purse.

I snuggled in with him among the pillows. Theres such a well-being that settles through me when cuddling a stranger. As he drifted between chitchat and sleep, I loved the intimacy of hearing him snore. I had a pleasant daydream about all the lone travellers who must be occupying the downtown hotels. I could make it my literal business to snuggle them all! If I weren’t already working four part-time jobs, Snuggler of Strangers would be a great side-hustle.

Chitchat-wise, he wasn’t the romantic free spirit his profile promised. (Who among us is?!) He was a pretty-recently-divorced guy who was irritated by the return of condoms to his life. I was really glad I wasn’t there to have sex. May I live a thousand lifetimes before I have to listen to any more dudes gripe about condoms in a post-Roe world. Fuck that all the way to heck.

“Uh,” I said, struggling to keep the pillow chat light. “You’re old enough to remember the Nineties. We’re all just out here trying to not DIE.”

That terribleness aside, I still felt safe and cozy next to him, so I asked for spanks. He’d described himself as a “pleasure Dom,” but I felt a not-unpleasant sadistic sting and said so. I thought we were bantering, but his tone shifted abruptly.

“I want to touch you, but you don’t want to touch me.” It was so out of left field that I felt like he was saying it to somebody in his past, with me as a proxy. (I have 100% done this to people!)

Yikes though. The whiny, entitled tone drove home the point—To him I wasn’t a potential friend or a comet prospect, I was the human equivalent of a Doordash meal.

 “I don’t like this.” I said. I hopped out of bed and started getting dressed. I gathered my things carefully, stopping to pee before the drive home.

I have lots of thoughts about the transactional parts of dating, the constant risk that I might be a fantasy or an opportunity without being seen and treated like a whole human. The following week, a text flirtation went south in a similarly entitled way.

Dating makes me sad sometimes. A few paragraphs ago, I was daydreaming about snuggling all the lonelyhearts in the downtown hotels, but I’m the loneliest lonelyheart of all. I want kindness. I want to make friends with someone cute and get to know each other and snuggle forever. Sudden hotel dates are probably not the way to accomplish this, but who knows?