And you’ll set up your profile, choose your best pictures, and write a short bio you think to be poignant and enticing, but which will probably read clever to only yourself. And you’ll have to say what you’re looking for, so you’ll pick “fun, casual dates“ and “intimacy, without commitment“ — no emotional bandwidth for a new relationship, but mentally prepared for physicality.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
I’M GOING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT DATING BECAUSE NOBODY ELSE WILL
Nobody else will tell you how this specific scenario unfolds, so I’m going to: a week after the man you’ve spent the last almost-decade with moves out, there’ll come a day when three different guys will get on your nerves, so you’ll install Bumble to go on a men-shopping spree.
And you’ll set up your profile, choose your best pictures, and write a short bio you think to be poignant and enticing, but which will probably read clever to only yourself. And you’ll have to say what you’re looking for, so you’ll pick “fun, casual dates“ and “intimacy, without commitment“ — no emotional bandwidth for a new relationship, but mentally prepared for physicality.
And you’ll get over 800 likes in the first hour alone and feel so overwhelmed that you’ll almost throw your phone at the wall for pinging like a psychopathic stalker. Alas, salvation will come in the form of the Incognito Mode feature, unavailable when you last went on an online dating foray, which allows you to only be visible to people you’ve swiped right to. And you’ll act out an obscure fantasy of being a casting director going through dozens of headshots of unbeknownst aspiring actors; almost humorous if it weren’t so ridiculous.
And you’ll feel like an exotic bird, a woman in her thirties just looking to get laid. But you’ll trudge forward purposefully, mostly swiping right on foreigners passing through town, because you’ll delude yourself with the conviction that if they live in the same area code, or even within the same borders, they’ll fall in love with you, and you can’t handle that. The thought that you could be the one falling in love, and subsequently getting hurt, is something you’ll exclude wholeheartedly. Because all you’ll want is to have sex; the human intimacy you’ve lacked for a desperate amount of time, — you need it, you miss it, and at that point, it’ll honestly be a matter of personal hygiene. You’ll tell yourself that’s what you crave, not validation in the form of men desiring you, no, you’re definitely not doing it because you are parched for compliments as if you’ve been walking through a desert of barely contained disgust hallucinating of water drops in the form of “you’re beautiful”s.
And maybe some people will tell you that, at times, getting your sex life back will go unsuspectingly well, whilst other times it’ll fail just as spectacularly. But most certainly nobody’ll tell you that you can, and will, lie to yourself about the depths of your grief when rejected. That you’ll tell yourself, and whoever’s listening: you’re aware you can’t be everyone’s cup of tea–, and you’ll wrap yourself in this cliché like it’s a knitted blanket gifted by a favorite grandma, or perhaps a prop armor glorifying a battle of your own inception. But, in the secret recesses of your heart, you’ll wish you’re Steve’s preferred milk-splashed Darjeeling, or Andrew’s caffeine-fueled matcha, so you’ll hurt when you’ll realize you’re not.
And even though a date with your vibrator takes five minutes and has an orgasm rate of a hundred percent, you’ll still get into the shower and perform circus-level acrobatics to reach every nook and cranny of your fleshy self to shave. And you’ll apply a carefully curated assortment of make-up calculated to impress without screaming screw me, and you’ll get into clothes that best cosplay the version of yourself you want them to want the most. And you’ll go out, meet them, and you’ll let them pay, mostly because feeding their manly ego scores you points, but also because you’d probably go bankrupt otherwise.
And you’ll smile, and giggle at appropriate times, and a lot of your dates will genuinely make you chortle, and for a split second you’ll grow apprehensive of the fact that you sound like a hyena on crack. But you’ll try to be yourself, — your beautiful self, remember, whoever’s man enough will let that authenticity pull him like an invisible umbilical cord! –, whilst, simultaneously, you’ll have devised a complex mental mechanism that censors your thoughts instantly, because sarcasm is your firearm of choice, and men are definitely not attracted to sarcastic women, or even funny ones. They must be atrocious in bed, otherwise why would they be funny? The only other explanation is that they’re smart, and somehow that’s even worse, so you’ll try to not be that, but mostly you’ll fail splendidly. And you’ll tell yourself that’s why they don’t seek you afterwards, because if they’d wanted someone to laugh at them, they’d still be riding a bike in front of their dads.
And maybe nobody’ll tell you that, after everything, you’ll open Bumble again, making the most of your premium subscription. Because even though you’re the only one who can make you come in two minutes flat, you also enjoy the caress of somebody else’s sweat on the salty valley of your arched back, the sensation of an entire being’s weight in bones, muscle and fat as it folds within your own like two matching socks rolled off the dryer. Or the tingling of fingertips hovering over goose bumped skin like a pianist awaiting the conductor’s first baton wave, and the almost painful arousal as nails dig into flesh as if the hands belong to a motorist angrily manipulating a confounding road map.
And if nobody’s going to tell you, I will: it’s worth it. It’s worth it to go after what you miss and crave. It’s worth the disappointments, the bad sex, and the occasional UTI. The headache, and the lost hours of sleep, the covert judgmental looks from friends who say they support you, but secretly hate you being free. Because it’s also splendid, and you deserve splendid.
And, ultimately, it’s human connection that keeps us alive. So, if you must go through it all to start loving yourself again, then that’s what you should do.
Hailing from Bucharest, Romania, Teodora Vamvu is a marketing specialist at a national radio station. She has short prose published on Spillwords, 101Words, Globe Soup, and MetaStellar, where her story is pending publication in this year’s annual anthology, and she is also part of two prose anthologies and a poetry one, self-published through Amazon. Her first CNF piece was a finalist in F(r)iction’s Creative Non-Fiction Spring 2024 contest.