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Whoa!
Not quite what I was expecting. I was so stunned by his frankness that I didn’t reply. Realistically, what could I have said? Ignore the blatant booty call, ask where ‘home’ is and what the weather’s like over there? It’s obvious I was once again way out of my comfort zone…
I also quickly learnt from stage 4 that the matches thatdomessage you often fall into three categories: 1) very direct and overtly sexual (à la José’s message), staying true to the hook-up reputation of the app; 2) boring and bland (akin to asking what your favourite colour is or writing a 5,000-word essay on the different shades of white paint Dulux produce); 3) promising. These are the rare gems. The one-in-a-million matches (well, sometimes those odds feel accurate) where a decent-sounding guy that you like actually interacts with you and seems normal. Happy days.
Stage 6: The VCOD: Vicious Cycle Of Disappointment
All too often, stage five often leads seamlessly to stage six—the vicious cycle of disappointment. You’ve downloaded the app because you’re ready to find someone and also, if you’re honest, no matter how confident you are, it’s nice to receive some reassurance that someone in the universe (or within your thirty-kilometre radius) fancies you.
Filled with optimism, you swipe away and then receive the ‘validation’ of a match, but of course, given the ‘like-all-and-sundry’ tactics men employ, you know a match means little without a message. Thus, when they don’t message, you’re disappointed.
Or you take the lead and message them, you’re enjoying the conversation and then, just when you feel it’s progressing nicely and you’re in the midst of making plans to actually meet in real life, suddenly they stop messaging you altogether for no apparent reason. There’s complete and sudden radio silence. Otherwise known as ghosting.Was it something I said?
When this happens, you get so fed up that you log off feeling worse than you did before you logged on and vow to delete the app altogether. It can really fuck with your mind.
But of course, it won’talwaysend up this way. Like I said at the start, as a middle-aged woman dipping my toe into the dating world for the first time in nearly a decade and a half when most of my peers were all settled and had done all this in their twenties and early thirties, I wasn’t expecting it to be easy. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and whilst I felt like I wanted to give up altogether after day three of using the app, I knew that if I wanted to get to the seventh stage, i.e., the actual date, I would need to persevere. So I started taking a more structured, businesslike approach.
For the last four days, I’d committed two hours to swiping and messaging (squeezed in between meetings, whilst eating dinner, just before bed, and also under the expert eye of Roxy, when I stayed over at her house last night). As a result I had three dates lined up for next week.
I had no idea what the men would be like in real life—if I’d like them, if they’d like me, if I’d want to meet them again. But given that it had been so long since I had been on a date, whatever happened, it was sure to be an ‘interesting’ experience.
