Frogs Are Just Princes In Training
You have no idea what other nightmares lay beneath the moss and sludge of dating apps.
“What kinds of qualities do you look for in a woman?” I ask. I am running through the last of the typical getting-to-know-someone questions. This falls somewhere after, “Whereabouts do you live?” and before, “What are you looking for on here?” though honestly, they’re all pretty interchangeable.
He says, “Confidence,” and I hate him almost immediately on principal. The attraction to confidence is reasonable enough but if you were to ask most men why so many women lack confidence, they rarely have even the smallest understanding nor ability to acknowledge their role. And yes, I know, not all men but enough men, surely too many men. And I can’t help but hate these men—the men who talk about how much they love a girl who eats freely and openly in front of them, a girl who doesn’t have issues with food, let’s be honest, a girl who isn’t a real fucking drag, but would hate my fat body. It’s always the same men who say that a woman shouldn’t wear so much makeup, or doesn’t need to wear it at all, as if they should be anything other than silent about the ways in which women try to protect ourselves from the brutality of this world. Those men, so many fucking unaware ill-thought-out men, who complain about the phenomenon of ‘duck lips’, as if they weren’t the reason that women make that stupid face, pouting our lips like ducks desperate for approval via sexual attraction. As if a man wanting to fuck you wasn’t still used as currency and validation. As if the typo wouldn’t be a more accurate description: dick lips.
“I like a girl with confidence,” he says, and then later when rejected, “Whatever you fat bitch, I wouldn’t have fucked you anyway, I just heard fat chicks suck good dick.” I can practically hear him singing “Fatty fatty boom-boom latty,” which is a real shame because I love a good rhyme. I can hear him from a mile away. His words are so loud I can hear them from the future. “I like a girl with confidence,” he says without even a hint of awareness.
This is what dating is like when you’re fat. This is what dating is like when you have even a lick of sense. I need you to know what it’s like on the apps so that you have empathy for all the dumb decisions I make. You’ll think it’s desperation or a devaluing of myself but that’s not true—it’s that there just aren’t that many good options if you want more in your life than friends, family, and your favorite tv shows. You’ll ask yourself why I keep kissing frogs but that’s because you don’t know that there are easily forty more layers of filth and amphibians beneath frogs that I’m staying away from. You’ll ask why I ever settle at all, why I even entertain the possibility of dating someone in their early twenties and that’s why I can’t help but gesture at the layers of truly-the-worst on the apps. Frogs are just princes in training. You have no idea what other nightmares lay beneath the moss and sludge of dating apps.
I was once in a writing workshop where two different narrators were being discussed: one, a male serial killer, and one, a single female. Everyone agreed that the female narrator needed to be more likeable in order to get the reader on her side, and I hadn’t even written her as fat yet.
“How can I be expected to write a likeable narrator when I can’t even get a man to take me on a second date?” Everyone laughs but the joke is quickly ruined because they too-easily believe my self-deprecation. It’s a play on words not my heart.
Cade broke my heart almost right from the beginning. This is hyperbole, of course. I wish Cade could’ve broken my heart. Like Cody before him, Cade was too sweet for me, by which I mean he was too young and naïve which comes off as sweet and gentle but is really just someone figuring out their life without considering your feelings. If we’re being honest that’s what all young people are doing (which spoiler alert: is exactly what makes them so terrible to date). And if you’re thinking, well, you’re the one who’s older so you should’ve known better—you’ll get no argument here. I absolutely should’ve known better, which is starting to feel like a real habit with me. But then again, I’m not sure if age or experience is the real teacher in life because at thirty-three, I definitely didn’t know any fucking better (at least, not better enough to stop making the same mistakes over and over again). I know better now but that’s because I’ve dated all the men. Okay, so obviously not all the men but I’ve dated enough men that I think it’s probably safe to extrapolate the data. I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all. I’ve even let a few of them do me. I know a million more things now than I did back then, but it's worth noting that I’ve also dated age-appropriate men with similar results and lack of satisfaction when it comes to the overall experience so if you ask me whether I want to be sexually and emotionally disappointed by someone in their twenties or someone in their forties—I’d say why not both!? Why are you trying to limit my misery! Let me be free!
The first time I meet Cade is in the parking lot of a mall. He wants to drive on our date, but I don’t want to give him my home address, so we meet at the mall like teenagers (which he not so long ago was). He drives a vintage car—Hemingway blue. I’m kidding, there’s no such thing as Hemingway blue. I made that up to sound literary, to give this story credence—the mention of an old white man validates anything.
I find it hard to describe men in my writing, men that I’ve met in real life, men who could potentially come across a story about them. I adamantly believe that they don’t need to be protected—that we, as a society, protect the egos of men the way we should be protecting the hearts of little girls (and full-grown women), but there’s something about describing someone realistically that always feel like an insult. He was short, he was thin, he was beautiful. His body had tattoos and a youthful softness to it. I couldn’t tell you what color his eyes were if you paid me a million dollars. He must’ve had a face, that I know for sure.
“I read your website,” he says, and I have no idea what that means. Has he read one blog post? Has he read the entire thing? Which entries has he read? What did he know? MY GOD WHAT DID HE KNOW?!? This revelation of his was terrifying, but it was also wonderful because he must like me enough to be interested in knowing everything about me. This is the kind of naïve stupidity I used to have around men. My therapist would say that I’m closing myself off by thinking that, but that’s because she’s not fat, and she hasn’t dated men like I’ve dated men. She hasn’t the lived experience of having a thousand (or maybe like thirty) men give absolute certain signs of interest only to immediately be proven wrong. The way I used to give credit for the most basic effort and interest from a man shocks me now. At the time, it felt like Cade was genuinely, truly, really fucking curious about getting to know me. I was acting like he had signed up for a college course on my life instead of just doing a quick google search or two (to his benefit no less).
He’d already told me, before meeting, that he’d been able to find my Instagram and Twitter (and thus obviously find my website), but it was shocking how that still seemed like too much effort for most men. Cody had said that he didn’t google me because he wanted everything to be fresh, to get to know me from me (as if my writing was by a ghost and not my own brain), that he wanted things to happen organically (after hunting me down on Twitter). There was a time I believed that kind of bullshit. Now though, it just seemed like someone who didn’t have enough curiosity nor effort to get to know me. Then again, why was it so important to me that they did or that they went through the effort to find my online footprint? It’s not like I had a fetish for internet sleuths. Maybe the ugly truth was that I wanted new readers rather new lovers. Either way, I wanted a man to care about what I had to say, even if what I had to say was imbedded in blog posts about sex and dating. I was never really writing about sex and dating anyway. Not really.
“Oh god,” I said dramatically trying to remember everything I’d ever said about every man I’d ever dated. “I hope it wasn’t too bad.”
“You’re really funny.”
“oh—thanks.” I paused and then asked, “What made you read it?”
“I wanted to have as much information as possible,” he said. “You’re pretty intimidating.”
“I am?” Didn’t he know he was the intimidating one in this scenario. He was busy stressing about impressing me at the exact same time I was busy stressing about being a disappointment to him.
“I’m so nervous!” I don’t know why I was practically shouting. I was trying to make us both feel better but I’m not sure it even moved the needle. I’ve always felt that there’s something about verbalizing an anxiety that makes it disappear. Like, if I’m terribly nervous for a date, and I just say it to the person so that they know and I know they know, suddenly everything is a little less nerve-wracking. So, I blurted out that I was nervous and waited to feel better.
“Why are you nervous?” he asked, I was immediately nervous again.
“Because you’re so young.” I blurted awkwardly and wishing I could melt into seat. I shouldn’t have said it, but it was the truth. He was cool as shit and not a total pretentious dick about it. He had tattoos he loved but could admit that some he regretted. He asked questions with genuine curiosity. He seemed to think I was pretty adorable and when we bantered back and forth, I felt like I was funnier than usual. Maybe he could be my muse. Maybe he could my lover. Maybe we could be buddies. I didn’t have a limit set on my heart. I tried not to think about our ages, but I couldn’t help it. They were everything and nothing. After all, it’s not like I was exactly living the life of a thirty-three-year-old. I was temporarily squatting in the home of my parents to save money while trying to live that artist dream (read: sleeping in my childhood bedroom being supported entirely by my parents while trying not to crumble under the pressure of a hundred-thousand-dollar student loan and the privilege to even think an artist-dream-life was possible). I wasn’t exactly a trophy-cougar. I was a poorly aging twenty-five-year-old, which if you think about it really isn’t that much older than a twenty-one-year-old. Right? Right?!
The truth about age is that it all starts to seem relative after a while, because if you message with enough creepy age-appropriate men who talk about your body in invasive and gross-way-too-early ways or the seemingly only other alternative, age-appropriate men who are at their core too boring for words, somehow an eloquent and polite twenty-one-year-old seems legit. All of a sudden, you’ve got a not-corny, not-sleazy, articulate, funny, interesting guy on your hands and who am I to be turning down such an opportunity? Doesn’t everyone keep telling me to be more open and to give these guys a chance (and then later chastising me for being a terrible judge of character, but that’s a whole other issue)?
In the car we laughed about our mutual nervousness, and I tried to let him convince me that I was brilliant. When he had to parallel park the car on a hill, I prayed for it to be easy. Can you imagine having to parallel park, on a steep hill, in a vintage car you’ve only just started driving, on a first date, with someone a decade older? I’m stressed and embarrassed just writing about it. I’d rather have a catheter inserted to be honest.
Inside the pool hall we shoot eight ball and drink sodas because we’re both sober.
“How long were you together?” I ask when the conversation turns to dating, turns to his ex, turns to this thing he has to get over.
“Three years,” he says, and I do the math even though it seems unnecessary. It doesn’t matter how old that made him when they met. He’s twenty-one now and three years in a relationship is his entire life. It is first love and first everything. I can already see it on his face. He is broken now. Fixable, sure, but right now, one hundred percent, he is broken from this.
“When did you break up?”
“Wednesday,” he says, as if today wasn’t Sunday. As if we weren’t on a first date only a few days after the (painful) dissolution of the most important romantic relationship of his life. I waited for someone to jump out of a closet to tell me I was being pranked.
“Ooph,” is all I can manage to say. I want to leave immediately. I want to cry about what a waste of time this has been. But I’m an optimist, or a rescue dog, I’m not quite sure which metaphor fits best. What I do know is that in the moment, my fight impulse kicks in as it does on so many of my dates, and I know that even though we’re taking on water, I must not let the boat sink. Don’t let this disappoint drown us, I think. Maybe I’ll be his lifejacket (I mean Jesus, can you imagine the arrogance?!). But it is what I think in that moment, in the awkwardness and stupidity of it all. It is what I say to myself, leaning across the pool table, trying to take a shot, while this twenty-one-year-old tells me that he’s been wrecked by a storm and I’m all: yeah yeah, cool cool, I’m sure we can find some spare driftwood around here to patch you back up good as new. I practically say the words good as new. I am an idiot in a typhoon. I still think this can work.
We play a few games of pool, most of which I win. I can’t tell if he’s impressed or intimidated or neutral or upset. He seems to be having a good time but never touches me. I make movements towards him and wait. I go in three-quarters. I go in so he can come the rest of the way. He smiles and never moves an inch. We flirt or we are just two people of the opposite sex being friendly—I can no longer tell (can I ever tell? Something to think about for later).
Maybe I’m not even flirting so much as just trying to have a good time. Together we drink our sober sodas and the bond of sobriety feels like more of an instant bond that having murdered someone together. This is the first time on a first date there’s not a twinge of guilt and shame for being the wet rag.
“No, no, you go ahead, I don’t mind at all,” I say as they order something alcoholic, and I mostly mean it. If they have less than three, if they don’t get weird, if it makes them more fun, it’s fine. But with Cade I don’t have to worry. We drink sodas and tell jokes and there’s no guilt and there’s no shame and we ask each other about meetings (he goes, I don’t), and coping (it’s a process), and then it’s nothing. It’s a thing that makes it so there isn’t a thing between us. And it’s yet one more thing that makes him seem older than he is (I’m starting to see how this could all be my fault, the blinders I’m wearing, the miscalculation of it all).
He pays for the sodas, and I let him because they’re cheap and because he offers and because it seems like the right thing to do. When the games are over, he walks up to me sheepishly and confesses that they only take cash, and he doesn’t have enough cash. He has some cash, and they don’t have an ATM in the pool hall, and if I have some cash he can run to an ATM after, “or I could run there now,” he offers and I say, “No, of course not,” and pay whatever he can’t. It’s like ten bucks and not a big deal at all and mostly I’d do anything right now to end the embarrassment he clearly feels at not having enough cash. I imagine his wallet must have Velcro on it. We pay and it’s fine though the age difference seems so intense in this moment that it’s like a flashing light between us. It’s entirely illogical, but I feel like a mom who just came in and paid the bill for her son.
Things go from awkward to ridiculous on the drive home. Cruising down Oak st. towards the bridge, a truck pulls up on the passenger side and begins to yell at us. “How did you get such a hot babe to ride with you?” one of the men in the pickup truck yells and I feel like I’ve just stepped onto the set of Dazed and Confused. Another leans over from the passenger to shout, “You should get out of that junker and ride with us!” They yell a few more derogatory things about his car and complimentary (if not objectifying) things about me, and he handles his own in a manner fitting an actual grown-up (far better than I would’ve handled said behavior, which is mostly just to look shocked and sink back into the seat), but the awkwardness is palpable. It’s like having a bunch of dudes whip out their dicks, insult each other’s, and then look to you like, “Who’s the real man pick me pick me?” and you’re just like, uh what the fuck bros this is so gross. Except that I can’t hold it against Cade because he didn’t ask to be a part of this. And then the light turned green and they were gone and he brought me back to the mall where my car was waiting.
It took an hour for the message to come via text, but I knew what it would say that moment we had hugged goodbye in the mall parking lot.
I’m not ready to date again. I’m sorry.
I tell him it’s fine. I tell him I understand. I try not to let the disappointment, which is to be expected, plunge me into a depressive episode. I say, keep in touch and he says he will, and we actually do. A few months or so later, we meet for a coffee which I think is a date but turns out is definitely not a date. We have a nice chat, we drink our coffees, we promise to keep in touch.
A few more months after that he messages me on facebook. He says something flirty that makes me think maybe he’s finally ready for something to happen with us. We make plans to watch a movie at his apartment. He orders sushi, which I happily eat without worrying about judgement because I’ve been on two dates with Cade and I’m not about to miss a meal for a third date that could be absolutely literally nothing. I’ve felt his bait and switch before. I’m not missing a meal for a man who doesn’t know what he wants, that’s for damn sure.
For two hours, we sit side by side not really touching, definitely not cuddling and I wait for Cade, who had invited me over, who had expressed interest, to make a move. No move ever came. After a while I got bored, and I got tired, and I stood up to leave.
I must’ve taken a wrong turn. Somewhere in between leaving his place and arriving home, it all quickly turns to shit. If you meet a man at the top of a hill, things can only go down from there. Cade and I started on Everest. The idea that there is enough joy in dating to make it worth it, that the weeks of fun will be worth the rejection that comes later was a fucking delusion. Or maybe it’s because I never seem to get the weeks. At best, I’m getting in only a few dates (and kind of shitty dates at that). This time there wasn’t even a kiss. He stood in the doorframe of his basement suite, on our third date spread out over a year, and said that I shouldn’t feel bad about how I look (as if his rejection of me had that kind of power) because he found me really attractive, but that he just wasn’t “feeling it.” I wanted to set his air quotes on fire. That said, there is a kind of painful relief in someone finally admitting that they weren’t into me because of my shitty personality rather than my fat little body.
And of course, I’m joking.
I’m joking, of course.
We’re going to stay friends (as if). He likes my “comedy” he says. “Keep that coming,” he says. And I can’t really remember why I thought we should stay friends, when we never were friends. I don’t know why I think we should try to be friends. I can’t wrap my head around his both being attracted to me and liking me as a person but not “feeling it.” I no longer understand what “it” is. Though I’m starting to wonder if “it” is definitely all my fault.
It’s almost as if dating twenty-one-year old’s isn’t a good idea.
After the rejections from Cody and Cade, things start to get a bit darker. It’s not them personally, nor is it the rejections per say, it’s just this feeling of missing out on a future I had thought would absolutely be available to me (and it’s my depression—let’s not downplay that). It had never really occurred to me that it would be so hard to find a man to get to four dates with. I wasn’t looking for a future, but they always seemed so scared of having one. I just wanted to have a couple fun nights, to have some tension and excitement, to have some new experiences and yet it seemed like I couldn’t get past a second date or even find that many men I wanted to go on a first date with. I was thirty-three now and though I had earned all these degrees, without a steady career or a successful book, I couldn’t stop feeling like I’d never accomplished anything.