It May Have Been His Fault, But I Was The One To Blame
Or, Yet One More Story Of Ignoring Red Flags In Order To Date
After space boots (whose real name I can’t remember), I go out with Cody who tells me he’s twenty-five but turns out to very much not be twenty-five. Everything about Cody is wrong for me. He’s soft and sweet and not very smart. He sends me pictures of him working out at the gym, flexing in the bathroom, smiling into the camera. He’s buff with a baby face, and because he went to the trouble of finding me on Twitter instead of waiting and hoping for a match on Tinder, I agree to one date.
I arrive to our first date early, sit in my car, check my lipgloss and swipe on tinder. I’m only a few swipes in when Cody’s picture pops up. His age reads twenty-one. I’m seething because I did my hair and I drove all this way and I hate liars. I hear something and turn to my right to see Cody excitedly waving at me through the passenger side window. Too late now, bitch.
Cody is the one who pursues me. Cody is the one who lies about his age. Cody is the one at fault for all of this, but somehow I am still the one to blame because I’m thirty-three and you’d expect someone my age to know better. But that’s the thing—because I absolutely did know better. I just also had the audacity to think that I could orchestrate at least a few fun weeks out of all of this. So far in my dating career, I’d experienced mostly first and second dates (and one lengthy relationship but that feels separate) and I so badly wanted to have a little more than that. I didn’t want a relationship and I wasn’t interested in commitment but fuck I just wanted to go on some dates that led to at least a few more dates before we realized we weren’t meant for each other. The truth was, since returning home from Montreal, all I really wanted to do was be a writer and someone men wanted to date—unfortunately, I wasn’t proving to be great at either.
Cody made me think that was possible, or more accurately, Cody’s enthusiasm for me made me think that was possible. At least I think it was his enthusiasm that got me. It also could’ve been the fact that I was turning thirty-four in a few weeks, and nothing reminds you of your youth quite like dating one. Or perhaps it was just because I, like Cody, was an absolute idiot. I guess we’ll never know.
The night of our first date, I wanted to put on a lemon-meringue pie’s worth of concealer. How much makeup do you need to mask a twelve-year age difference? I had gone out with younger men before, when I had been younger still, and it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal then. Now though, now I was over thirty. Now everything seemed to have a spotlight on it. Now I was a cougar (ugh such a corny turn of phrase). It’s so embarrassing the way we fetishize age differences.
The first date turned out to be like most. We ate food, we laughed and had a good time (because I always make them laugh and we almost always have a good time), he paid (because he fucking better), and then he asked if I wanted to take a walk somewhere. I agreed before realizing that we’d be carpooling since he’d taken the bus to our date. Ooph.
But the date had actually been pretty fun so far, lying and age-issues aside, and goddamn if his enthusiasm for me wasn’t almost addictive. So, I agreed, and we drove to the Quay to go for a walk. While trying to pay for parking, the machine didn’t seem to be working. I turned back to my car to get a piece of paper and pen to write a note and before I had taken even a few steps, he was shaking and banging the machine like a wild animal, or I guess a twenty-one-year-old. I yelled at him to stop it and a loud siren alarm started emanating from the machine. I was mortified and wrote a note about the broken machine and left it inside my car like an adult (even though I felt like a teenager).
We walked and my blood pressure lowered and he was just so sweet—like a golden retriever. And because neither of us lived alone (which seemed normal for someone his age and abnormal for someone mine)—we made out in public. He kept stepping on my dress and, I kept wishing we were somewhere else, somewhere inside, and private. But his lips were nice, and it was fun and christ he just seemed so eager.
The date unraveled the way all fairy tales unravel—like a math problem. I offered to drive him home (and that’s my bad), and he accepted, which meant I had to drive another twenty minutes in the opposite direction of where I lived (which was 30 minutes away to begin with). Ten minutes from his house he asked if we could hit the drive-thru at McDonald’s, which had to have a been joke but wasn’t. He was dead serious. Something about it being his “cheat day” and not having eaten enough at the restaurant earlier. Not one to expose my binge habits to others, I ordered nothing and just listened as this dude rambled off enough for three people and then looked at me all sheepishly with puppy-dog eyes and shrugging shoulders like “I just like to eat”. Outside his house but still in my car we made out again, this time surrounded by the sweet, sweet aroma of fresh fries. I was already emailing the brilliant marketing campaign to McDonald’s in my head.
I drove the fifty minutes’ home thinking maybe it hadn’t gone so bad, after all maybe this is what dating a twenty-one-year-old looked like—heavy on both the babysitting and seduction. The next day he texted, repeatedly. He wanted to know how I was doing and how my workout went and what was I up to. He wanted to talk, even though we didn’t really have that much to talk about.
I had a really great time, he messaged.
So did I, I texted back.
The following day was the same and the same the day after that—a lot of interest and nothing of substance. I wouldn’t say that he was losing his appeal, but my enthusiasm was cooling the more aware I was that neither of us lived alone (and weren’t likely to be changing that scenario anytime soon).
He starts sending me pics every day. At first, he’s just shirtless and showing off his muscles from the gym, which admittedly are still covered in a layer of cuddles, and I can’t help but wish that every thirteen-year-old girl had the blind body-loving confidence of men. He doesn’t have a model body. He doesn’t even think about not loving it. He sends pictures of it regularly and without request.
And then it occurs to me to make a request. But first I tell him that I won’t be sending any of me. I feel the need to make sure he understands that there will be no equal exchange. Because I am a writer. Because I want to be famous. Because I don’t want to. Because I can’t risk it. Because I don’t trust him. Because the year was 2014 and times were different. There are a million reasons.
I understand he types.
He sends me a dick pic. I hate dick pics. I’ve never seen the impersonal, unexperienced, theoretical image of a stranger’s dick and thought anything other than what is this fucking idiot doing sending this garbage to me. To me, a dick is an extension of a man I like, not a reason I like a man. A dick is nothing on its own. A dick is no island.
Instead of shutting him down though, I start making requests—send one of you smiling, send me a video. The video is exactly what you’d expect, it’s all dick and stroking and nothing else and though I recognize his dick and body from the earlier pictures, it could really be anyone in that I feel no connection towards it. Send me one where I can see your face.
A few moments later, a video arrives of him touching himself while he thinks about me, and he’s looking into the camera (at me) knowing that I’ll be looking back at him. I feel powerful for having asked for it, and for having the appeal to command such a request. Once again, my interest is piqued. Now I want a second date. Now I care that this thing doesn’t end right away.
He seems more invested as well. What else do you want? he asks, and I tell him. I want a video of him talking to me while he jerks off. I want to be a part of the film, even in absentia. I want his desire for me memorialized. I want to keep it forever. When we’re over, I want to have a piece of him, a piece of his desire for me, locked away. Just because. For my ego, or my memory, or because it helps with closure, or just as a reminder. I want to keep a piece of all of them. This will be his piece. He sends the video. The next time he asks me out, I say yes.
I say yes to the world’s worst second date idea. I am ashamed even typing it out here, but I have to because it’s the truth and that’s what we’re doing here. But know that it takes me hours to do it, it takes hours to admit that on a lone weekend when my parents would be out of town, I invited him over to their house, to my childhood bedroom, where I was currently living as a thirty-three-year-old degenerate. In my defense, everything seemed to be going great. He kept saying how much he wanted to spend time with me. I said: But you live so far because he lived in Port Coquitlam and I lived in Tsawwassen, and we couldn’t have been further from each other. We ate pizza and watched the Hobbit and had entirely mediocre sex, and then he spent the night which I hadn’t really thought through and was definitely a huge mistake. In the morning, before I had to drive him back to the skytrain station, he told me that he didn’t think we should see each other anymore. He said he didn’t really think we had anything in common. I couldn’t believe he was telling me this in person instead of via text after dropping him off at the skytrain. His crime was not the rejection (I was hardly bothered by that, after all he was absolutely right in that we had literally nothing in common), but instead forcing me to spend the next forty-five minutes with him after being rejected by someone I was barely into—a crime that deserved the death penalty if I’m being honest. I’m already swiping on Tinder before the weekend is over.
After it’s over with Cody, I spend a lot of time thinking about the sting, the rub, the hurt. I’m acutely aware how little the feeling has to do with Cody himself. The feeling is because I am the one to blame. I know that there had to have been a moment, or moments, where I could have been smarter, done it better, made it happen. But I was not smarter and so this is my fault. I worry that I’m starting to sound like psychopath. I am not sad because he left. There is no sadness at the rejection. He said, “I have a stronger connection with someone else,” and of course he did, I mean OF COURSE HE DID. He thought I wanted something big with him but truthfully, I just wanted laughter and kissing and fun (which, in hindsight he wasn’t even providing). Nonetheless this is now and that was then, and back then (and still a bit now) I struggled with the idea of how quickly men figured out they weren’t interested in continuing to see me. Was I just a nightmare of a person or was it the men I was dating. I spent a lot of time wondering if it was both.