We type mostly in emojis. We tell stories to each other in characters designed to save us time, and by the time I’m agreeing to meet we know almost nothing about each other. Except that he has made me laugh and for now that is enough.
It is enough until I remember (how the fuck could I ever forget?) that I am a thirty-three-year-old wanna-be writer who lives with her parents, and he is a twenty-three-year-old I-don’t-know-what who may or may not live with his parents and suddenly his living situation becomes the most important thing.
I’m not looking to hook up but if the first date (meet, meet-cute, why don’t we just meet?, “We could just meet up real quick,” he says) goes well and there’s another date/night/hang, we would need a place to just be, eventually. I am too old to be making out on street corners and in cars.
Eventually is more important now. I don’t have time (I have tons of time) to take leaps. I can’t be bothered putting in effort to meet men that I cannot date (even though I’m on Tinder, which apparently isn’t for dating or is for dating depending on who you ask, and I no longer know who to ask). I am a thirty-three-year-old wanna-be writer who lives with her parents. I don’t have time to date men without apartments. I don’t have time to date men when I should be writing. Oh god, why am I even trying to date? I have more degrees than men who have ever loved me, and I’m a thirty-three-year-old wanna-be writer who lives with her parents.
What kind of writing do you do? They ask using far fewer characters and in sentences that have to be pieced together like leftover muffin crumbs between the pads of your fingers. I tell them I write about sex and dating because it’s too hard to explain that I write about what it’s like to be a fat woman in this world, and I write about myself sounds terribly naïve and indulgent (which it is). A professor I had back at Concordia once called it chicklit. He said I could do better than chicklit. What he meant was the piece wasn’t good enough, wasn’t witty enough but he used the backs of women to stand up and say this; it probably read far too much like a diary (which is just called a journal if you’re a man). When men write about sex, it’s important (you better sit up and listen!). But I’m just a woman writing about sex (with men, unfortunately). A friend asks why I can’t seem to decentralize men from my life. Except that they’re not really that central, but I can’t tell people the truth, which is that of course I want to go on all these great adventures, but dating is free and travel is expensive and life gets lonely and every so often a girl would like to have an orgasm that she didn’t entirely orchestrate herself.
So even though it’s Monday, and Monday is when I had said we would meet, I go to the gym. I send a message and ask what he does for a living. He says: I am an equity analyst. Or one could also say that I simply play cards. Depends on the mood.
I ask: Which one is metaphorical and which one literal? though I already know. He is a poker player, which feels sketchy (which in turn feels judgmental). I ask him if he lives alone and when he says no, I don’t mince words. I say: Ooph, well that ends that I guess, I don’t live alone either because whatthefuckisthepoint anymore.
He says: Simply the beginning my dear and we banter back and forth while he tries to convince me that there is a solution to every problem, and I eventually forget that I am a grown woman who has made out in far too many cars and on far too many street corners and that some problems are just big fucking problems, and some solutions aren’t worth the effort.
He says: Best Western has never saved the day before but maybe today is a special day.
I say: I’m not looking for a hookup so a one-off in a hotel isn’t really for me. I don’t add that I’m a wanna-be writer living with her parents and that if I had money for a hotel I wouldn’t be squatting here. I don’t add that I would never be willing to pay half on a hotel room (again) for sex. I don’t add that my feminism is flawed and my ideas of equality ill-defined and that I am thirty-three and he is twenty-three and this all seems too complicated and filled with shame. I say: Sorry I don’t mean to rain on your parade. I just don’t want to waste your time. I’m trying to tell him no. I’m trying to end this before it starts.
He says: No parade raining has happened quite yet. I’m not sure what the answers to the universe’s more life-threatening issues are, but I feel as though this conundrum we are faced with is something that could be overcome. Time wasting is certainly not what I intend to do though, so I hope you will be gentle but firm in the way you tell me to hit the road, jack.
I read this between sets at the gym and he gets in a little. His use of commas and full sentences are a baited hook. Somewhere in between reps, he sneaks in with wordplay. And just like that, we’re meeting. I rush home from the gym. I rush to get ready. I text and say that we need to go for food—I try not to yell it through the screen.
He says something about having eaten recently, which I take as soft rejection. He says something about not wanting to go somewhere too expensive, which I take as an undervaluing of my time and my very being. Every text is a reason I should bail. I say as much. Again, he convinces me that nothing is a real problem. Again, he sways me. My hair and makeup are already done. I ask where we should meet.
We meet near his house. I pick him up like a mom after school (or, a normal nice person doing something nice and normal for someone else). But nothing feels so nice and normal. He says turn right at King Edward and Hudson, I’ll be there. But when I get there he is not there. Oops, he says, drive one more block up King Ed and I’ll be there in one minute. So, I do. And he is not there. And then he is there.
He gets into my car, and we drive down Granville and park. Inside a restaurant, I ask him to get us a table while I use the washroom. When I come out, he tells me that they’re closed: no food. We walk up the street to another restaurant where they tell us that their kitchen is also closed. The city is asleep before I’ve even had dinner. They say, “You can have drinks,” and so we go inside where I order a diet coke and he orders a water, and I’m no longer sure why anyone in this world continues to exist.
He tells a story about his brother’s wedding in some Massachusetts town I’ve never heard of. He says it was in this one place and then, no, it was in this other place. Or was it in the first place?
“It’s very important that we figure out the details,” I say, and he laughs and the rumble in my belly is no longer as loud. We start to joke back and forth. We start to have fun. He tells me about his job, how he travels all over the place: Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Australia.
“That’s why it makes sense to live at home,” he says, though it doesn’t completely. It makes sense to be twenty-three and living at home if you need to. He’s not in school, he says, just the poker. He doesn’t say too much outside of what I ask about his job. But I’m hardly in a place to judge someone living with their parents. He says again, “That’s why it makes sense to live at home because I’m travelling and away so often.” He says he spent a few months in Australia last year. He says he goes to Monte Carlo all the time. All of which I find wildly impressive.
When the conversation turns to dating, he tells me that he dressed up for our date by wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
“What would you normally be wearing?”
“Shorts.”
“Like short shorts or like swim trunks?”
“Swim trunks, with the built-in underwear.”
“Who doesn’t love a bit of mesh.”
He agrees about the mesh and again laughter pushes us towards each other. He pays the bill. I offer to drive him home.
When we pull over in front of where I had picked him up, he asks if I want to smoke the joint he brought. He lingers in the passenger seat and doesn’t open his door right away.
Sure, I say, “We could walk around.” I don’t want to get high though. I don’t know how long we will be walking for. I don’t want to get trapped here, walking around in the summer heat, with nowhere to go, just a couple of over-aged teenagers still living with their parents for very different or totally similar reasons (I’m still not sure which it is).
We walk and talk about Tinder. I’m only the second person he’s ever met, which seems like bullshit. I’ve met so many men, or have I? I’ve talked to hundreds, wasted my time on thousands, listened to a billion wax-poetic about tits and tell me all about how they’re fresh out of relationships. Tinder is all your ex-boyfriends, broken like records. “And how was it?” I ask about the other girl, the one he said he’d met in Australia.
“It was great,” he said, and I tried not to be jealous of a woman on another continent. He asked what I was looking for.
“Dating.”
“Dating and then hopefully…?” he gestured at nothing with his hands.
“No hopefully,” I cut him off. “Just dating.”
He looked at me like that was impossible. Was it hard to believe because I was a woman or because I was a woman during/past marriageable/childbearing years? Did he think I was hanging out with twenty-three-year-olds for that super dope baby batter?
“Just dating,” I reiterated. “You?”
“Fucking.”
Well, shit. “Fucking and activities or just fucking?” It had started to seem so weird asking this question. I mean, did I have so few friends to do fun things with that I had to stoop to spending my time trying to convince these men with their dicks (practically in their hands, panting, ready to fuck me), to just maybe shoot some pool or eat a meal or treat me in any way that suggested even the tiniest possibility that I might be more than just a walking vagina? Why didn’t any of them want the non-sex fun too? Were all their friends just super fun and always available? I was starting to think that the reason people got married had little to do with love and was entirely about always having someone to hang out with. The logic was not lost on me. My life was filled with family and friends whom I loved, and not a single fucking person to hang out with.
“I don’t care how much time is spent in and around the fucking,” he said, and he seemed to mean it but then again they always seem to mean it. I took him at his word, but what kind of idiot takes a twenty-three-year-old at his word?
“Do you usually date older women?” I ask like a broken record, like a needy baby, like a girl standing in front of a parking lot attendant just trying to get some goddamn validation. I don’t know what I wanted him to say. Yes? That he had dated a hundred women slowly creeping towards the open arms of death in order to make me just another old lady in a line of cougars? Did I want him to answer no in order to make me an outlier, to make me unique, which would then come with its own set of problems like—would he like my sagging boobs? Would he expect me to teach him new things? Was I supposed to be the dominant one or was he supposed to lead the way? Was age or gender the trump card? Was I going to be just another first in life, just another thing he sampled and then passed over? I wanted him to say that I seemed great. Walking around his parents’ neighborhood (presumably the one he’d grown up in), I wanted him to say that I seemed goddamn amazing and though he wasn’t sure what would happen with us, he didn’t want to miss his chance. I wanted him to see that I was great, right off the bat.
He said, “You seem really insecure about the age difference,” and just left it hanging there. But I wasn’t insecure about the age difference. I was insecure about all the things I thought a thirty-three-year-old was supposed to have: a job, an apartment, a reasonable expectation of paying off their student loan. I had none of these things. I was a writer. I was a writer. I kept trying to tell everyone that I was a writer.
I just finished my master’s degree, I would type followed immediately by and I’m (trying to be) a writer. Some days it seemed cute and self-deprecating. Other days it just seemed pathetic and unrealistic, and that didn’t even address the other stretch of truth in the sentence. A stretch so deep I practically had to start doing yoga just so I could tell it. Just? Just finished my master’s degree? I had finished my degree in April and here it was another April and September later and I was still saying just. Like, who me? living at home with my parents, yeah I just moved back, I just finished my degree, I’m just a little bit of a disappointment to my parents, I’m just hanging on by a thread, I’m just trying to survive. And maybe it wouldn’t matter to them, wouldn’t matter to any of them, but Jesus, did it matter to me. It was the only reason I hadn’t changed my phone number since moving back to Vancouver, so that every new guy I gave my number to would ask, “514? What area code is that?” and then I’d say Montreal and add that that was where I got my master’s degree and hadn’t bothered to change it back. Just a little stretch of the truth.
Twenty minutes later, he’d convinced me to go back to his parents’ house having explained that they were actually out of town for the weekend. I believe this is called adulting.