I
am sitting on the bottom stair in February of 2016,
glancing at the nearby door to my house, waiting to
hear the knock. This is not only my first Tinder date,
but my first date in my life.
I hear a faint stirring, then steps, and I know she is here.
It’s midnight, because that’s the only time we could meet
up. We have messaged back and forth for a couple days,
first on Tinder, then on Facebook Messenger. Our con-
versations flow naturally, at least online. We have a lot in
common — she’s into the same indie shit that I am. She
has the aggressive sarcasm that I am attracted to, and the
aggressive forwardness that I feel I need, especially for a
potential first girlfriend.
I take a deep breath, heart hammering, and open the
door. We go up to my room, sit on the bed, and talk.
At first she is surprisingly shy compared to the bluntness
of her messages, but we quickly become more comfortable
together and she begins to resemble the girl that I already
feel like I know. Somehow, her rambling, punctuation-less
text speak is reflected in her quirky way of speaking, with
her loose form of sentence structure. Her sarcasm and
irony are immediately present, though in pleasantly lower
doses than online — you can easily obscure your feelings
with text, hiding your smiles and your laughs and your
shock, but now I see her laugh freely and I feel relieved
that the irony only goes so far.
She tells me random anecdotes from her past, most very
funny but with weird, dark undercurrents that somehow
make them funnier. I tell her boring things about myself,
such as how I won the spelling bee in eighth grade or what
classes I’m taking. At one point, she says that I’m sharing a
lot, but not sharing my “soul” like she is. I know what she
means, but I’m not sure what to do differently. No deeply
revealing stories have immediately leaped to mind.
She is very forward, just like online, saying something
lame and then asking, “Did you like that pick-up line?,”
even making startlingly early jokes about what our chil-
dren will be like. She scoots closer to me and touches my
knee and rubs my arm and nestles her head in the crook of
my neck and gives me a back massage and then stares down
at me from above, unable to stop laughing, as she sits on
my stomach and my legs prop up her back. We sit together
in silence or lie together whispering or laugh uncontrol-
lably for reasons we can’t remember, and I think about
how unusually intimate this is and how this is something
I’ve never experienced before, at least in this context. This
came from Tinder?
In addition to this dreamlike intimacy, I have two
dominant emotions: 1. Incredulity that someone actually
dressed up and put on makeup and tried to look good for
me, and 2. thankfulness that this girl is forward enough to
freely admit her intentions and her feelings, because I am
absolutely terrible at discerning someone’s feelings for me.
This is what I’ve always perceived as the main reason I’ve
never had a girlfriend.
And then she asks, “Are you maybe ever going to kiss
me?” And it’s not in the blunt, funny, here-goes-nothing
“kiss me you dummy!” way; it’s in the nervous, unsure,
confused way. She is confused because in all the moments
where we stared each other in the eyes or laughed inches
away from each other, I did not kiss her. And I do not know
why.
Minutes pass, and I am trying to think of some way to
kiss her, but I feel paralyzed. I have kissed two girls before
in my life. The first kissed me in high school because I had
made my feelings clear and the ball was in her court. The
second kissed me outside a frat house bathroom because I
hadn’t been actively pursuing her but I guess she wanted
to. And now there is this girl and I have never considered
myself a shitty kisser and this girl is throwing herself at
me and making it clear what she wants and I fucking can’t.
I am frozen for minutes and she probably feels my heart-
beat, hard and fast. Then I blurt out, “Can I ask you to do
something weird?”
“Um,” she says, and I quickly say, “I mean, not really
weird. Not super weird or anything. Just kind of weird.”
“OK, try me,” she says.
“Can you … kiss me?” I ask.
Well, there’s my soul.
She takes a deep breath and I tell her I know it’s stu-
pid or weird and I’m sorry and I don’t know why, and she
scowls and says “no,” like I’m wrong to feel weird about it.
I hope I am, but I’m not sure.
She kisses me. We kiss. I think it’s fine but I really don’t
know because a few minutes after it’s over, she leaves. OK,
it’s 5:00 in the morning, so that’s fine, but it still feels a
little abrupt. And when she gets home she messages me
“sweet dreams,” so it wasn’t weird enough for her to ice me
out completely. But a few days pass and we don’t talk much
and I ask if she wants to hang out again and she agrees but
it just doesn’t happen. And every time I think about any
embarrassing aspect of that night — the question I asked
her, the kiss itself, the moments afterward with her staring
at the ceiling, the way she stepped out the door without
really smiling as she said goodbye — I feel fucking humili-
ated and I shut my eyes and press my palms into my eyelids
so hard I see color.
I am not sure what happened. Maybe I am a truly awful
kisser or I did something weird while it was happening.
Maybe my self-consciousness was a massive turn-off. I’m
not sure what in particular screwed things up, because
everything was going so well before, and even if things did
get a little weird, was that really enough to undo the emo-
tional intimacy we achieved before? Or maybe that wasn’t
real emotional intimacy; maybe it was just one touchy girl
and a lot more physical attention than I was ever used to.
But what I do know is that my persona as a writer is
inextricably linked to every other aspect of my personality
and life, including dating. Every person I meet, I wonder
what exactly they think about me, not just general feel-
ings of like/dislike but extremely specific details. I strive
to remember and write down everything that happens to
me. I wonder about old friends, I speculate about future
friends, sometimes I think about every single person I
know and wonder what everyone is individually doing at
this very moment and what they did yesterday and years
ago and what they’ll do years from now and I become over-
whelmed and want to pass out so my head isn’t filled with
so many unanswerable questions.
In sitcoms, the characters go on dates with new people
every episode, and every new guest star is a caricature —
“the one who’s obsessed with model trains” or “the one
who’s attractive but dumb.” At the end of each episode, the
guest star leaves and Monica Geller or Jessica Day or Ted
Mosby moves on. But I can’t move on like that.
This is part of why I don’t date regularly. As much as I
might yearn to flirt at parties and sleep around, I am not
someone who can, because I am seriously self-conscious,
and I don’t have the ability to forget anyone or flatten them
into a two-dimensional guest star in my life. As a writer
who strives to be a good person, my stubborn penchant for
imagining the vast complexity of everyone’s lives is help-
ful. But as a 20-year-old who sometimes wants almost des-
perately to be in a loving long-term relationship, it’s shitty.
It’s very frequently my absolute favorite quality about
myself, but in times like these, it’s my least favorite.
So there I was sitting with a girl who really liked me and
I couldn’t make a move because I was obsessively worrying
about what would happen and what she would think and
what could go wrong and what she could tell her friends
about me. I was paralyzed everywhere, wanting and feel-
ing but physically unable to do what I needed to do.
What I try to remind myself now is that this is still a
transitional period. As I meet new people and date more,
I’ll learn to get out of my own head. I will learn to care more
about what I want than what other people want, to be self-
ish but in a healthy way. I’ll learn to forget the people who
deserve to be forgotten for their ultimate insignificance to
my life. And one day, I will be in a relationship that doesn’t
require so much constant scrutiny and self-consciousness.
But on the worst days, I am worried that it will never
happen, and that it will be because of me. It will be because
of my insistence on thinking of people as individuals with
a dizzying, incomprehensible array of hopes, dreams, fears
and particular reasons they feel the way they do about me.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
6B
Scared of Romance
by Ben Rosenstock, Senior Arts Editor
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA