Companionship: Moving from 35,000 feet to 20,000 feet
Loneliness takes so many shapes, in its emptiness and human efforts to fill it. My inner compass is guiding me towards a somewhat closer view of what life could look like with the filling of that loneliness with a partner, which is risky as well as magnetic territory.
If you ignore my Hume apparent body age prediction, I am young for a person who has taken 61 trips around the sun. Based on geneology alone, I could live another 30 years, hopefully at least 99% of those years really well. That is just about the same length of time as my marriage. Let’s take a moment for the zoinks/holy shit response to that reality.
The emptiness of my home as well as the verbal, and sensory quietude is a really important part of my response and healing, after a progressively isolated, ending-of-life life with Mike as his disease progressed. It is shifting in my need and its meaning. I listen to it like a pulse, waiting for a trend to understand how to best respond. I trust my instincts in this unfamiliar territory because I know I have wisdom that guides me. Given that I have made ridiculous, instinctive errors in my life, like when I added chutney to my tomato sauce, perhaps confidence in my instincts are poorly placed and timed (which is officially a human being kind of move).
I see this shift as if a plane is moving from 35k feet to 20k feet elevation. I can always fly back up if I’d like to. The symbolism of the landing equating to actual dating is quite erotic, but let’s set that aside and wait for another metaphor to surface there. But before setting that aside, the mammalian reality of skin hunger, loneliness and the ache for meaningful, tender companionship is a progressively louder voice in this silent house. I see the very real risk of that desire eclipsing judgement, just like when I was in my 20’s. Idiocy has a higher cost now as a grown up with real responsibilities, a reputation to uphold and a place on the stage. Moving slowly will help balance that out.
A month ago, I set up a hidden profile on a dating app just to see the ecosystem of a world of which I have never partaken. To be clear, online dating is no different than online shopping. I needed a marketing department, photographer, snappy slogans and an editor as I summarized myself to advertise my potential partnership to total strangers. SO weird.
This is nothing short of online shopping for a person, which is sparkly and intriguing, while also freakishly dystopian and disconnected.
My first “I like you” click (whatever that means) outreach was to an Italian appearing guy with genuine eyes, ample, dark hair and who used the word, “sapiophile” in his intro. Self-realization number one is that a solid, creative use of vocabulary piques my interest and sometimes even results in reflexive, desirous inner stirrings, which makes me realize that indeed I am a sapiophilic mammal subject to instinctual responses to pheromones and cleverness. I had never recognized this in my 20’s when dating, and for the last 34 years I simply loved Mike.
Just as in hiring, each response in online dating is a data point, and it must trend in the right direction. Every response counts - the pause, the word selection, and warmth really matter. For creatives, an innovative response to a prompt is fuel, and doesn’t take much time at all to hit the ball back. Steven’s first narrative reflected on the wacky world of online dating and inquired about the pending holiday. This response is a 1 on the 10-point scale of creative writing. It suggested a quick, thoughtless response likely due to fatigue with the process, which is totally fair.
I hit the ball back, being both interested and interesting. Playful and articulate is my jam and I liked my linguistic ‘dink’ into his kitchen. No response in 48 hours resulted in my pragmatic choice to unmatch. The truth is, I am selectively and tentatively exploring matches one at a time. Apparently some folks explore bulk responses to increase their statistical likelihood of a match. While that approach is absolutely logical, its an approach I can’t identify with simply because we are talking about human beings here, not crowd control at a Radiohead concert. Hitting the ball back requires timing and intention. Perhaps I was abrupt, but given response #1, I find him uninteresting. So currently my n= 1.
I am now onto the second data point: a gentleman whose headshot demonstrated total confidence and ownership of life while wearing a banana costume. This bold and goofy move, along with his graduate degree and 5/10 self description, got my attention at least enough to play with writing to him like a cat batting around a toy. We don’t know each other, so this is not playing with someone’s emotions: I simply complimented him on his bold confidence concurrently existing with the costume, which is a rare social move. Unfortunately he is allergic to cats and lives two hours away, so its out anyway, but there’s no reason this can’t be fun in the meantime. Why not hone the skills even with the logistically incompatible? Like fellow creative soldiers in the trenches, even when boundaries suggest incongruence, why not share a high five and fist bump to encourage each other along the way?
I don’t mean to brag or anything, but a lot of super elderly appearing gentlemen click on my profile, denoting the wish for a conversation. Clearly, my particular brand of ‘je ne sais quoi’ is catnip to boomer men with many colored collars. Pretty boys continue to be disinterested, which is on brand for my entire life. The pleasantly tousled, sleeper hero is more my type in all directions than the boy band guys, who always look for the blond, thin ones. That’s ok, because the blond thin ones now are osteoporotic and I have the bones of a powerful peasant woman. (#winning)
My goal is to find trends and to optimize my entertainment while texting with hopefully clever human beings. I’ve been most likely to raise my eyebrow to dudes who live too far away for a date, because they don’t know who I am. That statement alone may land like self-aggrandizement, as if I am a PNW Beyonce. But seriously, the concept of click-liking someone local only for our paths to cross socially is pretty cringeworthy. From a purely pragmatic perspective, there’s no way I’m driving 2 hours to Seattle or 8 hours to Oregon or for a date - unless it was one particular guy I liked in high school. So if he shows up in my feed, that would be quite an interest piquing, needle-in-haystack experience that is statistically unlikely yet quite juicy to contemplate.
In the meantime, I will be in training for the physical skills involved in online dating apps. An unfortunate finger scroll on the right side of the screen erroneously super-swiped on a guy named “Howdy”, who has not replied (thankfully). Perhaps his inbox is so full, just he’s catching up.