“This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” I told my friends one evening at Clive’s. “Getting back out there. I’m on Tinder and I think I’m going to try Hinge.”
Lauren laughed ruefully and said, “Godspeed.”
Amirah pointed out, not necessarily helpfully, that I’d barely been “out there” to begin with. Having dated Jon since I was nineteen, I wasn’t making some grand comeback to single life. This was my debut.
My first date was with a twenty-seven-year-old bartender called Sofia, from whom I got the idea to use normal-to-average photos of myself on my dating profiles. She had seemed pretty enough online—short and strong, with bold eyebrows and little Marie Antoinette boobs—but when we met in real life, and I first saw her walking toward the patio where I was guarding two ciders while trying not to be sweaty, she looked so beautiful that I thought briefly about running away. Instead, I wiped my clammy palms on my jeans and, before I could stop myself, shook her hand like this was some kind of sexual and emotional job interview, which I guess in a way it was.
Sofia took my hand with a sly smile and said, “How’s it going, Maggie?” and we spent three hours drinking cider and talking about our core wounds before getting to second base in Trinity Bellwoods. The date was so successful I spent a week or so entertaining the idea that I was done with men for good, but then on another date a musician called Tyler lifted me up onto his washing machine, and I was forced to admit I was pretty much interested in whoever was interested in me.
It took an enormous amount of time, all the swiping around, matching, picking a charming yet aloof opening line . . . then the banter, the scheduling, the rescheduling, the canceling and finding someone new. Sometimes I would let Olivia or Amirah swipe around for me. People in committed relationships got a real kick out of “the apps,” not because, as many seemed to think, they were jealous or wistful about new, high-tech methods of meeting and mating. They approached it more like war correspondents, as if they had a duty to impartially observe the horror. I could see it in their eyes when a profile popped up featuring the bottom two-thirds of a man’s face incredibly close up in three different locations, or a woman I’d been speaking to for four days revealed she had a boyfriend and was looking for a fun surprise for their anniversary, or when a man messaged, u suck cock? with the emoji of a monkey bashfully covering its eyes. There was an excitement there, an eagerness to rush back and report to their partner from the front lines of modern dating: you wouldn’t believe it, babe, it’s a nightmare out there.
It was not always a nightmare. Sofia was lovely, and we saw each other two more times before she sent me a long message full of compliments and ending with the information that she was getting back together with her ex. Lauren and I went on a double date with a pair of cousins who got us free tickets to several basketball games, and a woman called Gretchen made me squirt, something I had previously thought impossible. Even when a date was bad—the man who flossed at the table, the woman who asked if she could use some of my pubic hair for “non-dark sexual magick”—it didn’t matter. There were, as promised, many more fish in the sea. Lots of these fish were even attractive. Some were fun to talk to, and really the only thing that mattered was that all of them were technically available. Once you matched with someone and parsed the obligatory how’s your day goings and what you looking for on heres, you were between twelve hours and two weeks from a first date.
I was always surprised by how forthcoming new matches were before we’d even met in person. In these ten-minute preliminary chats I learned about people’s peccadilloes, parental relationships, and least favorite coworkers before I knew their last names or how tall they really were. For my part, I preferred to drop the divorce bomb in person, though I was never sure how to approach this disclosure. I asked a friend with herpes for pointers and was told she’d rather date a guy with an STI than “that level of emotional baggage.”
I said I was the total package: dead inside, plus I got cold sores.
“Oh, if it’s just cold sores you don’t have to tell them,” she said. “HSV-1 is not the headline herpes.”
Far from being a problem, my marital status provided a fun talking point. Most people reacted with amused surprise, as if I’d told them I’d had a secret life as a famous children’s performer or an international spy. It was also a neat segue into both parties discussing what went wrong in their last relationships, an activity that comprised a full 50 percent of the app dates I went on. Amy was right: it made me seem exciting, even mysterious. Also—and perhaps most important—it made me seem unlikely to seek commitment, something I quickly learned most men did not want and most women wanted immediately but seemed to love being denied.
Noticing this made me feel like I was living in one of those sitcoms where characters are always saying, “It’s the nineties!” but I could not deny the pattern that evolved. Men were apparently freed by the thought that a woman actively trying to disentangle herself from one man would not be quick to jump into a serious relationship with another, and women found it either romantically tragic or relatable. If they didn’t want to save me, at least we could trade war stories—not everyone is divorced, but everyone’s had their heart broken.
A younger woman I met on Hinge told me my marital status was “honestly kind of chic,” adding that it functioned “like an age reset, because you don’t look young, no offense, but you look very young to be divorced.” Later that night she—Harriet, I think? maybe Hali?—got her period so hard that the blood seeped through my sheets, staining my mattress. A few days after that I made a joke over text about medieval virginity tests, saying my father, the king, had been pleased to see it, but she didn’t get it, or if she did, she didn’t like it. Either way, she didn’t respond.
Clive told me Gen Z rarely wasted time breaking things off in full.
“I think it’s a best-case scenario,” he said. “Old guys are so clingy. With young people, they like you or you never hear from them again.”
This would very much prove to be true. In my first month on the apps I went on six first dates, three second dates, and one third date. I didn’t see anyone a fourth time. It was nice to be busy, to have places to be and reasons to shower. It was nice, too, to have a good reason to look at my phone. Suddenly sitting at home scrolling mindlessly on Twitter felt like biding time between important texts. My phone was not only a food delivery portal or scrapbook full of heartbreaking pictures and videos. It was a hub of sexual affirmation and potential romantic connection! Being on it for hours just made sense.
But as the weeks went on and the novelty of the all-you-can-fuck human buffet wore off, I realized my favorite part of these dates was the hour or so before they started. I liked the ritual of date preparation: showering and moisturizing languidly, trimming my armpit hair （she’s a feminist!） and shaving my leg hair （a low-key one!）， working a lightly scented oil through the ends of my head hair while the ice melted in a little pre-date pick-me-up on the radiator.
I’d stream something to get me in the mood to be alluring, singing along as blasé women crooned through my phone’s tinny speakers, eating a light snack to absorb alcohol but avoid bloat. I’d run through the evening in my head, idly rehearsing my dumb jokes, trying to remember if this person was the one I’d already told about the devastating sunburn of 2005, or if that had been someone else who also wore glasses and enjoyed travel.