I went out with a guy named Ben. He showed up in jeans and a ’70s ringer shirt pocked with holes and said, “Look, I dressed up for you,” and already I liked him. He had brown eyes that caught the light.
We sat in a bar that was delightfully sleazy, and he drank a beer and I drank water, and nothing was forced or uncomfortable about this arrangement, which was shocking in itself. He asked me why I quit drinking, and I told him. I asked why he and his wife split, and he told me. We both baby-stepped toward each other, one refusal to lie at a time. When he walked me to my car, he said, “So I’m unemployed, I’m broke, and I still live with my ex. I understand if you never want to see me again, but you should know all that.”
I saw him the next week. What the hell, he was different. We sat outside a gelato store with our feet kicked up on the railing, and we talked about pornography. I can’t remember now who opened the door in the conversation leading to the hallway that contained beaver shots, but he told a story about the first dirty picture he ever saw. Hustler magazine, the hard-core stuff. All these women spreading their labias, six of them stacked on the page like bricks in a wall, and he felt a little ruined by it. Because after that, he needed so much just to get the same scorpion sting. He’d gone to college during a wave of antiporn sentiment in the late ’80s, and he’d learned to be ashamed of his desires. Then he got married. Then the marriage caved. Now all he wanted was to dig himself out of the rubble and figure out who he was.
I let him kiss me that night. A lovely, soft, and unfrightening kiss. “I’ll call you,” he said, but he didn’t, and that was fine, too, because some relationships are good to say yes to for a very short time. It was nice to learn that rejection didn’t have to burn.
I thought about Ben sometimes. I thought about the photo of all the labias, because some part of his description reminded me of the pretty boys I used to cut out of teen magazines and plaster over every inch of my fifth-grade bedroom. Maybe this was my own version of a beaver shot: all those puppy-dog eyes staring at me, boring into me. I wondered why women like me complained about pornography setting up unrealistic expectations for men, but we rarely talked about how romantic comedies—and the entire bubble-blowing industry of teen magazines and obsessive pop songs—set up unrealistic expectations for us, and I wondered if I was a little ruined, too.
Maybe we all were ruined. Porn and Hollywood clichés were like the wooden framework that built dating sites. The women wanted walks on the beach, exotic trips, someone to talk to after a long day at work. The guys claimed to want that, too, and then they would show up in your in-box, demanding a tit shot.
The more I hung around the dating site, the more I suspected a few of those guys could use a little more shame about their desires. I couldn’t believe the things men would ask of a woman they’d never met. I’m in town for a weekend away from my wife. Would you like nostrings-attached sex? Or: I really can’t meet for coffee, but I am willing to fuck. And so I practiced saying no, because clearly these guys weren’t hearing that word enough.
A 23-year-old sent a flirty message one day, and I wrote back, telling him I was flattered, but he was a little too young for me. “Nonsense,” he replied. “Age isn’t nothin’ but a number. All it means is that I have more to cum in your face.”
First of all: He needed to double-check his science. And second of all: No. Noooooooo, young sir, no way in any time or temperate zone. What happened? What warp of etiquette and eroticism had conspired to result in such a blisteringly wrong sentence?
These guys were way too enabled by the false intimacy of the Internet, which allowed you to toss out come-ons you would never utter if you were staring into another person’s eyes. The frightening reality of another human being, the frightening reality of our imperfect and stuttering selves. How much technology has been designed to avoid this? We’re all looking for ways to be close at a distance. Alcohol bridged the gap for me, the way the Internet bridges the gap for others. But maybe everyone needs to stop trying to leap over these fucking gaps and accept how scary it is to be real and vulnerable in the world.
One night in April, I went out with a guy who was studying psychology. We ate at a fried chicken restaurant, one of those trendy places where they served comfort food that used to be trashy. The guy talked fast, and I enjoyed the thrill of trying to keep up. “You’re a contrarian,” I told him, licking grease off my fingers.
“Is that good?” he asked. “I want to be the thing that you like.” And it was the first time someone had said this to me, but I recognized it as my driving motto for the past 25 years. It was nice to be on the other side for a change.