“Wait, hold on.” Her hand cups my shoulder and stops me. “You really still love him? Jane, ask yourself why…what was so great about him?”
“It wasn’t just him, Julia. It was us. It was how we were together.” I shift down a few more steps and stop to look back up at her. “I don’t know if it matters now, but me and Dex? We were good together, we fit together perfectly.”
“Until you didn’t?” she asks.
“Yeah, until we didn’t. But God, I wish we still did.”
When we get outside, Julia is tapping away at her phone furiously. I wonder if she wants to get some takeout and drink some wine, but before I can ask, she looks up from her phone with a surprisingly large smile across her face. “Do you mind if I call it a night?”
“Did you just meet someone on an app in the stairwell with me?”
“Sort of, it’s not a hook-up at all, but I’m definitely meeting someone for something.”
“That sounds like a drug deal.”
She laughs and waves as she walks in the opposite direction of our apartment building with a bounce in her step.
I suddenly envy the trajectory she’s walking in; Dex lives that way and I find myself wishing we could really erase everything and start over from scratch and fall in love all over again. But things like that don’t really happen in real life. Not for me anyway.
Later that night when I slip into bed, I get my first message on Misanthrope, the alarms once again scaring the hell out of me. I immediately swipe at the screen and try to squint at my match’s profile, even zooming in, but all get out of the picture is a blur of dark colors.
Match 1:My favorite mutual dislike so far: people who ask stupid questions. Then they tell you to start a chat with your match by asking a stupid question.
Me: I think my favorite mutual dislike is using dating apps.
Match 1: And yet here we both are.
Me: Yes, chatting like adults. Your next message isn’t going to be asking me for nudes, is it?
Match 1: Nudes? Forget nudes. I want a dating app that requires people to upload pictures of their medicine cabinet so I can figure out what kind of psycho I’m dealing with.
Me: Oh, that’s good and we need a feature that would recognize all unsolicited dick pics before they are successfully delivered, censor them, and give users the option to reveal them if they so choose.
Match 1: Oh, no really? Woman don’t like random dick pics? I thought you all had folders on your computer full of various-sized penises. ;)
Me: Oh, we do. I have an entire folder named Man Meat. And every time I receive an undesired one, I send back a bigger dick pic from my Man Meat arsenal.
Match 1: Hmm. What if you received a desirable one?
Me: Oh, then in that case I beg for the desirable one to come over immediately so I can acquaint myself with the one-eyed monster personally.
Match 1: LMAO. It sounds like we’d have a great dating app. I’d think it should also come with an emoji translator. I don’t know what half these women are trying to say to me.
Me: The app should also take your profile picture for you, not something you upload from a party you were at ten years and twenty pounds ago.
Match 1: With a three-hundred-sixty view so you can see them from all angles.
Me: We should also mandate an upload of the user’s residence. I once met a guy on Tinder and went back to his house where his mother walked in on us when she was trying to do his laundry. He also had a huge horsehead mask hanging on his wall that he kept asking me to put on.
Match 1: Are you serious?
Me: Unfortunately.
For a few momentsMatch 1 doesn’t respond with anything and I wonder if I’ve somehow ruined the mood. It was a descent conversation so far.
Me:How about if the app had testimonials from friends or exes?
Match 1: I’d skip that part. Not one of my exes would say anything nice about me.
