CHAPTER 1
The Queen
“When he does the bare minimum — and you decide minimum isn’t enough anymore”
SLOANE
The moment I decided to burn my dating life to the ground, I was eating cold pad thai across from a man explaining Bitcoin.
His name was Brad. Or possibly Chad. Definitely a name that belonged on a lacrosse roster or a list of people banned from a country club for inappropriate behavior at the annual gala. He’d spent the last forty-three minutes — I’d checked my phone twice, once when I lost the will to live and once when I found it again just to calculate how long this torture had lasted — explaining cryptocurrency to me passionately, convinced he was saving my poor female brain from financial illiteracy. Never mind that I’d casually mentioned having a degree in communications with a minor in economics. Never mind that I’d turned a single tweet into a cultural phenomenon. Brad-Chad was here to educate me, and he was going to do it whether I wanted him to or not.
“The thing about blockchain,” — he checked his phone for approximately the fifteenth time since we’d sat down — “is that most people just don’t get it. Women especially. No offense.”
No offense. As if those two words were a magic spell that could retroactively un-offend the offensive thing you’d just said. No offense, but you’re an idiot. No offense, but your face isstupid. No offense, but I’m going to mansplain the concept of money to you while eating the spring rolls you said you couldn’t eat because of your shellfish allergy.
Oh yes. He’d done that too.
When I’d ordered, I’d said — clearly, distinctly, in the Queen’s English. “I’m allergic to shellfish, so I’ll have the vegetable pad thai.” And when the server had brought out the appetizers, Brad-Chad had smoothly intercepted my plate and swapped it with his shrimp spring rolls, claiming he “didn’t really like shrimp anyway” and “you should try these, they’re amazing.”
I’d stared at the glistening, potentially-fatal-to-me rolls on my plate and a crack opened inside my chest. Not my heart — deeper than that. A fracture that had been building for years, through dozens of dates just like this one, through men who talked over me and ordered for me and texted other women while pretending to listen to my stories. A fracture that looked up at Brad-Chad’s perfectly gelled hair and thought: I am twenty-eight years old and I have been on approximately one hundred first dates, and not a single one of them has evolved into a thing worth keeping.
My mother’s voice echoed in the back of my skull, how it always did when I teetered on the edge of an emotional cliff. She was a corporate attorney who’d built her career on accuracy, restraint, and the ability to remain calm while men twice her age tried to talk over her in boardrooms. She had never understood how she’d raised a daughter who felt everything so loudly, who wanted so much, who couldn’t seem to accept less. You always do too much, Sloane. You expect too much. You want too much. That’s why these dates never work out. You need to be less… you.
I’d heard that voice so many times that it had calcified into a truth I believed.
“Are you even listening?” Brad-Chad asked, his brow creasing as men do when they’re not used to being ignored. “I was explaining gas fees.”
I set down my chopsticks — the ones I’d been using to push cold noodles around my plate for the past twenty minutes — and smiled my terrible-date smile — the one I’d perfected over years of dinners just like this. Sweet enough to be polite. Sharp enough to cut. “I’m sorry,” — I pressed my napkin to the table — “I must have zoned out somewhere around minute thirty-seven. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re wondering if your dinner is going to send you into anaphylactic shock.”
He blinked at me, confused.
I pointed at the spring rolls. “Shrimp. Shellfish. Allergy. I mentioned it.” A pause, perfectly timed. “You know, when you were paying attention to me instead of your phone.”
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “I thought you were joking.”
And that was when I knew — with the marrow-level certainty of a woman who had finally, finally hit bottom — that I was done. Not just with Brad-Chad and his cryptocurrency TED talk and his complete inability to retain even the most basic information about the person sitting across from him. I was done with all of it. The apps, the dates, the endless parade of men who couldn’t bother remembering whether or not eating shrimp would kill me.
I flagged down our server, asked for the check, and didn’t bother coming up with a polite excuse when Brad-Chad asked if I wanted to get drinks after. I just looked at him with a dead-eyed stare usually reserved for women in true crime documentaries. “I think we both know how this ends.”
His Uber rating? Two stars. And I wrote a very detailed review.
Three hours later, I was sitting on my couch in the sweatpants I’d owned since college — the ones with the hole in the left knee and the elastic waistband that had given up on life two years before I did. Drinking my third glass of Pinot Grigio and doom-scrolling through dating app profiles with the morbid fascination of a woman watching her own funeral.
Men holding fish. Men standing next to cars that probably weren’t theirs. Men whose bios read “fluent in sarcasm” or “looking for my partner in crime” or, my personal favorite, “not here for hookups” above a shirtless mirror selfie that suggested otherwise. The bar for men wasn’t just low — it was so far underground that archaeologists would someday discover it and mistake it for a primitive tool. Homo sapiens dating expectations, they’d write in their research journals. Believed to have been used for self-flagellation.
I’d had three glasses of wine. My judgment was questionable. My rage, however, was justified.
I opened Twitter (alright, X).
Dating show idea, I typed, my thumbs moving with the furious precision usually reserved for passive-aggressive work emails. Men compete to prove they can ACTUALLY listen. Challenge 1: I talk for an hour, quiz after. Challenge 2: Cook my comfort food without asking what it is. Challenge 3: Notice when I’m tired before I say it. Eliminated immediately if you say “not all men” or try to explain crypto.
I stared at the tweet for three seconds. Then I hit send.
Then I finished my wine, put on a face mask, and fell asleep on the couch with my phone clutched to my chest for comfort.
I woke up to 50,000 notifications, a voicemail from my best friend Tessa that simply said“We need to talk about how you’re accidentally about to become the most famous person in America,”and a missed call from my mother.
I called Tessa back first.
