Four hundred matches, every one of them a quarter of an hour from my door
- Looking for
- four consecutive messages from one person, which is apparently rare
- Experience
- Two years, no dynamic yet, one friendship.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
Four hundred matches in two years, and if I plotted them on a map every single one would be inside a fifteen minute ride. Eleven of them turned into a conversation lasting more than a day. One turned into a coffee. None turned into anything else, and the total distance separating me from all four hundred of them would not fill an afternoon.
That arithmetic is the thing I cannot get past. In a big city you can tell yourself the map is the problem. Here the map has been eliminated as a suspect and what is left is that matching is free and therefore worth nothing, and everybody, me included, is holding forty conversations that never started.
Twenty seven, the west, submissive, two years in and nothing to show for it except a very clear understanding of the numbers.
I have changed one thing. I write first, on the day, with something specific in it, and I do not match with anybody I am not going to write to. My totals collapsed and my life improved.
Not looking to be one of forty. Not looking for somebody who reappears every three weeks with a friendly nothing. And not looking for anybody who thinks a match is an event, because I have four hundred of them and they are worth precisely nothing.