I have forty matches and every single one of them is dead
- Looking for
- one live conversation instead of forty dead ones
- Experience
- A year on the app, forty matches, no meetings and no arrangement.
- Around
- the west of the city, Berlin
Forty matches. The oldest is from last summer. Every one of them began with two friendly messages and then stopped, mostly on my side, and the list now works as a record of the evenings when I was briefly brave. I scroll it occasionally the way people go through an old drawer. Nothing in it is going to happen and I cannot make myself clear it either.
Forty five, the west of the city, curious, a year of this and no real idea what I am doing.
The thing nobody says out loud is that a match feels like progress and is not. It costs nothing at either end. Forty of them is not forty people who wanted me, it is forty people who did not rule me out in half a second, which is a very much smaller thing than it looks at two in the morning.
What I would like is one conversation that survives a fortnight, then a coffee in daylight. Past that I do not know, and the not knowing is why I stall at message three every time.
Not looking for anybody who expects me to arrive with a list of preferences. Not looking to be somebody's easy yes, which I suspect is how I have been read. And not looking for a person who vanishes at the point where it becomes real, because I have done that to four people myself and I know exactly what it looks like from the other side.