Three hundred matches in a city where I have met four people
- Looking for
- one person who will send four messages in a row and then name a day
- Experience
- Two years, no dynamic yet, one friendship.
- Around
- Stockport, Manchester
Three hundred matches in two years. Four of them turned into a conversation that lasted more than a day. One of those became a coffee. Nobody has ever become anything. Those are the real numbers and I have finally stopped reading them as a verdict on me.
Twenty seven, Stockport, submissive. What I have worked out is that a match costs nobody anything and therefore means nothing, and in a pool this size everybody is also quietly aware that the person they are ignoring might be somebody's cousin, which makes people even less inclined to say anything definite.
So I have changed one thing. I write first, on the day, with something in it that could only have been sent to that person, and I do not match with anybody I am not going to write to that evening. My totals collapsed. My life got better.
What I want underneath all of that is structure that holds on an ordinary Tuesday. Rules I check in against, somebody who notices when I have gone quiet, an arrangement with a shape rather than a mood.
Not looking to be one of forty. Not looking for anybody who reappears after three weeks with a friendly nothing. Not looking for a person who treats a match as an achievement, because I have three hundred and they are worth nothing at all.