Right Swiping
THERE WAS A KNOCK at the door of my cabin. There he was, the guy I was here with at this music festival.
“I locked myself out of my cabin, so can I use your key to get back in?” he asked. I looked at him, wondering how this grown man makes it through life. “No, you can’t,” I said slowly. “Why?” he asked, confused. “Because that’s not how keys work,” I said, gritting my teeth. “My key won’t open your door.”
He looked at me helplessly, just as he had when he couldn’t figure out how to get the car key out of the ignition, and I had to tell him to put the car in “park” when he parks it. Like when he forgot his festival pass and we were forty minutes away, and when he accidentally ran over a raccoon and joked about it constantly, even though I told him it upset me. He was baffled when I couldn’t wait to drop him off at the airport after four very long days.
Man oh man, dating is an area where I see (and experience) a lot of suffering, especially in the wacky world of online dating. Every day my phone lights up with a friend asking for help analyzing a message (or the lack of a message). It’s not exclusive to gender or age or any other qualifier—everyone’s doing it, everyone’s messed up from it, and we all think, “It must just be me.”
It’s not. We’re all floundering in these murky dating waters together, telling ourselves the same stories about why we (and everyone
