Dating : Please Stop Saying I Need to Have Sex

But a couple of weeks ago, while going through a tough moment with my feelings about the breakup, a friend told me he thought I needed to get a new guy to think about, to be able to forget about the last one. “That’s what I did,” he said, recalling how six months ago he had jumped from one relationship to another in less than a week (something I would hardly say is a good way to deal with your emotions). “You need to have sex,” he said. And this time, I was weak enough to listen. This time, I let all those other people and their comments get to me.

I knew I wasn’t ready. But I was bored and sad, having a hard time with my writing and with work, as well as still carrying these unresolved issues and feelings about the person who had broken my heart. So I downloaded a couple of dating apps and got to work.

It was pretty easy at first, as it always is. You go down the rabbithole and swipe left,left,left,right,left,left,left,left,left,left, right, until you get dizzy and realize you forgot to prepare dinner. I lost one good evening and a lunch break to dating apps, and I’m glad to say that was pretty much all the time I wasted swiping.

I was left with some observations:

• If you only have one photo on your profile, it feels like you’re a creep.
• If your first photo is not of you but of a landscape or a celebrity (this happens surprisingly often) it’s much less likely people will check out the other pictures.
• It’s pretty easy to get matches, but few people actually take the time to have a conversation or meet somebody. It feels a little like people are only there to boost their egos with the matches they can get, not even intending to go any further with it.
• What people say in their profiles they are looking for is often not true.
• Everybody lists “travel” as their interest. Now, unless you are really traveling several times a month, I’d say this is not really a hobby or a personality trait and doesn’t tell me anything about you, except that you couldn’t come up with anything more imaginative.
• Men over forty that have never been married or in a long relationship are a giant red flag that you should run away from as fast as you can (this is in Buenos Aires and might not apply to every other place in the world).
• Men over forty who recently got divorced from their high school sweetheart might not be great guys either. They could also just be on Tinder trying to recover from their lost youth and get through as many women as they can find, the younger the better.
• Don’t believe everything you see. Women use a lot of filters and Facetune (I learned this while comparing Tinders with a male coworker). Men always think they are two inches taller than they really are.

But among all the swiping I managed to get a few matches, a couple of guys started talking to me and I made plans to meet one of them pretty much the next day. He was what I’d call my target demographic as far as age and physical appearance went, and we had a lot in common when it came to education and work. I met him and, while I didn’t feel like he was the love of my life or that we’d really share any important values, we had a lot of other things in common, so I let myself go (I’m a progressive, anti-populist pro-choice vegan living in Argentina, so I’ve pretty much given up on meeting someone who would share my entire worldview).

I didn’t know if I liked him, or if I just liked something about him, but I went out with him a couple of times and had sex. Yes, I did it, after two years. It was technically good, I could tell he’d spent the past two decades going on a lot of dates with women like me. But it didn’t give me anything more than that. There was no spark, no passion of any kind. I had fun, sure, and it felt good to feel another person’s body close. But it wasn’t what I wanted. There was no real connection.

However, I was putting in a real effort to get to know him. I didn’t want the sex to just be sex. I wanted the fact that I’d gotten to this point to mean something.

And then, after a few more dates, he ghosted. Said: “I’m sick, let’s talk in a couple of days,” only to be never heard of again. I still stuck to the dating apps for a week or so, but felt it harder and harder to be interested in the whole thing. Then I deleted all of them.