I was having lunch with my friend M the other day and she mentioned one of her girlfriend’s who’d been writing back and forth with a man through a dating service for an extended period of time. They’d never met in person.
It’s easy to imagine this is the worst face of internet dating.; two people so lonely for companionship that they’re willing to spend big chunks of their time emailing their daily devotional thoughts and fears. It might be one thing to have an intimate correspondence with an old friend who lives far away, but the idea of doing it with a stranger carries an undercurrent of desperation.
When I was twenty-two I wound up emailing a woman who had gone to my high school. A mutual friend thought that we might have something in common. We were both writers, read too much, and had a similar taste for deviance and disruption. She still lived in Fresno and I had been in LA for more than four years. I didn’t know anyone there anymore, and the idea that I might still have a friend in the town where I grew up, a writer no less, made me happy.
We started emailing and got along as predicted. We picked up each other’s musical references and had patience for arcane arguments about DH Lawrence versus Anais Nin. In hindsight, it was an embarrassing scrum of mutual assurance that we were separate and better than all those other slackjaws; a short-term emotional cocoon for the overly sensitive post-graduate.
Our e-mails gave way to phone calls, and after a few months I decided it was time to stop ebbing around the edges. I asked her if I could come up and visit her one weekend. She said yes.
I had no idea what she looked like. The only point of reference I had was a hazy photo from my high school yearbook. She was pale and freckly and her lips were small but puffy pink. I had the mental pre-tingle of sex the whole drive up. It was exciting imagining what she would be like in person. I had come to know her personality well enough, but there was a whole other being to be reckoned with. Her physical bearing, her mannerisms, rhythms, movements, smells. Her inner self had been a good partner so far. I was hopeful that the physical side would be a good match as well.
When she opened the door to her apartment I was overwhelmed by stale air and cat piss. She was wearing dirty blue sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt with blotchy stains spattered across it. Whatever might have been tingling inside me earlier came to a stop.
Suddenly, the idea of a long weekend with A’s company seemed like an insurmountable trudge. I had imagined a lithe kink-sprite tumbling from the pages of Delta of Venus. Instead, I was entering the zone with a pallid introvert with an over-generous tolerance for the stench of her cat’s bodily waste. For a moment I imagined turning around, walking back to my car, and driving the four hours back to LA.
“Come in,” she said.
We talked for a little while. I helped her with the last bit of tidying up which my arrival had so noticeably interrupted. The sun was going down and we decided to get some beer and watch a movie. I was nervous and tried to keep her at arm’s length with conversation, hoping I could cover my recoil with some affable chatter about anything so long as it was non-sexual. She remained quiet, answering in barely audible mumbles and short clips that I couldn’t reconcile with the woman I had gotten to know over the phone.
After a few beers and an hour of an old movie she suddenly became animated. We were sitting side by side on her couch, awash in a sea of cat hair. She reached for a small tin of lip balm and put some on. She asked if she could put some on me.
My body stiffened and I tried to keep my eyes locked on the television. This was the moment I had been dreading. She was going to try and seduce me now. I had hoped I could passively joke my way through the weekend as if we were just good buddies catching up. But she was ready for sex. I figured out some terrible excuse for not wanting to put on lip balm (“Why? I don’t really feel like I need it.”) but she persisted. After a few minutes, we came to a compromise. I would put on lip balm but I would apply it myself.
Not deterred, she bent down at my feet and started undoing my shoelaces. I was wearing heavy boots and it took some doing to unlace them. I knew what was happening but I didn’t know how to tell her no. I wished there would have been a button to push or a placard I could hold up that could settle things. Instead she pulled off my boot and smelled the inside with a giant inhale, all while looking me in the eye.
“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.
I told her we should just watch the movie. She threw my boot across the room and then leaned over me, lowering her mouth to mine. I leaned away and held my forearm up to keep us separate. She pulled away and looked at the floor. She sat down next to me on the couch and after a few minutes I heard her crying.
We finished the movie in silence and then went to bed. I lay beside her all night, rigid and afraid to move for fear of brushing against her.
Affinity for someone’s personality is not sex. I had no idea.
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch