Chapter 1: The inciting incident
You’ve got to ask the universe for what you want. That’s what a guy dressed like Jesus at a music festival told me once. Only he meant some kind of ritual, setting your wishes on fire in the full moon, affirmations in the mirror and that. He was right, though he could have been clearer if he’d just said, ‘You’ve got to actually download a dating app.’
I guess most people figure this one out early on. But if you have a prodigious imagination and a talent for self-deception, as I do, you can get to your mid-twenties protected by the delusion that one day you’ll drop a pile of packages and a handsome stranger will pick them up who, by chance, you’ll be madly attracted to, and they you, and who will turn out to be a sexually talented financially stable black-belt Arctic explorer with your exact sense of humour and an ambition to have, for example, one-maybe-two children with you (an inexperienced socially anxious administrative employee) at least ten years into the future but before your eggs become inviable, while first exploring every continent in the world together and also, totally by surprise, taking you to see Hamilton the musical in New York at the cost of a month’s rent as a whimsical romantic gesture.
People will try to convince you in all sorts of ways that the reason you’re unfulfilled (in love or work) is your own self-made insecurities, when maybe the fact is, you spent so long studying to be what other people wanted that you never got to learn what you want or how to ask for it. I was twenty-five when I decided to take festival-Jesus’s advice.
At the time of the inciting incident, I was at home in my rented house truck, two thirds through My Ex-boyfriend’s Dad: A Forbidden Romance on Kindle. My underwear was around my knees, my pink dildo pulsing all the way inside my vagina as my left index finger, lubed up, explored the sensitive rim of my anus, when my mother’s face appeared in the far-right window of the truck, her hands cupping the glass like two binoculars, parsing the dark.
‘Knock knock,’ she called.
I fumbled for my clothes, washed my hands and opened the door to receive the left-over stir-fry, spare tea towels and details about my sister locking her keys in the car (again, somewhere along a state highway with the phone dying and the kids and dog possibly now sunburnt and without healthy snacks, roaming the adjacent farmland). It was clear that she hadn’t seen nor comprehended more than the idea that she had woken me from a nap. She has, thankfully, poor eyesight and the imagination of someone who met her husband, age twenty, at Bible camp.
‘What have you been up to?’ she said, finally.
The question always felt vague to me. I would do my best to remember the last time I’d caught up with whoever was asking and then list the events since then that would be considered most significant to them. But all I could think of at that moment was what I’d been doing just then.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘not much.’
Something about being interrupted in that position pushed me to reconsider my life choices. Despite my romantic imagination, until recently I’d convinced myself I was asexual. I wasn’t a virgin, but my experiences hadn’t exactly gone brilliantly, and I didn’t think I’d ever had a crush, not the way it was described in my books. When I’d felt something like what attraction was supposed to be, it was in response to someone being attracted to me, which made me think, was I just that much of a people pleaser? You couldn’t trust an emotion like that.
Although the dynamics in the two-dollar romance novels I read turned me on, the male characters were mostly mob bosses or small-town American landowners. They were interchangeable, their alluring traits being an abstract sense of confidence and possessiveness. I couldn’t find any similarities in them with the kinds of people I was likely to actually get along with or even meet in my own small city, where the prospects were mostly corporate dogsbodies and IT workers. But I couldn’t give up these poorly concocted, ethically preposterous erotic novels, I was losing sleep, whole days, to read them, so I knew the asexual hypothesis couldn’t be totally true. I was lonely, and I was horny.
When my mother left, I climbed back into my duvet nest. The wind was picking up, and it made the wooden shell of the truck strain squeakily in its frame. The truck belonged to my sister and when she came back in a month with her two kids and her husband, I’d have to find a house-share situation of my own.
‘I’ve decided to completely reinvent my life,’ I told my friend Annie the next day on our lunch breaks.
‘Did you have a new business idea?’ she asked. ‘Oi, what happened to your Mills and Boon?’ Annie wrinkled her nose over her coffee.
‘No. I mean, that’s still on my to do list.’ She had a point, reinventing my life was kind of my favourite hobby at that point in time. Three months ago, when I’d moved into the truck, I’d decided I’d become a sort of reclusive erotic novelist and churn out dirty little books about pirate threesomes and so on over the internet. ‘There’s just no time, really,’ I said. ‘But this is not a business idea. ‘Well, it’s not anything really. I’ve decided to start dating.’ Now that I thought about it, it was quite embarrassing.
‘Oh yeah? Do you want help with your profile?’
‘I might get you to review. I’m more worried about the whole messaging thing. I dunno, it’s kind of scary.’
‘Is it? Why?’
I frowned. I thought she’d say yeah, of course it is scary. ‘It just is.’ A memory flashed involuntarily in my mind – a particular section of wallpaper, sick feeling. Stop it fuck you get out. I pinched my arm under the table. Tried to think of puppies and tiramisu.
Dating was ‘not my comfort zone’. In a year or two, I’d get officially diagnosed as autistic. I was told I was as a kid, but nobody had really believed it since, not even me, so mostly, I still thought I ‘had anxiety’. I wasn’t autistic enough, you see. That’s because my autism is what some people, mistakenly, call ‘mild’ or ‘very high functioning’. They mean that I seem normal to them, just a bit anxious.
The best way I can explain it is like this: imagine you’re learning to drive for the first time, and the car you’re driving is a manual, but the person instructing you doesn’t know that it’s a manual (nobody in this scenario has even heard of a manual) and is teaching you how to drive an automatic. It takes you a long time to figure out to begin with. Sometimes your engine cuts out. It’s enraging and scary. You can’t understand why this instructor is not being clear with you. Why you can’t seem to follow their instructions. And then over time, if you’re a smart kid, you figure it out. You need a different set of rules, but you can drive just as well as others who drive automatics. Only sometimes it takes you a bit of extra concentration. You have to change gears, and it takes you a moment, and the person in the passenger seat sometimes wonders why you don’t seem to be listening to them. They don’t see that you have to change gears.
My autistic brain is like that manual car. And I was pretty good at driving it. By this point in my life, I was just as competent socially as many others who weren’t clinically autistic. Lots of autistic people have a ‘special interest’, a hobby or subject they’re way too intense about. By some combo of luck and strategy, since childhood, my special interest has been communication. I was always listening, building data, figuring out the rules. I’d taken theatre classes and learned that every instance of speech is an action, with a goal and not just a literal meaning, so I’d figured out how to pay attention to those actions. Still, my progress to social competence had been slow. I still struggled to initiate conversation, to answer open questions and to appear as if I was at ease in casual conversation and not sitting some sort of oral exam. None of this made traditional romantic meet-cutes likely.
That evening I made a dating profile, with what felt like a frivolous disregard for my own safety. Just to be on the app made me feel exposed. Vulnerable. Like an unpopular child who’s been coerced to stand up and invite a class of socially confident middle-schoolers to attend their birthday party.
Chapter 2: Think of me when you score
Every picture a man took with a dog or middle-aged woman seemed at first to be calculated, to disguise his true long game of boasting to his mates about sleeping with me. I almost gave up after two rounds of swiping in this state – every missing detail had a disappointing explanation. Surely other people didn’t approach dating like this. Normal people must start with the assumption that everyone else was also just trying to find a connection, that we were all on here playing musical chairs and our preferences and turn-offs were merely personal differences and therefore that to express interest in someone was not to fall into their complex emotional trap put there to take advantage of you, but instead simply a matter of sorting people into those who matched you, like choosing pairs of shoes.
I took some deep breaths and tried to swipe in a more generous frame of mind – certain common sins needed to be forgiven: wearing sunglasses in all the photos as though in disguise, trying to make pineapple on pizza an interesting point of debate. It was fine, I said. Men just weren’t good at profiles. They wouldn’t actually make you talk about pineapple on pizza.
The effect was swift. My phone was going off, ding, ding, ding, I hadn’t been this popular since my family lost me in the mall. Once I got into it, the messaging was much like starring on The Bachelorette, but without the emotional work of having to manage my contenders’ feelings when they were out of the running.
I thought too much at first. I sat pinned to my desk refreshing my work screen as I calculated the correct response to ‘Up to much this week?’ If I issued a non-response, a ‘not much’, they might lose interest; if I told the truth – binge-watching the Queens Gambit and napping – I might be revealed as sad and uninteresting, or worse, commit myself to explaining a television show: what happened and why I cared about it, which was another thing difficult to say. It’s about an orphan girl in the fifties who’s a chess prodigy and beats all the nerd boys. But who would care about that? Should I attempt to explain the vicarious indulgence of watching a little girl prove a room full of men wrong? And anyway, any character who is underestimated and outnumbered could produce the same response. It was true I enjoyed the show, but why this one? Wasn’t it just manufactured emotion wearing the hat of feminism? But I did enjoy it, despite myself. I wanted to say to those silly men, ‘Exactly, do you see now, do you see you were wrong and stupid and small?’ – but not really meaning about Beth Harmon the chess girl, but some part of myself that was still, metaphorically speaking, a little chess girl who was taught she couldn’t do it. How silly and confused would it sound to say all that aloud?
All this thinking made me sick. I typed in the work password again, phone balanced on my lap, refreshing the dating app with my other hand. I had to learn to care less – to be cruel – that was what it felt like, this game, cutting people off when I lost interest, responding only to who I chose, like a celebrity acknowledging a fan’s tweet.
The last man standing was a burly, Middle Eastern footballer. He used my name a lot in messages, and he followed everything with a smiling-blushing emoji, which made me think he must be bashful and happy-go-lucky. Normally, I distrusted overt cheerfulness, but I was trying to be a different sort of person.
‘Would you be keen to meet up tomorrow afternoon? 😊🥰😇’ he asked.
I messaged yes. I felt nauseous as I sent it.
He didn’t drink alcohol, so we agreed to meet at a local teashop. I had to turn my phone off and go for a run, then, to keep up with my heart.
☼
This is the part of the romance where the main character looks at herself in the mirror, and the narrator attempts to convey to the readers how unequivocally beautiful she is, but how she is the only one incapable of seeing so.
I wore my long ginger hair out; where the sun hit, it was the colour of fire. I’d have beach waves, so long as no wind or moisture came near me on the walk there. I’d chosen a little blue slip dress under a denim jacket. I felt like I was about to audition for the part of ‘the footballer’s girlfriend’. Did I fit the part? Could I be his summer cheerleader? I tried to add contour to my tinted moisturiser, squinting critically at myself in the little wire-framed mirror I’d squeezed above my bedframe. It looked like I had makeup on, but I wasn’t sure if that was good or not. I looked… nervous. I practised my smile: a little like a hostage reporting their wellbeing. I resolved to aim for more of a neutral expression.
I arrived early and busied myself on my phone, so as to look up in surprise as he approached the table. I’d manage to secure one of the big teal booths, though the tea shop was busy with Saturday shoppers resting their feet; a woman ordering her two kids fluffies; two guys with their laptops back-to-back; and a girl in leggings looking conflictedly over the menu, which was written out on a hanging reel of brown paper by the door.
As the minutes closed in, I had a feeling I’d had before in a dream where I’d sleep-walked onto a bungee platform. What was I doing? I’d read too many romance novels in which the men fall in love on sight. Where it is sudden and undoubtable like a religion. Of course, it wouldn’t be like that. I would have to display a personality, which meant having ‘fun facts’. As I was scrabbling for some fun facts about myself, in the corner of my eye, a bearded, muscular figure was rounding the corner.
I frowned at my phone, feigning interest in an ad for a razor subscription service.
‘Maddy?’
‘Hello!’ I went to stand, but the seating was bolted. My thighs hit the table and propelled me back down. I laughed awkwardly.
The footballer shook my hand over the table as he sat down. His grip was firm. He smelled of mint and musk. He looked at me quite seriously, as if startled, and with no hint of the smiling-blushing emoji.
My attempt at holding his gaze lasted less than a second, and I blinked and shifted my attention from the table to his hair and roundabout, gathering intel with each swiping glance, while his big brown eyes searched me out. Finally, I sought focal refuge in the salt and pepper packets and picked one up, rubbing the packet between my fingers so that the granules ground together.
‘What kind of tea do you like?’ I asked.
‘Ah, I’m not much of a tea person,’ he said softly, but glanced at the menu. ‘Ah sheyesh there’s a lot. What would you recommend?’
I had to recalibrate. It had been he who had suggested tea, since he didn’t drink coffee, so I’d thought he must be a tea connoisseur. He seemed shy and serious, where I had assigned him in my imagination the characteristics of a personal trainer – gregarious and upbeat. But I ordered us a gunpowder tea for two, to save him having to learn about teas, which seemed to overwhelm him.
He rumbled something. He spoke quietly, and his Arabic accent knitted the words together in a way I struggled to unpick, so that I understood what he had said only after a delay: So, what do you like to do?
‘Um, I like reading,’ I said, ‘and writing.’ As soon as I said it, I was ashamed. I wished I liked better things like outdoor rock climbing.
‘Oh wow, you must be smart.’
I laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘I’m not much of a reader myself.’ Now he looked embarrassed. He must have thought I was one of those people who only date men that read books. I was determined not to be one of those.
‘Well, what kinds of things do you like to do?’ I said.
‘Oh, ah, I play football. Video games with my mates sometimes. Do you play?’
‘No. I’ve actually never played a videogame.’
‘You’ve never?’
‘Except Singstar,’ I corrected, ‘and Farmville.’ This was a simple Facebook game where you build a farm and exchange wheat for rustic ornaments, I explained. I’d been through a phase of that once.
‘Oh, I think I know. You never played video games?’ He seemed floored, as if I had told him a fun fact. ‘You play any sports?’
‘No, actually, I never liked team games.’
‘You work out? You go to the gym at all?’
I laughed in desperation. I was realising very quickly how hopelessly unrelatable I was. ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Gyms kind of freak me out. I feel like people are watching me, and I just, don’t know how to use the machines …’
Thankfully, the tea arrived on a platter, with instructions on a little card. ‘Two-minute wait time,’ I read out, glad to have something to contribute.
‘Fancy,’ he said.
I wasn’t sure what was fancy about having the same wait time as two-minute noodles, so I pretended there was more to read on the card.
‘What about food?’ He asked. ‘You like to eat?’
‘Yes,’ I said, flooding with relief.
‘What’s your favourite cuisine?’ He asked.
‘Um, I don’t know, that’s a really hard question,’ I said, fully aware that it was in fact a very easy question. ‘Um. I like everything?’ I scrambled for something more concrete. ‘Indian food, I like spicy.’
‘Ok, nice.’ He brushed his huge forearm across the table, absently, and as he pulled it back, the tray was pushed, as easily as an errant cobweb, to the lip of the tabletop. The jug teetered and lurched. I lunged and grabbed hold of the tray, but the jug had leant too far, and half its contents were already on the floor.
‘Shit, oh I’m so sorry,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ I said brightly. It hadn’t been me who’d dropped it, so I felt, with relief, that I had won the date.
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