Just add some friction ⁂ a short story, part 1
After publishing my first short story about coming out, please welcome my musings on dating.
This fictional story explores the complexities and paradoxes of modern dating, particularly through online platforms like Tinder, where Clay and Lola navigate their desires, insecurities, and the search for genuine connection amidst societal changes like the pandemic and the 'Me Too' movement. It delves into their internal struggles and evolving self-awareness, highlighting the universal human quest for connection, both with oneself and with others.
I named this story after Billie Eilish’s song, ‘my strange addiction’. IYKYK.
P.S.: this short story is better read with the following playlist inside your ears. If you love reading lyrics, you’ll find gems in there.
Thank you for being here,
꩜ Mathilde
Clay met Lola on Tinder on a hot end-of-summer evening. Did they meet or did they simply match, that is another question. They were both swiping left and right—mostly left for Lola and right for Clay—for a while—four minutes for Lola and forty-five minutes for Clay—when the holy algorithm that would decide on the quality and charm of their dating life calculated it would be a good thing to give it a shot. Or at least, to show their dating resumes to each other.
Clay is 27, Lola 26. They are both from the same area of the country. Lola lives there still; Clay does not anymore, but he gave some coins—read: a lot—to the digital marriage agency for the inconvenience that is time and space and the serendipity of life and encounters to be of little importance. In other words, he bought himself the privilege of travel mode.
Why did Clay use his privilege to swipe in the biggest city of his home region instead of never-sleeping New York, a cool little surf town in Australia or even his own town, for obvious logistical reasons, one could wonder. Maybe the privilege of digital travel mode allowed him to find homes anywhere like the citizen of the world he was, or rather the possibility of new homes, the possibility of new travels, at a time when a global pandemic made people reinvent themselves in the confined place of their heads and hearts. Or pants. Whatever.
Lola has a list of fifteen matches and she hasn’t even clicked on them to start a conversation. Some part of her would want them to make the first move, and she knows it doesn’t come from pure fear of putting herself out there or even playing hard to get; there is just something in her head that said ‘if they want to talk to me, if they want to meet me, they know where to find me’.
This must have been what Lola’s fifteen matches also tell themselves, since they don’t initiate anything either. It is as if the digital quest were more important than the result itself, which would be finding someone to spend some time with to feel heard, held and loved, even for a brief moment. Or at least that’s what Lola wants. She likes to think that it’s universal, that want, yet she finds that most people, herself included, were often responsible for the fact they are not heard, held and loved like they need to, because either there is no connection—je n’ai pas de feeling, as the French ironically call it—or no communication of said needs. Maybe communication enables good connection, she thinks to herself. Yet, she cannot bring herself to open the bloody conversation.
Clay and the majority of his heterosexual friends find it hard these days to find women irl, both because of the pandemic and ‘Me Too’, they think, or rather because of the pandemic and the poor systemic behaviour of many many other heterosexual men just like them, but admitting this is true would mean questioning their own part in the bigger picture and that is too much to bear so they went massively online instead. Sometimes he thinks the world needs an ’Us Too’, but then he gets shy and a little guilty and he blushes at the idea of asking for forgiveness because ffs he didn’t do anything wrong, he is a decent guy after all, and then he shrugs and goes on with his life.
At first, it was almost impossible to match more than once every three days. Now, it’s better. All the energy and time perfecting his profile and swiping and talking in and to digital bubbles have borne fruits. At least that’s what he tells himself. He hasn’t put the word ‘feminist’ on his profile yet but he is positive it would make him match more. It would be cheating, he finds, or manipulative of him to attract women with a word that is in fact a promise, a commitment to treating them well no matter what. He fears that saying he is actually a feminist would mean he is looking for a long-term female partner to cherish like the queen she is, and he doesn’t know if it’s what he wants right now. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he just wants to fuck some random women without even talking. He doesn’t know if this rather primal want of his suppresses his feminist side or adds to it, since he most definitely would adore being fucked by a woman without talking, too. In fact, he would absolutely prefer being fucked. For what it’s worth, he takes pride in thinking he is a good dater. For Tinder, he simply is a good customer.
Sometimes Clay and Lola fantasise about what dating was before the pandemic. I write fantasise because how could they know, they were both in a long-term relationship prior to that. They both left their former lovers to find themselves, which is, if you ask me—yes me, the writer, sorry for interrupting—the mandatory first step of our universal quest here on Earth amongst other loving beings—Lola through all the self-help books she could find and a weekly therapy session; Clay through Tinder’s travel mode and patting his ego in the back by dating younger women who seemed completely in awe before him, which is something his former lover had stopped giving him a long ago.
And now that they seem to have their shit together, now that Lola’s ego is in check and Clay’s ego bursting, they only long for one thing: connection. Because connecting with yourself is, I’m repeating myself so that you feel in your bones the weight of it, the first step to a bigger quest: connecting with others without losing yourself again. Except in bed, of course, since losing your mind means returning to your body and to the pleasure it is able to feel, which is in my opinion the only valuable way of losing yourself, and also the only way you can tell sex was good, but that’s a story for later. And for this lifelong, cyclic, mind and body-fucking quest, I, the writer, wish you a hell of luck. But maybe that has nothing to do with that.
If you felt something, hit reply and tell me. That’s why writers do what they do.
& if you liked part 1, send it to a friend who might like it too.
See you in a few days for part 2. Love you lots :)