When classes began again, I promised myself I’d stop thinking about Jon. This turned out to be surprisingly easy; all it required was 100 percent of my energy, 100 percent of the time. I stayed busy with work and meetings, going to friends’ houses to gossip and text through movies, and obligatory calls to my family to tell them that, yes, I was okay, no, I still did not want to move home for a while to “sort some things out.”
I avoided thinking about him on my commute to work, crammed onto the bus with my headphones in, occasionally looking at attractive strangers with an expression Lauren called “Missed Connection eyes.” I barely thought about him while trawling sublet listings in my office or fielding students’ half-assed questions—more comments than questions, really—about Spenser or whomever. I did not think about him during long weeknights alone, sitting on the living room floor marking papers, or doing probably unhelpful facial tightening exercises, or lighting my one fancy candle for an allotted thirty minutes before blowing it out again.
I didn’t know exactly what the plan was; all I knew at this stage was that staying occupied meant staying distracted and therefore something close to happy. If I emerged from this period with a better body, cooler life, cuter face, and incredibly hot, possibly famous new partner, so be it. In service of those goals, I started a “squats challenge” and made a resolution to cycle more and possibly save up for preventative Botox. I stopped crying all the time—in fact I hadn’t cried in weeks—and made jokes online about my fabulous, wild life, spending my weekends drinking and dancing and dating. Because it provided the most instant distraction, I focused most heavily on the dating.
My friends feared I was moving too quickly, warning that my first time with a new person might feel messy and emotional. It had actually been alright—minus a few instances of erectile dysfunction from Calvin—though I had resolved not to tell anyone about that particular life choice. Having a sexual secret felt kind of fun and soapy, but I was also fairly ashamed of myself. So I feigned interest in their advice about taking it slow, while secretly hoping to take it as fast as possible, to push Calvin swiftly down the scroll of my sexual history. I was impatient, too, because being excited or nervous or horny was better than being sad.
“This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” I told my friends one evening at Clive’s. “Getting back out there. I’m on Tinder and I think I’m going to try Hinge.”
Lauren laughed ruefully and said, “Godspeed.”
Amirah pointed out, not necessarily helpfully, that I’d barely been “out there” to begin with. Having dated Jon since I was nineteen, I wasn’t making some grand comeback to single life. This was my debut.
My first date was with a twenty-seven-year-old bartender called Sofia, from whom I got the idea to use normal-to-average photos of myself on my dating profiles. She had seemed pretty enough online—short and strong, with bold eyebrows and little Marie Antoinette boobs—but when we met in real life, and I first saw her walking toward the patio where I was guarding two ciders while trying not to be sweaty, she looked so beautiful that I thought briefly about running away. Instead, I wiped my clammy palms on my jeans and, before I could stop myself, shook her hand like this was some kind of sexual and emotional job interview, which I guess in a way it was.
Sofia took my hand with a sly smile and said, “How’s it going, Maggie?” and we spent three hours drinking cider and talking about our core wounds before getting to second base in Trinity Bellwoods. The date was so successful I spent a week or so entertaining the idea that I was done with men for good, but then on another date a musician called Tyler lifted me up onto his washing machine, and I was forced to admit I was pretty much interested in whoever was interested in me.
It took an enormous amount of time, all the swiping around, matching, picking a charming yet aloof opening line . . . then the banter, the scheduling, the rescheduling, the canceling and finding someone new. Sometimes I would let Olivia or Amirah swipe around for me. People in committed relationships got a real kick out of “the apps,” not because, as many seemed to think, they were jealous or wistful about new, high-tech methods of meeting and mating. They approached it more like war correspondents, as if they had a duty to impartially observe the horror. I could see it in their eyes when a profile popped up featuring the bottom two-thirds of a man’s face incredibly close up in three different locations, or a woman I’d been speaking to for four days revealed she had a boyfriend and was looking for a fun surprise for their anniversary, or when a man messaged, u suck cock? with the emoji of a monkey bashfully covering its eyes. There was an excitement there, an eagerness to rush back and report to their partner from the front lines of modern dating: you wouldn’t believe it, babe, it’s a nightmare out there.
It was not always a nightmare. Sofia was lovely, and we saw each other two more times before she sent me a long message full of compliments and ending with the information that she was getting back together with her ex. Lauren and I went on a double date with a pair of cousins who got us free tickets to several basketball games, and a woman called Gretchen made me squirt, something I had previously thought impossible. Even when a date was bad—the man who flossed at the table, the woman who asked if she could use some of my pubic hair for “non-dark sexual magick”—it didn’t matter. There were, as promised, many more fish in the sea. Lots of these fish were even attractive. Some were fun to talk to, and really the only thing that mattered was that all of them were technically available. Once you matched with someone and parsed the obligatory how’s your day goings and what you looking for on heres, you were between twelve hours and two weeks from a first date.
I was always surprised by how forthcoming new matches were before we’d even met in person. In these ten-minute preliminary chats I learned about people’s peccadilloes, parental relationships, and least favorite coworkers before I knew their last names or how tall they really were. For my part, I preferred to drop the divorce bomb in person, though I was never sure how to approach this disclosure. I asked a friend with herpes for pointers and was told she’d rather date a guy with an STI than “that level of emotional baggage.”
I said I was the total package: dead inside, plus I got cold sores.
“Oh, if it’s just cold sores you don’t have to tell them,” she said. “HSV-1 is not the headline herpes.”
Far from being a problem, my marital status provided a fun talking point. Most people reacted with amused surprise, as if I’d told them I’d had a secret life as a famous children’s performer or an international spy. It was also a neat segue into both parties discussing what went wrong in their last relationships, an activity that comprised a full 50 percent of the app dates I went on. Amy was right: it made me seem exciting, even mysterious. Also—and perhaps most important—it made me seem unlikely to seek commitment, something I quickly learned most men did not want and most women wanted immediately but seemed to love being denied.
Noticing this made me feel like I was living in one of those sitcoms where characters are always saying, “It’s the nineties!” but I could not deny the pattern that evolved. Men were apparently freed by the thought that a woman actively trying to disentangle herself from one man would not be quick to jump into a serious relationship with another, and women found it either romantically tragic or relatable. If they didn’t want to save me, at least we could trade war stories—not everyone is divorced, but everyone’s had their heart broken.
A younger woman I met on Hinge told me my marital status was “honestly kind of chic,” adding that it functioned “like an age reset, because you don’t look young, no offense, but you look very young to be divorced.” Later that night she—Harriet, I think? maybe Hali?—got her period so hard that the blood seeped through my sheets, staining my mattress. A few days after that I made a joke over text about medieval virginity tests, saying my father, the king, had been pleased to see it, but she didn’t get it, or if she did, she didn’t like it. Either way, she didn’t respond.
Clive told me Gen Z rarely wasted time breaking things off in full.
“I think it’s a best-case scenario,” he said. “Old guys are so clingy. With young people, they like you or you never hear from them again.”
This would very much prove to be true. In my first month on the apps I went on six first dates, three second dates, and one third date. I didn’t see anyone a fourth time. It was nice to be busy, to have places to be and reasons to shower. It was nice, too, to have a good reason to look at my phone. Suddenly sitting at home scrolling mindlessly on Twitter felt like biding time between important texts. My phone was not only a food delivery portal or scrapbook full of heartbreaking pictures and videos. It was a hub of sexual affirmation and potential romantic connection! Being on it for hours just made sense.
But as the weeks went on and the novelty of the all-you-can-fuck human buffet wore off, I realized my favorite part of these dates was the hour or so before they started. I liked the ritual of date preparation: showering and moisturizing languidly, trimming my armpit hair (she’s a feminist!) and shaving my leg hair (a low-key one!), working a lightly scented oil through the ends of my head hair while the ice melted in a little pre-date pick-me-up on the radiator.
I’d stream something to get me in the mood to be alluring, singing along as blasé women crooned through my phone’s tinny speakers, eating a light snack to absorb alcohol but avoid bloat. I’d run through the evening in my head, idly rehearsing my dumb jokes, trying to remember if this person was the one I’d already told about the devastating sunburn of 2005, or if that had been someone else who also wore glasses and enjoyed travel.
I read in some grim article I’d googled about dating in 2018 that men didn’t like it when you wore pants on dates, so when seeing them I stuck to dresses and skirts, though I didn’t own many. I worried initially that if I met a man I liked, I’d run out of clean versions of my woman costume, but of course shortly discovered this would not be an issue. The real danger was seeing too many other bi women and going home to spend four hours considering the acquisition of a septum piercing.
Most of these dates were pleasant enough. Only one was terrible—a man who arrived thirty minutes late, barefoot, and lectured me about women’s usurpation of the “natural masculine role”—and two were very fun. We would go to bars or sit in the park at sunset or occasionally do an activity, bolstered by three to seven drinks, relative anonymity, and the tacit understanding that we were equally attracted to each other, or at least equally horny.
It occurred to me—while straining with every fiber of my being to avoid getting my phone out while a girl was in the bathroom—that by your late twenties you could probably have a satisfactory first date with almost anyone: everyone had a big breakup or two under their belt, most had acquired a semi-reliable source of income and could afford a drink or two (or at least knew a bartender) at the kind of place where the servers were resolute in their bralessness and you just knew there was a taxidermied something somewhere.
That the bars all looked the same was not an issue. There is too much data about millennial tastes in the world; everywhere we go looks like math. But although I’d assumed the apps would broaden my romantic horizons, an incredibly homogenous figure emerged as the type I most often matched with, chatted to, and met for dates. The men tended to be bearded and left-leaning and got too excited if you mentioned Harry Nilsson. All of them thought Bernie would have won. An alarming number were thinking about getting into stand-up comedy. None of them had curtains.
While the women were marginally more varied (different haircuts, different styles of dress, different routes to the idea of “finding the Jim to one’s Pam”), the size of the queer dating pool in Toronto meant I also knew a lot of them: saw them in yoga, held doors for them at friends’ parties, passed them in the hallways of the university. The women were too close and obsessed with letting the world know they were “tender.” The men, while strangers to me, had disgusting bathrooms and were bad on text. Tinder was not as fun as nobody had said it was.
It turned out not to matter. Just as I was tiring of the app-based dating cycle (meet, two dates, sex, delay third date, reschedule, cancel, and, finally, ghost), I noticed something else at work. Some kind of “I’m vulnerable” bat signal had gone out to the almost-encounters of my past—people I’d wanted to sleep with at university, acquaintances I’d always found cute, flirty coworkers from old bar jobs—and they were getting in touch in massive numbers.
They would like an old tweet, or comment under a photo, or drop a casual text to say something they’d seen had made them think of me: an ad for a restaurant we’d joked about six years ago, a flower the same color as my hair. A British man I’d almost kissed at a party in 2017 sent me a picture of a bean-covered baked potato with the cryptically menacing caption ur the beans.
Amy, with whom I had stayed in touch and sometimes met for coffee when I’d already complained about Jon too much to my other friends, said these figures from my past could “tell” I was single from my social media activity.
“It’s instinctual,” she said. “That Story you posted the other day? Your nipples were visibly hard. Women in relationships simply do not post like that. And that’s something these people would know.”
She showed me a Boomerang of a man adding powder to a water bottle and shaking it vigorously. “This to me has big single energy,” she said. “The way he’s eye-fucking the camera? And look.” She tapped his profile and scrolled through his photos, tutting. “Hasn’t put the girlfriend on main in three months. I mean, this is Great Wall of China–level single. You could see that this guy is single from space.”
Part of me was horrified to be in the same camp as the hulkingly horny protein man. Was I really so obvious? I felt like a baboon waggling my big, swollen ass at some other baboon I’d attended a conference with five years ago. But mostly I was thrilled by the messages, at the external validation, the chance to try something I already knew I liked.
Meeting new people felt like starting over: daunting and depressing, a challenge for someone fallen on romantic hard times. Reconnecting with paths not taken was easier and seemed more purposeful. These were the people my relationship had been holding me back from being with! The right ones were there all along! It was comforting to think that being with Jon had been the mistake, not losing him or letting him go. If I was supposed to be with one of these near-flames of my past, then breaking it off with my husband had been an important step toward finding real love, instead of what it usually felt like: a failure.
Coming home from a date with an old colleague, distantly flirtatious acquaintance, or friend of a friend with whom there’d always been tension, I felt a satisfaction and pride bordering on mania. Realizing that other people—lots of people!—liked me or thought I was pretty or wanted to fuck me was spectacular. I had hoped that Jon would love me forever, sure, but a part of me had also assumed he was the only person who really wanted to try.
Back at my apartment at four a.m., I’d pass the hall mirror and catch my own eye: a person beguiling enough to be asked out, hot enough to be frenched in the back of an Uber, “good on text” enough to acquire a second and possibly third date. Spewing my little anecdotes and doing some eyeliner and discreetly finding opportunities to touch whomever’s back had worked. I was, according to the objective opinion of an outside body, worthy of time, and what was the saying? “Time is how you spend your love”? Take it up with Zadie Smith!
That loving and supporting someone for many years was not the same as eating pizza with them for two hours in a bar full of pinball machines did not really register. I was fucking lovable, actually. I was fine.