It is 9:47pm on a Tuesday and I am opening the app again. I don't know why. The light in my kitchen is good. I have a glass of wine within reach. The cat is on my lap. I could be reading. I could be watching something. Instead I am doing the thing I have decided, in writing, several times, that I am no longer doing.
Here is what the app looks like for a 47-year-old woman in Denver tonight.
Thirty-four matches. I'll save you the scroll.
The twenty-two-year-old says "hey pretty." He is in college. His bio is empty except for a Snapchat handle, which I believe is how he proposes we take this seriously. I swipe away. He'll be fine.
The fifty-eight-year-old sends me a photo of his boat. No face in the photo. The boat is at a dock in a place I don't recognize. The message is "weekends on the water?" and I think, sir, it is February, and also no.
The thirty-nine-year-old sends me a photo of his dog. The dog is adorable. The caption is "This is Max, he's my whole personality." And I think — and I want to be gentle about this because I know his mother — I think, sir, a personality has to have at least two things. Max is lovely. Max is not enough.
There's a forty-four-year-old who works in finance and wants to "see where it goes." There's a forty-eight-year-old on his second divorce who has a very cheerful bio about "starting over" and is, I'm sure, a perfectly nice man, but I read it and I feel very tired.
There is one — there is always one — who is age-appropriate and handsome and writes in full sentences and mentions a book I have actually read. I give him three whole minutes of hope. Then I get to the photo where he is standing in what appears to be a Balinese meditation temple with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel. I don't swipe left on this man. I put the phone face down on the table and I drink my wine and I think: where is he hiding. Where is the man my age who has read a book and doesn't want to fix me and isn't currently in a manifesting phase.
Here is the thing about the dating pool at forty-seven. It is not empty. It is full. It is full of people who used to be in good shape, who used to be married to people who didn't appreciate them, who used to be more fun, who used to be able to do this. Dating at twenty-five was about going to places. Dating at thirty-five was about building things. Dating at forty-seven appears to be largely about comparing each other's existing exhaustion. Everyone is a little bit already done, and none of us want to say so in the bio.
So I close the app. Again. I finish the wine. The cat has not moved. The light in the kitchen is still good. I have this great life I built on purpose and I'm trying to figure out why I keep periodically trying to rent part of it out to strangers.
I'm hungry. There's nothing in the fridge that sounds appetizing. There are forty-three restaurants within delivery range. I end up eating a piece of good bread and a slice of an aged cheese I bought just for me, standing at my own counter.
It's not that I don't want to date. It's that I don't want any of this.