Primalsoup

In which I discover that being desirable to everyone is worse than being desirable to no one.

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For 7 weeks, I was a babe. Then I pressed delete.

Image Credit

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On the wrong side of thirty, I finally downloaded a dating app. I’d held out through the early swipe years, but my family WhatsApp groups had gone quiet. Even my mother had stopped forwarding biodata. It was time.

I expected digital silence. Maybe a few matches from divorced uncles or men who’d “settled in Bangalore” with their mothers. I’d prepared myself for the specific invisibility of being a thirty-something woman in the marriage market.

Instead, I became a babe.

Not through any effort of mine. Simply by being: Female. Breathing. Willing to upload three photos where my face was visible.

My phone exploded. 18-year-olds from Ludhiana. 60-year-olds with premium accounts who could reach across state lines. Everyone between 2 kms and 500 kms away, all sliding right with the desperation of men who’d been taught that online dating was a numbers game.

“Your eyes are beautiful,” they said. All of them. Every single one.

Sample opening lines from my week one collection:

·       “Hey beautiful, your eyes speak volumes”

·       “Those eyes 😍😍😍 What’s the story behind them?”

·       “I generally don’t message first but your eyes compelled me”

By day three, I was considering LASIK surgery – if my eyes were my only selling point, might as well restore them to factory settings permanently.

Everyone wanted “connection.” Deep, meaningful connection. Preferably after midnight. Preferably starting with “hey beautiful” and escalating to philosophical questions like “what are you wearing?”

Week 3: Found someone who didn’t mention my eyes. 29 years old – still in his twenties, which gave me the ick. His twenties-ness was audible in every voice note, visible in every emoji choice. But his bio wasn’t trying too hard. He lived 40 kms away – in Bangalore, that’s a 4-hour commitment through traffic. Far enough that we’d both have to really mean it to meet. Traffic: the ultimate romance filter.

We matched. We chatted. In the app, where it was safe, where I could unmatch if the twenties-ness of him became too much.

The problem: I wanted ephemeral connection. Someone to talk to between meetings. Someone to make me feel seen without requiring a five-year plan. He wanted something serious. The 29-year-old was ready to brave 4 hours of Bangalore traffic, probably had already scouted cafes at the exact midpoint between us. He was talking about meeting parents and shared futures while I was just trying to survive Tuesday.

Week 7: I deleted the app.

My personal Brexit. Tindexit.

The beautiful eyes brigade, the midnight philosophers, the cute 29-year-old who was willing to navigate Silk Board junction for love – all disappeared with one tap. Seven weeks of being everyone’s right swipe, of wading through copy-paste romance, of discovering that infinite options meant no real choices.

[Unlike the slow fades of Double L or Digital Boy, this was a mass exodus. Efficient. Final.]

Turns out I wasn’t looking for a father to anyone’s children. I was just lonely on a Wednesday (yes, another Wednesday) and thought an app could fix that.

It couldn’t.

But for seven weeks, I was a babe. Add that to the growing collection – fathers-not-met, romances-not-started, but at least I know exactly how many men within 500km are prepared to write poetry about my corneas.

That’s something, I guess.

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This is part of How I Did Not Meet Your Father, a recurring series in which I mine my non-existent love life for content, gently, and with context.