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My best friend arrives moments after I do, announcing herself by ringing the doorbell five more times than necessary. When I let her in, she’s carrying a familiar, nondescript white paper bag I immediately recognize from our favorite panadería downtown. Bless her.
“Oh, shit, you beat me!” Angela exclaims when she spots the equally nondescript white box sitting on my coffee table. “How are you already here when I got off an hour before you?”
“Erica let me go early. Apparently, I’ve been nothing but useless to myself and others all day.” Those weren’t her exact words, but I wouldn’t have blamed her for saying them. My boss was much nicer when she sent me home, telling me to sleep off my “mind fog” when the third person I’d checked out left the building to the blaring sound of alarm bells. There’s a reason we bump the books before handing them off to patrons, and three is too many times to forget in one day. Angela was buried in shelving all day, so I’m not surprised she didn’t notice.
“It was a slow day, anyway.”
“You need to get out of this funk, Marcela,” Angela says. Then she holds out her hand. “All right, let’s see it.”
I hand over my phone with a dramatic groan. Her expression turns contemplative as she reads over the profile I’ve just updated. Underneath my name and age—Marcela Ortiz, 27—is my job title and a list of my favorite authors, quotes, and drinks. Her eyes narrow the longer she reads, until finally she shakes her head in disapproval.
“No.” She hands me my phone back. “Absolutely unacceptable.”
“Oh, come on! I thought I did a pretty good job this time.”
“You cannot put an obscure quote from An Ember in the Ashes in your Tinder bio.” She rolls her eyes at my pout. “Read the room, Marcela.”
“What? I thought it was fitting, considering the circumstances.”
She rolls her eyes again so hard that I’m surprised she doesn’t get brain damage on the spot. “Your subliminal messaging is positively uncanny.”
I look down at my phone and read over the quote in my bio.
“There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.”
It had been Angela’s idea to revive my dating accounts when I told her all about my painful lunch with Ben. She wasn’t nearly as surprised as I was to learn that Ben was taking the next big step in his relationship with Alice, which only shows how far removed from reality my own feelings have made me. Loving someone you can’t have is exhausting. But loving someone who’s in a committed relationship crushes you under a thousand-pound weight of guilt and shame until it bleeds you dry. Living under that weight isn’t just unsustainable, it’s also lonely and heartbreaking and unbearable and I can’t do it for a second longer.
So, in choosing Tinder, I’m choosing the latter. Fire my soul to purpose, baby.
“Sabaa Tahir is too wise for this world,” I say, almost wistfully. Then I glance over my shoulder at my friend with an innocent look. “Too deep for Tinder?”
“I really don’t think I need to answer that.”
She snatches the phone out of my hand before I can blink, fingers darting across the keyboard to rewrite a half hours’ worth of thoughtful consideration. Angela finishes typing in under two minutes, and when she hands my phone back to me, I guffaw as my eyes trail down the screen. Apparently, I live for spontaneous adventure and am NOT looking for anything serious. She even changed two of my three profile pictures, and my teen librarian title is gone.
“Casual.” My brain sticks on the word, refusing to make sense of it. “I really don’t think I’m a ‘casual’ kind of girl.”
“No better time to start than now. You should be using Tinder for what it’s intended for.” Her curly hair bounces off her shoulders as she leans forward to grab a bright yellow concha from the box on the coffee table. “One-night stands.”
Angela, ever the commitment-phobe. She has her pick of romantic interests, being beautiful, willowy, and tall, with gorgeous hazel eyes and olive-toned skin. Although she’s quick to dole out relationship advice, she’s never actually had one of her own. Not even a fling, for as long as I’ve known her. The girl can expertly flirt her way to free drinks for an entire table, but she rejects every single advance that comes her way. I’ve always wondered if there was a reason for that.
“When have you ever used Tinder for a one-night stand?” I shoot back, raising my brows at her.
“I’ve never used dating apps in general. I have no interest in them.” I’ve always suspected as much, but I’m still a bit surprised by the confirmation. “My time will come when it comes. But you”—she shakes a bony finger at me—“you need all the help you can get.”
I heave a sigh. She’s not wrong about that.
“I still don’t think a one-night stand is the answer.”
“Not according to every rom-com out there,” she insists, voice slightly garbled around a mouthful of pan. Once she swallows, her expression turns serious. “They’ve been together a long time, Marcela. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” I look away from her, not wanting to go down this rabbit hole again. “I know it’s tough, but you should’ve done this a long time ago.”
“It’s not like I haven’t tried. I don’t like the idea of random hookups. It all seems too nerve-racking.”
I’ve been on a string of failed first dates, enough talking phases to test my sanity, and exactly two relationships (if you could call them that, given that both fell apart almost as quickly as they came) since Ben. Maybe if any part of me found dating exciting, I wouldn’t have so much trouble. As it is, my body confidence is in constant fluctuation depending on the day and dating only adds more pressure to that. Sure, when I’m feeling particularly confident, I can appreciate the hourglass figure my soft curves form—a large bust that dips into a slightly tapered waist before widening into rounded hips and thick thighs. My butt, however, is surprisingly flat. Of all the departments to fall short in, it would be the one area I wish a little more fat would travel to.
But I never know how the men I date, and potentially become intimate with, will react when they see my body. I’ve been burned before, the few times I actively participated in hookup culture. And that was with men I spent time getting to know, only for them to turn around and treat me like crap in bed. They got what they wanted from me, but what did I get? Certainly not what I’d (ahem, didn’t) come for. Not decency, not respect. Not even a call or text back after, though the ghosts were almost preferable to the ones who’d attempted to let me down easy directly after sex. As if telling someone you’d just been inside that you never wanted to see them again wasn’t gross enough, there aren’t enough showers in the world to wash off the shame of hearing I wasn’t their “usual type,” or even worse, that they weren’t attracted to me. That one was a head scratcher until I realized it was a coded way of saying what they were too afraid to.
Score one for fatphobia, followed by another point for every time I internalized that shit. Which is why until now, I’ve practically given up on dating entirely. I’m able to love my body so much more when I’m not bombarded with the reminder that there are plenty of men who don’t. I’m not interested in putting myself in that position again.
