“I’m done with traditional ways of finding guys. I’m telling you, this is the future of dating.” Jessica’s blue eyes beamed down at me from her six-foot stature in elegant heels.
“Seriously?” My heart raced, which was kind of nice in the bitingly cold East Village wind on that otherwise snowless December night. “Aren’t you a little…,” I searched for the words, recalling not-so-safe moments in my life where dating was far from pleasant, or consensual.
“That’s one of the reasons it’s so brilliant.” Jessica was gorgeous, one of a number of actual models I’d grown close to since moving to New York, though she no longer worked as one. I’d somehow landed a spot at Columbia University as an academic underdog from a small New Mexican town with nothing but a GED and some decent writing chops. “You get to drill down to exactly what you’re looking for: education level, types of books he likes, job interests, hobbies, whatever. Plus, you obviously meet in public. It’s way safer than a crowded bar.”
She was right, though this new way of approaching dating seemed so … off as if for someone who had to hide behind a computer.
But if the “real world” meant a stinky bar filled with cigarette smoke and sketchy predators, didn’t setting up a nice time in a cafe one-on-one make sense?
Jessica wrapped her fur-lined trench tighter around her waist as we reached the club. “You’ll never look back.”
The Platform
Having someone like Jessica, not only stunning and elegant but graduated summa cum laude due to an innate and bitingly sharp, analytical intelligence that to this day makes her one of my favorite conversation partners, suggest I take the plunge into something as new and unique as online dating gave me little option.
I had to do it.
Nerve.com was an online magazine devoted to writing about sex, relationships, and culture, nominated for a number of awards alongside such giants as The Atlantic, Business Week, and the New Yorker, for its unabashed take on the edgier side of relationships and sex that most of the elite literati only discussed over cocktails behind closed doors up until that point.
Nerve made it okay to tick a box requesting bondage in your personal ad, even if your reading taste leaned more Foucault and less Dean Koontz.
Though bondage was never my thing, I’d always felt very, very far from normal due to a wildly untraditional background. Nerve’s branding as a sort of highbrow Penthouse, alongside the fascinating history of The Onion’s Sean Mills involvement in an attempt to bring the same kind of loyalty that super funky satirical site does to the masses, made Nerve the obvious choice for my personal ad platform.
The Date
My fingers tightened on the cold, slick metal of the bar as the E train shook and rumbled towards the stop I’d meet my first Nerve date.
We were both looking for something unique, bizarre, untenable, and somehow this ended up meaning no words.
Those were the only rules.
No words.
We’d laid out the specifics: he’d enter the stage at Court Square, we’d both be in the clothes we’d described. We had until Washington Square Park.
If we liked what we saw, we’d stay until that stop and head to the park.
He was tall and thinner than I’d expected, with long, thick hair loose beneath a winter hat. His blue eyes were large and he was unconventionally attractive, the barest hint of a tattoo sneaking up the side of his neck where skin peeked through.
Though he didn’t smile, his eyes didn’t waver as he headed straight for where I stood.
My hand tightened further, palm now slick with my own sweat.
The silence was crushing in that otherwise loud car.
It was the New York time of night on a Saturday where everyone was animated, some already intoxicated, verbose and happy, not yet in the anxious, I’ve-had-too-much and it’s too late anyway part of the night where the pain, loneliness, and isolation of that city seeps through in nighttime pockets.
He stared down, mouth immobile, eyes glued to the outlines of my face, tracing me.
There was freedom in that line we drew, he could stare and stare and no one cared because it was New York and no one cares in New York because we’re all in our own worlds together.
I was barely even nervous, though maybe the excitement mixed with those nerves created that intoxicating, confusing mix of something else, something I had no words for.
Which was fine, because we had no words, those were the rules.
We didn’t have to.
He liked my face, I could see it. He may have loved it.
The admiration made my cheeks burn, eyes fall towards my feet. The cold blasted my bare neck.
Exposed, five stops from Washington Square, my naked neck lay open.
The car grew tighter, squeezing in on itself the way only a New York subway can, bodies cramming closer and closer together.
New York is silent in the extremity of its intimacy.
We learn to give space, thousands of miles of it, though our bodies are, at times, cheek-to-cheek.
We never acknowledge this intimacy because to do so would be a brutal assault, violation of an unspoken pact that we are here, packed together forcibly but cannot know the feel of the touch that is all around us, all the time, the breath so close it crystallizes our lashes in winter.
No sound was the only rule, so it was not a violation when his fingers gently grazed the smallest hairs at the base of my neck, right beneath where I’d tucked the rest into a clip beneath my hat.
My back became a billion tiny mouths puckering and the blast of winter from the briefly open door trickled all the way to the bottom of my spine.
His fingers remained there, like that, until the stop where we both got to decide whether to walk to the park or leave.
There was no unspoken question, no hesitation, not even the barest hint of concern for one.
The walk from the station to the park is short and the sudden, actual distance between bodies, coupled with the frigid cold, the way the air swirled around us like water bubbles in half-frozen cubes of ice, highlighted the emptiness of the space between us.
The fact we’d somehow broken that unspoken bubble of non-intimacy and made it intimate made us children breaking the one New York rule, some firm, non-negotiable one we should feel nothing but shame for leaving behind.
We were in New York, silent, and had touched.
We didn’t hold hands though when we found the bench beneath the thickest copse of trees between dim street lamps, we were alone amidst the faint city voices we had chosen not to join, and sat in silence, and did not touch.
Not for a long, long time.
In the fur-lined thickness of my black, thrift-store gloves, my fingers grew numb.
The ghost of that touch still lingered all over my spine, that part of my body behind me, now touching the bench, tingling with a mix of cold and memory.
His eyes met mine and there was nothing romantic, no longing for something either of us wanted or needed that could have come from Nerve or any other dating site, but we’d opened this portal neither of us had realized existed until that experiment.
We thought it was sexual, but it wasn’t.
It was about New York, touch, space, and sound. We’d blocked out the noise, welcomed the silence, and enveloped ourselves in a different kind of bubble.
He leaned in and enveloped me. His arms were long and strong and he was much larger than me. For a moment, I was warmer, and he tightened the embrace.
We held each other, my face moving towards his not for a kiss but the barest hint of skin, of cheek-to-cheek.
His grew warm, a little wet.
He cried, silently, his body immobile.
I had no idea why, but I couldn’t break the agreement, so instead stayed in that embrace, in that temporary warmth, as tears slid soundlessly down his face.
He pushed my body away, gently then. Soundless, he mouthed the word, “go,” and I did.
I never saw him or wrote to him again. I didn’t even look at his profile. Our experiment was over, complete, and perfect.
I went on a few more Nerve dates, but nothing stuck, though Jessica ended up marrying a wonderful man from one of hers, and we all grew into this new form of meeting one another, of knowing people virtually or testing ourselves and our understanding of the world in different ways through this new, insurmountable hyper-reality of the internet.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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