We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

The courtship was amazing. Until I met him, I had been an unwitting victim of a lot of Netflix and Chilling, except that wasn’t a thing then. Let’s just say I spent a lot of nights on various boyfriendly futons watching HBO for whatever amount of time is long enough to feel like a not-prostitute before having unenthusiastic sex. I was twenty-five, man. No one was asking me to dinner! It was like, “Oh, hey, cool, you gave me your number at that De La show! Wanna come over and watch me and my roommates play Resident Evil for three hours?” So I would say yeah, and shave my legs, and get all my shit on, and go to some kid’s house to watch him smoke weed and play Xbox, and then when he lost, we’d go to his room and have loser sex atop the pizza boxes and Jordans and DVDs scattered across his bed. And by “have sex” I mean “lie stiff as a board with all my muscles taut so his roommates wouldn’t hear the bed squeaking.” Lather, rinse, repeat for the entirety of my early twenties until this adult human male picked a time and a restaurant that served food on real plates. In the cab on the way home, I whispered to myself, “This is it.” I knew it was love because he was busy with school, and I was not busy—at least, not busy in big and important ways—and it’s cute when you’re not busy to mail care packages to your boyfriend who literally lives thirty minutes away but hasn’t called in a week because he is so fucking busy. That inner cringe when a friend asks “Have you ever even been in...