Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

I love swimming in the rain and would have swum for longer had the matronly lifeguard not ordered me to get out for “health and safety reasons.”

I was fascinated by the men all my friends had chosen to merge their lives with, particularly how they all interacted with each other.

If God wanted me to do housework, he would have put diamonds in the sink!

Lola and the vet went to go find “a wine bar,” which meant somewhere dark where they could talk some drunken nonsense at each other until one of them made the first move and they could dry-hump on a banquette.

When I got home, I listened to half an episode of my current favourite podcast, which was a light-hearted romp through the history of female serial killers,

I lay in bed and downloaded a dating app for the first time in my life.

My thirty-second birthday was the simplest birthday I ever had. Which was a perfectly lovely way to begin the strangest year of my life.

I dragged the three boxes into my bedroom, which hadn’t changed since I moved out over a decade ago and looked like a museum replica of how teenage girls lived in the early to mid-noughties.

Lola had been giving me a crash course in modern dating over a series of drinks and emails since my birthday and had warned me of all the impending disappointments to expect. One of them was that men were completely incapable of choosing or even suggesting a place for a date.

I had, in total, twenty-seven conversations on the go with twenty-seven different men.

I’d cheated the system of romance—all these handsome and interesting men, just waiting for me in my pocket.

we’d been told finding love was like an impossible quest of endurance, timing and luck. I thought you had to go to awful pop-up events and specialist bookshops; keep your eyes peeled at weddings and on the tube; strike up conversation with other solo travellers whenever you were abroad; get out of the house four nights a week to maximize your chances.

Looking for love didn’t have to be factored in to my schedule in the way I’d dreaded—I could do it while watching TV.

this was a completely normal reaction for a first-time dating app user—that the dreamy haze would plateau in a couple of weeks and then dull to a despondent ennui and ultimate deletion of the app in about three months’ time.

the more men I saw, the more I pieced together categories of humans that I never knew existed.

the men who were incredibly excited about the fact they’d once been to Las Vegas.

Why had I only ever met a handful of graphic designers in real life and yet I had seen at least 350 of them on this dating app?

There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we’d like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

Max had hair that was a shade between sand and caramel and was cropped but just long enough to show its loose, messy curls. He was 6 foot 4, a full foot taller than me.

While speaking with pictures of my potential soulmate, I had forgotten that hundreds and thousands of other women were assessing their prospective futures from their sofas and commutes too.

“It’s cut-throat,” she informed me. “You can’t personalize this process. You’ve got to be in it to win it. You need to be fighting fit and stay focused. It’s why it’s a young man’s game.”

Max could be something of a Linx Celebrity, which she had encountered a handful of times—dastardly men who were prolific on apps thanks to their good looks and pre-packaged charm

Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument.

Max, who was sitting on a bench reading a book.

He was as solid as a Sequoia, high as a Redwood and as broad as the prairie. He was earthly and godly; elemental and ethereal. Both not of this earth and a poster boy for it.

“It’s a story told from the perspective of a man on his deathbed looking back on his life and reflecting on what he’s learnt. It’s all about the passage of time, which I used to find moving and I now find terrifying.”

sitting down and placing the drinks on the table, hoping he hadn’t noticed the nervous warble in my voice.

Only a species as accommodating and nurturing as women could fetishize the frame of a sedentary middle-aged man and call it a “dad bod” or rebrand a white-haired, grumpy pensioner as a “silver fox.”

When he mentioned his dad, his words were jostled with a tone of either resentment or regret. I knew it would be a subject we returned to at some point when we were drunker and more comfortable with each other and we’d steer the conversational tone until we sounded like Oprah doing a tell-all televised interview, in which we’d take turns to be the guest.

“Single or double?” I smiled and he winked.

It was his first time on a dating app. He said he’d initially found it fun, but the hollowness of the encounters had made him feel jaded. He’d been thinking about deleting it.

“Yeah, but look at you,” he replied. “How could I not?” It was the first of a few disingenuous, dashed-off compliments and I adored every single one of them.

I noticed the unapologetic strength of his profile, particularly the slight curvature of the bridge of his nose. I wanted to put him on a coin.

“But those are the best things about a person—the contradictions,” with a faraway look in his eyes. I knew that very second that if I ever had a reason to hate Max, if he ever treated me badly, I would return to this sentence as proof that he was the worst person alive. But for now, I was able to nod dreamily and agree.

We asked questions we didn’t want to know the answers to and feigned total absorption in his twenty-five-minute description of a particular pub in Kentish Town that he used to drink in that was now closed. We did it because we wanted to earn each other’s admiration and trust:

The sexiest, most exciting, romantic, explosive feeling in the world is a matter of a few centimetres of skin being stroked for the first time in a public place. The first confirmation of desire. The first indication of intimacy. You only get that feeling with a person once.

He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it.

I wondered how much of his behaviour this evening had been dictated by a pressure to perform his gender in such a demonstrative way. But then again, what was I doing? Why was I wearing a pair of four-inch heels that gave me blisters? Why was I laughing knowingly twice as much as I normally do and making half the amount of jokes?

“And I’m certain I’m going to marry you.”

And do you know, for about five minutes as I walked to the bus stop—I believed him.

her pupils—I swear—dilating. I knew she’d love this—I was speaking her language now. Dates, man, love, potentially someone for me to bring round for Mark to talk about rugby and traffic with.

“There’s something dark and magic about him, while being wholesome. Wholesome in an essence-of-man way. He’s sort of biblical.”

We’re in hell

Baldracca—Italian noun: whore (mostly used as an insult).

????

“He’s nice, but…I don’t know. He did a couple of things that cringed me out a bit. He’s the sort of man who lies in bed after you’ve had sex and waits to catch your eye and says ‘Hey.’

she was a pathological people-pleaser—hell-bent on making sure every single person she came into contact with not only liked her but adored her and felt sensational about themselves in her presence.

She was both the most tragically insecure and beguilingly confident person I had ever met.

she loved fun, which was infectious.

Her pursuit of new experiences was a preoccupation, and her permanent state of being single had given her the time to make ...

‘last chance’?” “The summer afterwards I will probably be pregnant,” she said. I’d known that would be her answer, but I wanted to hear her say it explicitly. Her illogical optimism about the exact trajectory of her life never failed to make me glow with fondness for her.

I also would just like some of our friends to appreciate that while their search is over, mine is still on. And I have supported them every step of the way on their search. I’ve written them poems for their weddings—”