Faking It, page 3
The cherry on the cake is when I get a notification that evening: Mitch has added me . . . on LinkedIn.
What?
Has he seriously just added me on a professional networking platform like I didn’t (very quietly and calmly) just a few hours ago threaten to pour my drink over his suede loafers if he didn’t back the hell off and leave me to listen to Lena’s sister’s speech in peace?
What a tool.
While the familiar drama of a Call the Midwife episode plays out on the television, I flip between apps on my phone. Twitter, Instagram, back to Twitter, no new messages from anyone on WhatsApp or Messenger . . .
Switching between apps to scroll mindlessly feels automatic, second nature. It’s also automatic at this point to add a dating app into the mix. Tonight, it’s my new favorite one, Hookd. I click on the icon of the red fishing rod, hooking a heart on the end of the line, and the app explodes to life on my screen.
I wonder if my new and hopefully improved profile will have secured me any more matches. I haven’t really used any dating apps since my last breakup just before Christmas, so a few weeks ago Tally and I decided to revamp my profile a bit: swap out some photographs, write a new bio, use some different prompts.
No man, new me, and all that.
Not that it was exactly heartbreaking, as breakups go. We only dated for a couple of weeks and we were still in the getting to know each other stage. But, you know. It’s not exactly nice to be broken up with on Christmas Eve when you thought you were meeting up to exchange presents.
In spite of that—and in spite of Mitch’s very chivalrous offer of a quickie in the toilets—I’m back on the horse when it comes to dating.
Although I’m not really sure I’ve ever been “off” it.
Hi, my name is Sophie, and I’ve been single for . . . ever.
Cue the Greek chorus: “Hi, Sophie.” Because honestly, I’m pretty sure my love life counts as a tragedy in anybody’s book.
I mean, I’ve basically been single forever. I don’t count the
“boyfriend” I had when I was thirteen, when the extent of our relationship was holding hands in the cinema on a trip out with all our friends, and every relationship I’ve had since then has never been, well, serious.
Part of that is my fault, I’m sure, or I wouldn’t still be single.
But part of it isn’t. The guys who, after nine weeks of stringing you along, say, “We’re just talking. We’re not exclusive, are we?” or, my personal favorite, “I’m not ready for commitment,” and then the next thing you know they’re on Facebook announcing they’re having a baby with their ex or something.
(Which happened once. But that is one time too many, right?) It’s a fun story to tell my friends about now, obviously, and since so many of them are in relationships, they thrive off tales of my dating life—or so they claim, like Lena just did—but honestly?
It’s exhausting.
Why can’t it be that easy for me? Meet a guy, start dating, keep dating, probably end up married one day. Like all my friends seem to be doing.
Sometimes—or, fine, basically al the time—I wish I was like them. That I had what they’ve got. Not just someone to kiss good morning or go on dates with, but someone. A person who’s mine, and I’m theirs, and we’re an “us,” and it’s nice, and good, and comfortable, and it’s the whole rest of our lives.
I wish I had someone, so I could build a future like everybody else is instead of being faced only with a panic that, because I’m alone, I must therefore be a failure. I won’t get to throw big parties that all my friends have to go to, and I won’t be able to buy a house and make a home with someone, or even have someone to split a bottle of wine with on a Friday night!
I wish I didn’t always have to feel so alone and left behind.
I catch myself quickly; that is not a thought spiral I want to give in to, not today. It’s a Sunday night, for god’s sake. I have work tomorrow. Now is not the time for a self-pity party and a why can’t I get a boyfriend existential crisis.
My phone screen lights up, like it knows my attention is somewhere else and I am in desperate need of a distraction.
You have a new match!
That tiny five-word message on my screen sends a little thrill through me. It’s a feeling I relish. Whether it’s someone I really fancy or someone I just swiped right on because I was bored and/or drunk, it’s that rush of Someone likes me! Someone thinks I’m attractive! I have been deemed worthy!
It’s shallow, I know.
I open the app back up to take a look at the person who’s matched with me. His name is Joseph. He has three sisters and likes to travel. His first photograph is him sporting a great tan and a pair of rainbow-pattern swim shorts, posing on a pile of rocks near some exotic waterfall. He has a group photo with some friends outside a pub at a stag do, and one with what I assume are his sisters at one of their weddings.
He says very little about himself on his profile so I don’t have an awful lot to go on, but he looks nice and I’m flattered he likes me back, so I message him.
Joseph and his technicolor swim shorts, how you doing?
The reply is almost instantaneous, which gives me another spike of dopamine.
Haha, that’s a great one! I’m doing good thanks.
How about yourself?
All cozied up with some Sunday night telly, so pretty good.
What’re you watching?
Call the Midwife. (Don’t judge, I promise I’m not catfishing and actually like a middle-aged woman with eight cats, or something.)
Haha, sounds good.
Hmm.
Maybe he’s not the chattiest of guys, or maybe it’s just that he’s a bit shy and needs to talk more before coming out of his shell.
Still. He looks cute, and he looks nice, and he’s liked me back, so I’m willing to see how this goes.
I spend most of the next hour messaging Joseph, teasing more out of him about his job (technical engineer for some company I’ve never heard of), his hobbies (weight lifting, travel, horror movies), and rewriting my own messages in my head before I type them, trying to match his shorter sentences so the conversation feels more balanced.
Not to be a total bore, but I think I’m gonna turn in for the night. It’s been kind of A Day!
Been great to chat to you though :)
Now for the moment of truth. Three little dots appear and disappear and reappear and disappear several times as he painstakingly types his reply. I watch them with a tight feeling in my chest and a sinking feeling in my stomach, bracing myself . . .
Talk tomorrow? Xx
And he gives me his number.
Four
“What happened to that guy you were talking to?” Tally asks me a week later while she’s busy perusing the menu in Costa, like we both don’t already know she’ll get a medium skinny caramel mocha, because that’s what she always gets if there are no seasonal drinks available. (In the peak of summer, it’s a skinny caramel frappé. She likes to mix things up.)
I look up from my phone. “Rainbow Joe? We’re going for drinks again tonight.”
“Huh? Oh, no, the, um . . . what’s his name? You know the one I mean. Charlie Weasley.”
Charlie Weasley—not the fictional character studying dragons in Romania but the redheaded thirty-year-old who worked at the zoo and had a pet lizard. His real name was Daniel. We matched just after I’d updated my profile and I met him for dinner once, about two weeks ago.
I shake my head. “Fizzled out.”
Tally turns away from the menu behind the counter, the look in her dark-green eyes something a little too much like sympathy.
“Did he ghost you?”
If she wasn’t my best friend, I’d try not to roll my eyes. But I do roll my eyes and I huff for good measure. “No. It just, you know, fizzled. Mutually.”
“But I thought you liked him!”
“I—well, I did, I suppose, but . . . ”
But, yes, he ghosted me. Fine, Tally wins. But it hurts to admit, and I hate how it makes me question every word, every action, wondering what I did to mess it up so bad that he can’t even let me know he’s no longer interested.
Tally’s face creases with a little more pity, and I hate her feeling sorry for my singledom as much as I hate being ghosted, so I barrel on. “I don’t think I’m what he was looking for. He was very reserved and introverted, and we just didn’t have the same sense of humor.
That’s okay. We gave it a shot.”
“His loss,” she says firmly, the sympathy in her face vanishing.
“So what about Rainbow Joe? Sorry, I promise I do read your messages, it’s just . . . ”
To be fair to Tally, I know it’s not her fault. She’s in the middle of some huge project at work with a looming deadline and they’ve just announced mass redundancies and she’s in the midst of trying to buy an apartment with her boyfriend, Sam, so she’s got a lot on her plate. Meeting up for coffee before work, midway between both our offices, was her idea, so we could catch up properly. We never really got the chance to hang out much at Lena’s engagement party.
After we order our drinks, I fill her in on Rainbow Joe—Joseph, with the rainbow swimming trunks. His messages are supershort and he never double messages, so sometimes I feel like the conversation is a bit stilted, which means I don’t like to send him small essays asking more about his life or telling him stuff about me.
But I don’t think he’s being intentionally curt.
Tally nods wisely. “He’s just being a guy. Yeah, I get you.”
I tell her about how much better the conversation flowed when I met him last Thursday night for a drink, after we’d been talking for a few days; how he asked me about myself and seemed genuinely interested and had wanted to see some of my photography when I mentioned it was a casual hobby of mine; that he had a dry sense of humor and kissed me on the cheek at the end of the night before I got an Uber home.
Tally scrunches up her face. “Oh.”
“What?”
“Just a kiss on the cheek?”
“He just got out of a long-term relationship not too long ago.
I think he wants to take things a bit slowly. That was the vibe I got, anyway.”
“How long is not too long ago, though?”
“Like three months.”
She pulls a face and makes a hmmming noise, skeptical, but quickly smiles at me again. “That’s good, though, that you’re seeing him again tonight! Are you going for dinner?”
“No, just drinks again. Keep it casual, I guess. Then back home since it’s a work night.”
She makes the hmmming noise again before she can help herself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
She sighs, fidgeting with her napkin. “It just seems a bit noncommittal? I don’t know. Like, what’s wrong with just going out for a meal? Why does it have to be drinks again?”
“You’re overthinking this,” I tell her, because I have to, because it’s exactly what crossed my mind and if I give in to it, I’ll just over-analyze the whole thing and ruin it before I’ve even given Joseph a real chance.
Drinks are nice, casual. Too casual? And on a weeknight where it’s only two, maybe three drinks at a push, then the bus home?
Hmm. It does limit our time together, and it’s not as intimate as dinner. More conducive to a conversation than going to the cinema or a club, so bonus points for that. Did he suggest drinks again because he thought that was what I wanted, after I said how much fun it was last week? Or is it because he’s saving the expense and effort of a weekend dinner date for a girl he’s more interested in and I’m just a midweek ego boost and a way to kill some time?
See? Overthinking it.
So if Joseph wants to meet for drinks on a Tuesday night, that’s fine. I’m happy that he wants to see me again.
“I just don’t like seeing you get hurt,” Tally tells me. Her heart-shaped face scrunches up, full lips pursing into a pout.
I feel a pang of something I can’t quite identify—I don’t know if it’s panic because she’s right somehow, or offense, or sadness; I just know it doesn’t feel good, so I tamp it down quickly and give a dismissive snort. “I don’t think I ever manage to date a guy long enough to get hurt.”
“Maybe not hurt, exactly, then. But you’re disappointed whenever it doesn’t work out. And you took a break,” she points out,
“after The Gareth Who Stole Christmas.”
The Gareth Who Stole Christmas, code name for plain ol’
Gareth, who broke up with me on Christmas Eve.
“You came over with a bottle of Baileys and cried over him. You had two of your emergency cigarettes.”
“Because it was Christmas Eve! The season of goodwill! Not a day you break up with people on! It’s like, in the top five worst days of the year to dump someone. Right up there with Valentine’s and your birthday.”
“And you said, ‘Tally, I’m not doing this again. I can’t keep wasting my time and energy on these losers who string me along.’”
“That was then. I’m over it now.”
“You’ve said things like that before, though, Soph.”
“And?”
Tally sighs, and it’s a sigh I know well after being friends for ten years. She’s not the only person from school I still talk to, but she is the only one I’d invite to my wedding (if I ever manage to find a partner to have one). She’s my oldest friend, and my closest—both emotionally and geographically. Anyway, it’s the kind of sigh she does when something seems glaringly obvious to her and she doesn’t know how else to explain it to me. A bit like when she used to help me study for my maths GCSE, or that time she talked me through how to cook asparagus.
“Wait,” she says suddenly, reaching for her phone. “Here, I think there’s something you should read . . . Hang on, I know I liked it on Twitter . . . there!” She clicks a link on her phone and then places it in front of me.
SINGLE, SWIPE, REPEAT: I know it’s a commercial fad but I just want somebody to love.
My own anonymous article about being sad and single stares up at me from her phone, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
The column started out completely by accident. A few times, as part of my bid for extra responsibilities as a marketing assistant, I’ve written up pieces for advertisements—usually when companies want it to read as an organic part of the paper, not a paid ad.
Local news isn’t, generally, the most exciting of circles to move in. Dog shelter adoption days, school fairs, a stay-at-home dad who’s gone viral online for his crochet creations on Etsy. Once we did actually have a major drug bust that involved snipers and everything, but that was two years ago now.
The marketing department is only marginally more exciting, because we’re owned by some media company with a bunch of other local papers across the country, so we get pretty decent marketing links.
Like last December, just before New Year’s. We had a fully comped night in a spa hotel, and I begged my boss, Jenny, to let me do the write-up. It was supposed to be a romantic couples’ getaway, and because they were pushing for me to take a guy and Gareth had just dumped me, and my go-to guy friend Frankie said he wasn’t sure his girlfriend would like it if I took him, I ended up taking my work bestie, Duncan, who’s more like a brother figure in my life than anything else. The two of us got hammered on the complimentary champagne. He slept in the luxury claw-foot bathtub and declared it the best night’s sleep of his life.
But since it was supposed to be a romantic getaway—the hotel gave us a complimentary couples’ massage, champagne, a tasting menu, the lot—I wrote it up like it was one. Nobody needed to know we went as friends or that I was newly single, and so what if I made up a romantic kiss with my unnamed “boyfriend” that Duncan and I laughed about when I sent him my draft of the article? It was just a little white lie, and only for the sake of a story. I didn’t lie about the hotel.
It did better than anybody expected. The editor, Duncan’s boss, Andy, said the traction it got on the website was good enough that the company who owns the paper took an interest, and suddenly I was agreeing to write a monthly column about relationships and promising Jenny that it wouldn’t affect my work on her team.
My only condition was that it be anonymous. Both Andy and the team in legal encouraged me to change names, dates, any identifying factors and all that jazz, which suited me just fine; I didn’t want my friends or family knowing I was behind it.
Should I tell Tally, now that I’m faced with it?
Part of me would love to, to prove that I’m doing something with my life, that there’s something worthwhile, something successful about me, especially since things with my normal day-to-day role at work have been a bit bumpy lately.
Before I can make up my mind, she’s already resumed talking.
“I think,” Tally says, “you put a lot of pressure on—”
Her phone rings. It’s not her usual ringtone; it’s the one she set up for people from work.
Tally swears under her breath and scrabbles to grab her phone back from me, moving it to her ear with both hands so abruptly she knocks her glasses askew. “Hello? What’s . . . no, I haven’t seen . . . oh shit, really? Bollocks. Right, no, it’s fine, I’ll— He’s what? Okay.
Okay, no. Yeah. I’ll be in soon. Okay.”
“What were you saying?”
“Oh, nothing, it’s just—” She swaps her phone for her coffee, chugging it like a first-year uni student would a pint. She gasps when she’s done and swipes her hand across the back of her mouth, smudging her lipstick. I grab her bag for her, rooting around inside for her lipstick and holding up a compact mirror so she can fix it.
“Someone signing off on things they shouldn’t be. Which is exactly what I need to deal with today when we’ve got a last-minute drop-in from the higher-ups wanting a full presentation updating them on progress. Like we’ve got the time. The usual crisis. Ugh.”
“No, about me. I put a lot of pressure on what?”
Tally’s mind is racing a hundred miles an hour, though, and it’s already at work. She’s mentally drafting emails and scripting conversations she needs to have. Her brain has moved on from our conversation and it’s clear from the brief, wide-eyed look she gives me that she’s already forgotten.
