Satisfied we were both who we said we were, we’ve arranged to go for dinner - tonight is our first date. Our conversations haven’t really been too in-depth and I think he was drunk during our brief FaceTime, but if I have learned anything during my Matcher-ing, it’s that if you spend too long chatting beforehand, you have nothing to talk about on your first date and it’s super awkward.
I didn’t know what Matcher was until I discovered that my boyfriend was on there. It’s weird, because he kept making comments to me about online dating, joking around with me about seeing what was out there… I assumed he was kidding as he chatted about it with me on the walk back to his after a night out. I was listening, of course I was, but I didn’t really care because I had a boyfriend, what did I need to know about dating apps for? David, my then boyfriend, was perfect on paper. He had a good job, his own flat, a nice car, a handsome face – all the things you’re supposed to look for in a partner if you’re shallow, but I didn’t care about any of that stuff. I felt so safe with him and when he would lie in bed with me at night, cuddled up in the dark, and he would tell me how all he wanted was for us to get our own place.
That night we got back to his and had sex, but that’s about all I could tell you about it: that we did it. It wasn’t special or memorable in any way, and when he was done he rolled over, checked his phone and then went to sleep. I climbed over him to go to the bathroom, sat down on the loo and thought about things. About how cold he was, about his new fixation with dating apps – did he tilt his phone away from me when he checked it? I was sure he did. And when I started really thinking about it, he’d changed the passcode on his phone a matter of days ago, because ‘someone at work’ had learned it, and was on a one-man quest to ‘frape’ him – get into his Facebook account and post something embarrassing on his behalf. He never did tell me the new code…alarm bells were ringing so loud they were deafening, and it was making me dizzy.
I walked back to the bedroom where David was fast asleep, his phone on the bed next to him. That’s when I realised he’d fallen asleep with it unlocked and then I did something I’ve never done before and I’ve never done since – I looked on his phone. I felt sick with myself for looking but that’s nothing compared with how I felt when I looked through his apps and saw Matcher. Still willing to give David the benefit of the doubt, I considered whether or not this might just be curiosity and, with my heart banging hard against my chest, I ventured inside the app. Once in there, I got lost, drowning in a sea of matches and messages from more girls than I probably have in my phone contacts. I still felt like I was reaching, looking for something to grab onto to save me, but all I was seeing was conversations my boyfriend was having with single girls, telling them how he’d been single for a while, how he’d never met any girl that was worth the effort, how he’d love to go on a date with some red-headed girl, a veterinary nurse, some chick over from Australia on holiday for two weeks, a bird looking for ‘no strings’ fun, a single mum all the way in Doncaster – my boyfriend was putting out all kinds of bait and reeling in any fish he could get his hook into.
I locked his phone, placed it down next to him and climbed back into bed. I woke up and gave him a handful of opportunities to come clean, but he didn’t. It was lie after lie. Even though it was 3am, I packed up my things and I left, because without trust, what’s the point?
David was my first, proper grown-up relationship, and I thought we were going to be together forever. We were together just over a year, but we got so serious so quickly, we’d be talking about moving in together. Getting a place with David in Leeds was all I wanted. When the shit hit the fan, I thought to myself: who says I need a man to move out of my parents’ place and into the city? That’s probably why I was so quick to move in with Nick, despite not knowing him all that well. He was a means to getting what I wanted, even though it turned out that I did need a man to move out: Nick. I probably would’ve been happier living with my lying, cheating bastard of an ex.
One of the things I’ve learned about Matcher is that it makes people greedy. Because you can’t just chat to one person, you wind up chatting to a whole bunch of different people. Say you pick just one to go on a date with and wind up having a blast – you don’t think maybe something could go somewhere with this person, you realise just how easy it is to get more dates. Why date one person when you can feasibly date at least four people a week? It’s horrible really. But that’s the world we’re living in now..
When I first started using Matcher I was very cautious about who I spoke to and I certainly didn’t plan on meeting up with anyone. I knew that Millsy was never off it, and that it allowed him a different girl to sleep with every night, but I didn’t fancy it for myself. ‘Single AF’ as Millsy described me, because the bulk of his vocabulary is internet slang these days, he told me to sign up ‘for the banter’ last year, so I did, and I was surprised when I got talking to one dude who seemed pretty cool called Jack. I chatted with him for two months before I met him – which is ages in online dating world. He had his own place in the centre, he was gorgeous and he seemed really kind and funny – until I met him. Well, when Jack turned up, he looked nothing like his photos at all. He was significantly bigger than he appeared in his pictures, and shorter that I imagined too which didn’t help. He wore these little rimless glasses which – and I feel bad for thinking this at the time – made him look a bit like someone you’d expect to find on the sex offenders register, but I can honestly say that I didn’t care, because he was nice, and sweet and kind and funny – except he wasn’t. He didn’t just look different in person, he acted it too. Our chats were friendly and flirtatious, but we’d never really got onto the subject of getting it on, which is why I was surprised when – fifteen minutes into our date – Jack pinned me up against a wall and kissed me like a porno director had just shouted ‘action’. And right in the city centre, on a Tuesday lunchtime too. I wiggled free of his grasp awkwardly, steering him into the nearest shop in an attempt to halt his horses a little. I thought I was being a bit of a prude – which is unlike me – but Jack only got worse. He was like a horny teenager that had been granted unlimited access to boobs for the first time – except he hadn’t. When he wasn’t grabbing me, he was going behind me to try and unzip my dress. I let this go on for fifty minutes – forty-nine minutes longer than this excuse of a date should’ve lasted. Needless to say, this knocked my Matcher confidence and it took me nine months before I even dared to meet anyone again, but I did, and I have continued to meet fellas since, but no one has ever dazzled me. Everyone has been weird or, worse, boring. It’s full of vapid, topknot wankers who bang on about ‘cheeky Nando’s’ and how much they lift at the gym, and are on a one-man quest to shag as many birds as possible by any means necessary – people like Millsy, but he’s OK, because he might be a topknot wanker, but he’s my topknot wanker.
These days, I don’t really give meeting up with dudes a second thought, and I’d rather do it sooner than later, get it out of the way, see if they’re weird or boring and then move on to the next one if they are. I breeze through it like it’s dull, mindless admin work. This one is no good, on to the next. Unlike Millsy, I’m not sleeping with my dates – I rarely find Matcher dudes tolerable enough to sleep with. Millsy teases me and says I’m weird, but I just can’t fancy someone if I think they’re a bit of a dickhead, no matter how hot they are. This is why Millsy tells me I’m ‘doing Matcher wrong’ because I’m not ‘making the most of the D’.
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