finding love in the freezer aisle

for a while, i was really diligent about using dating apps. no matter that i kept tweaking my prompt responses and updating my image selections with little to show for it except screenshots of egregious profiles i could send to my friends for a laugh—i felt confident that if i just sent out my daily allotment of eight likes on hinge and swiped right on bumble until a cooldown timer popped up letting me know how long until i could resume (lest i actually make a successful match and uninstall the app), the fruits of my labor would inevitably reap rewards. 

even when profiles so bland, so jarring, so unenticing compelled me to retreat in defeat or disgust, i made sure to continue laboring. "dating is a numbers game," i kept hearing, so i thought adhering to the rules and getting my numbers up would lead to my inevitable victory. 

before i was thrown into this mess of a dating landscape, i had never been able to develop an organic, in-person connection into something more, but i did get close once. i remember long days spent daydreaming about future interactions, keeping mental tabs on his precise location whenever we were in the same room, and menacing my friends with my incessant yearning while simultaneously disregarding their advice to just tell him how i felt. and when i finally found the boldness to say something, i thought i had succeeded in jumping a hurdle it seemed everyone around me had seamlessly surpassed ages ago—entering my first relationship.

i was young and misread the situation, or maybe it just ended up proceeding down a path i hadn't expected, because for all intents and purposes, that was not my boyfriend, partner, love interest, anything. that was someone i had confessed my feelings to, who thought it was okay to verbally return those feelings when he didn't mean it. 

i'm not in his head; i can't know for certain whether or not he meant it. but in the years since, my constant, then frequent, then occasional ruminating over the six months i spent thinking i was in my first relationship has made me realize it only occurred because he thought he should settle for what was presented to him. i was a convenient choice, which isn't really a choice at all. 

until recently, no one has unprovokedly expressed romantic interest in me save for the occasional hinge like that, if we match, inevitably goes nowhere. that changed late last year in, of all places, the frozen food aisle at my local stop and shop. i was nearing the end of my grocery run, mostly thinking about how i had to be sure to get broccoli florets instead of cuts this time, only vaguely aware of the man standing in front of the fridge i needed to open. my usual protocol in this scenario is to kill time browsing whatever's across from me, even if it's something i would never buy or physically cannot eat; this time, however, i locked eyes with the man. 

mistake number one. of all places my eyes could have landed, why couldn't i have gazed at my cart, his cart, the floor—literally anywhere but the one place that would alert him i was aware of his presence? and then i made mistake number two: i smiled. 

it's a leftover habit of my southern upbringing that's been hard to shake since moving to the northeast, where my efforts are usually met with quick, stone-faced looks in the opposite direction. i try not to take it personally. i feel like an asshole whenever i meet someone's eyes and manage to pry them away without engaging, but sometimes, it's better to be an asshole than to stick out. 

after my gaffe, i tightened my grip on the cart handle, suddenly fascinated by the frozen fruit concentrate in the fridge next to me. i thought i was in the clear after a few moments passed undisturbed, but then i heard a voice ask, "excuse me?"

as much as i'd hoped somebody else had entered the aisle, i knew he was speaking to me. i finally had the chance to take him in: dark skin, medium height, bald, some gray patches in his goatee. if i had to guess his age, i'd place him around forty.

"what's your name?" he asked. in the same instant, i thought "do not tell him your real name!" and "damn it, why can't i think of a single woman's name other than my own?" so i told him my own.

mistake number three! not the most egregious one since i'm not naïve enough to think that he could do anything with just that snippet of information—jessica used to be in the top ten girl's names in america—but i didn't want to give it to him. my brain just didn't know how to react under pressure. 

the pressure hadn't eased any when he asked, "do you got a man?" the safest thing to do would've been to say yes because, unfortunately, the "protection" of a man, even if he doesn't actually exist, can do a lot of heavy lifting if a situation like this were to turn south.

i want to make it clear that nothing about the man was overtly threatening except for the fact that i was alone and not expecting him to talk to me. i hate that i've come of age into a world where casual, in-person interactions with strangers are immediately seen as suspect, but that's the only world i know. paired with the constant, low-grade-at-minimum anxiety that's plagued me for as long as i've had consciousness, my mind was always going to travel to danger, even if i could logically see how unlikely of an outcome it was.

in the aisle, something about the question of "do you got a man?" made me snicker. it's not as if we all walk around with badges above our heads indicating our relationship status, and yet part of me thought this stranger should find it obvious that, as always, i had zero prospects. so i said no—mistake number four, but by then i'm not sure if i was still counting—which brought the interaction to its conclusion: the man asking for my phone number. 

the rational part of my brain finally wrested control back from my wayward amygdala and told him, "no, i'm sorry." i made sure to let him down gently, but the permissiveness had to stop there. 

as funny and uncomfortable as i found the situation, i also had a sensation i couldn't fully name. was it flattery, vindication, disappointment that that's all there was? twenty-two years on earth, and this was now going to be the only example of someone definitively expressing interest in me?

in the coming weeks, i was back in my typical cycle with the dating apps: uninstalling them in fits of despair and then realizing my hubris after contending with the fact that i wasn't going to make any connections if i never left my apartment. but it quickly became apparent i wasn't getting any closer to a first date, let alone a relationship.

on hinge alone, i would send likes to eight different men every day—some enthusiastically, others with an air of "well, let's just give him a chance." still no matches. i realized if i was reaching my like limit every day and not getting matches, that meant that after a week, there were fifty-six men who got the notification that i had liked them, opened the app, and thought "no, not for me" after looking at my profile. fifty-seven if you count my sunday rose recipient, the winner of a careful consideration of the seven or so men who the algorithm determined to be most "my type" and therefore chose to gatekeep. 

i won't act like i know for a fact that it played out this way with all 57 of them. i wouldn't be surprised if some of them had turned their notifications off, deleted the app without hiding their profile, or simply received so many likes in a day that mine got lost in the shuffle. but after so much effort with so little reward, it feels foolish not to start looking at the common denominator. 

i don't suffer from the same self-loathing i had when i was an overly sensitive adolescent who funneled all her negative emotions so far inward that i'm still working on uprooting them now. for years, i've been putting in what feels like constant effort to feel more free in the body i have instead of fantasizing about a "better" one forever out of reach. i adopted the moniker of "feminist" in the eighth grade and haven't looked back since. but unfortunately, none of this stops me from feeling deep shame—even sorrow—that the kinds of men i like don't like me. i want to be concerned with more important matters. i want to not feel like an aberration. mostly, i want reciprocation.

whenever i surpass merely finding a guy attractive and develop a true crush, it's not about hair color, job title, college major, ethnicity, or other individual attributes. i need something beyond the physical to form an emotional connection with him, or if i'm being honest, the idea of him. i've had interactions—sometimes even meaningful ones!—with men i've had a full blown crush on, but any information i learned from them was never enough to fully dismantle the idealized image i created of him. no matter what red flags crop up, i always find a way to make it about his complexity and inner workings when sometimes, it's just a sign that we're not a good fit and/or he's not that good of a person. 

but alas, when i fixate, i fixate hard. i'm not brave enough to admit to many of the things i've said or done while in the throes of a crush, but it's safe to say the border between interest and obsession gets blurred if not crossed entirely. it can take months for me to fully divest my emotions from someone, even when i'm actively trying to get over them, so with dating apps, it's incredibly off putting to be swiping or scrolling through profiles of people who i feel nothing about in the hopes that it leads to those same feelings. 

any time i get a match—frequently on tinder, less so on bumble, and rarer still on hinge, which is directly inverse to the quality of said apps and their pool of prospects—i might feel temporary excitement, but it's more about receiving validation than it is about the person themselves. they may be a lovely individual in real life, but i've become jaded by the endless cycle of optimistically sending a like only to get ignored, or else matching, having a lukewarm conversation that lasts between a few hours and at most a week, then silently going our separate ways.

it's such a stark contrast to how i'd feel if i made a connection with someone face to face, but now that i'm out of college and no longer have an open pool of available men around my age living on the same campus as me (though i use the term "available" loosely and, as a reminder, no one expressed interest in me from the day i moved into my freshman dorm to the day i walked across the stage to get my diploma), i don't know how to make meaningful connections without the crutch of an app on my phone.

as much as i know living in a previous era would take away many of the comforts i've grown used to, i constantly fantasize about navigating all this before meeting on an app became the standard. then again, if you took the apps away, who's to say i wouldn't be in the exact spot i'm in now?