And the women around me would agree, especially if they’d been married and were getting, or had just gotten, sectionorced.
They would gaze longingly at my Tinder matches. And then, with a sigh, they’d go back to emailing their bitter ex-husbands about the exchange of the teenagers for the weekend.
Out in the Village, Kitty and I looked over my prospects. It was like the old days when we were in our twenties and broke and would spend hours talking about men and trying to figure them out as if they were possibly the answer.
“You were always cute,” she said. “But you never had this many guys interested in you before. Even when you were twenty-five.”
“I know. And they’re all younger. Something isn’t right.”
“Let me see your phone,” she said.
She peered at my profile then laughed. “Well, no wonder. Those are the four best photos of you I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Photos?” I screamed. “What photos?”
I thought there was only the one.
I grabbed my phone.
Fucking Tinder. What else had they got on me? And how had they done it?
Kitty was right. There were three other photos on my profile, all taken back in the old days from some photo shoot where I’d had my hair and makeup done.
/> I knew the photos had come from my Facebook or Instagram pages but why those photos? Why only the younger ones? What was wrong with the older ones?
Most of my current photos reveal a smiling yet clearly middle-aged woman who looks like she could possibly be someone’s suburban mom. Had a person—a Tinder person—actually chosen the youthful photographs or had some mysterious sorting program chosen the photographs that were the most mathematically attractive?
Had Tinder created a fake me?
This meant that before I’d even had my first Tinder date, I’d become a “false advertiser”—one of those people who make themselves out to be taller, better looking, bigger titted, richer, more glamorous, better traveled, better connected, more successful, and younger online than they actually are irl.
“What are you going to do now?” Kitty asked.
I groaned as we looked through my prospects. Richard, twenty-eight, was cute, but he also looked smug and judgy. Chris, twenty-five, was adorable and worked in the tech department at the New York Times but looked like he’d barely graduated from college. I swiped to Jude, thirty-one.
“What about him?” Kitty asked.
“He lives in Brooklyn. And he’s in a band. He’s sort of a cliché.”
“So what? Maybe he’ll take you to some cool clubs in Brooklyn. That would be good for you.”
Choosing Jude
It was always going to be Jude I realized a few days later as I was getting ready to go on my one, and I hoped only, Tinder date.
I zipped up my dress, thinking about how, from the beginning, Jude had contradicted what others had said about men on Tinder. Starting with: “They can’t make plans.”
Wrong. Jude was a plan maker. It took only five or six or seven texts to arrange our “date”—a drink at a restaurant in Lincoln Square.
“The guys send dick shots.”
Nope. Jude couldn’t have been more respectful. After his initial hangover reference, his texts were polite and sober.
“The guy could turn out to be a psycho killer.”
I’d been studying Jude’s photographs for days looking for clues, and I was pretty sure I saw genuine kindness in his eyes.
Every person I’d shown his photo to agreed that he was definitely attractive and very much a “man-man,” whatever that meant. On the other hand, the fact that he was attractive meant he was probably short. After all, you couldn’t get good-looking, nice, and tall on your first spin around Tinder. And then I saw it: the dark hair, the beard, the glittery black eyes; if Jude turned out to be short, he would look exactly like Charles Manson.