It was pure sexting almost right out of the gate. He introduced her to the Snapchat-like feature on Instagram when sending pics that ‘disappear’. Keep in mind, she’s not as young as she used to be. She doesn’t know all this Snapchat lingo! (Don’t even get her started on TikTok!)
She sent him a couple boob shots. Anyone who’s sent a sexy pic (don’t lie, you all have!) has a go-to pose or angle. For her, she preferred a quick boob pic. It required very little finagling with angles or filters, and it was a part of her body she really wasn’t that insecure about. However, she knew she could only send so many of basically the same pic before this sexy, polyamourous, Greek god on the other end would get bored.
He asked her when she would come visit him, or when he could come visit her. She told him point blank that she was very busy for the next few weeks and that she couldn’t give him a definitive date. No hard feelings if he chose to end their chat there. He said he was having fun chatting with her and that he was fine to keep talking for the time being. But that’s when he started to ask for better pics.
Let’s be clear here, folks – she is not an innately sexy person. Not in a negative, insecure, sad way. Only in the sense that she is just… super, duper awkward! She had no game. She didn’t know how to pose. She could never get a good angle. And she had fallen off balance more than once in her attempts to snap a good pic for him. In the end, she was able to scrape by with one or two acceptable shots. However, she forgot she had to take the pictures through Instagram, not just on her phone. She had sent the first photo (a not-terribly angled, half covered ass shot), as an attachment in their chat. That’s when the app just completely shut down on her.
She opened it up again and re-tried. It worked but she noticed that under his name it no longer said how long since he’d been active, instead it said his full Instagram handle. She clicked his profile and discovered “User Not Found”. “Why?… What the fuck..?” is an exact quote from her brain. This person had sent her so many instant photos (or whatever the proper fucking term is for disappearing Snapchat-like pics!). And in return, this guy, who seemed like a real person and not some fake account or Catfish, had received a number of scantily clad photos of her (no face), and had just disappeared.
She wasn’t too sure what to do or how to take it. Was there a problem with the app? Was this guy just some huge scammer? There really was nothing for her to do about this, so she resigned herself very quickly to the fact that some stranger now had a bunch of pics of her boobs and ass. As much as she tried to shrug it off, (because really, it’s not the end of the world, right?) she knew that it was her own mistake to immediately trust this stranger just because he was fucking gorgeous and his eyes pierced through her soul. She knew better. But, once again, she let herself get wrapped up in the attention of a man and she ignored her better judgement in the hopes that his attention would stay on her. She felt a false sense of validation in it. Again.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She had learned nothing. Except – she was even more certain that dating apps were off the table for the time being. And on the off chance that Sexy Hands Guy did actually text her about getting together the following weekend, she told herself she wasn’t going to get her hopes up and she wasn’t going to get attached. She was 100% not going to catch feelings for him. She really was a rollercoaster of faulty logic and erratic emotions.
The next week came and went. No text from Sexy Hands Guy.
She had had some friends over for a safe, backyard hang on the Friday night. They drank and smoked and got all kinds of fucked up. She spent the entire Saturday recovering from her hangover – she definitely could not party like she used to. The value of water and aspirin had never been more apparent to her than when she hit her thirties. That all being said, it’s probably a good thing he never messaged her – A) because he’s not a good guy and she should really learn her fucking lesson, and B) she wasn’t back to 100% until at least the Tuesday after.
It was around the end of August when she un-paused her dating apps. After Sexy Hands Guy and Bella Boy, she had gone a couple weeks without talking to any guys. As mentioned in recent chapters, she was then able to focus on herself and get her shit together a little more than she had been.
She decided to un-pause her profiles mainly out of boredom. Almost immediately, her phone was blowing up with Likes. That’s really how they get ya, eh? The dopamine overload that floods your brain is very overwhelming. She went through her likes and matched with a few guys, including a sexy, black, British guy. He had commented on one of her pics and he seemed really normal, especially compared to the dating app trash she had been chatting with so far, so she replied.
They chatted for a bit that night and she found out he was a single dad who had moved to Canada to be with his (now ex)girlfriend and mother of his child. During that first conversation he already asked about meeting up. Again, she told him she was apprehensive but, to her surprise, he was super understanding about it. He had shared custody of his daughter so he was only available certain times a week. They arranged for tentative plans about two weeks from their first conversation.
In the meantime, they just kept chatting and getting to know each other. It was clear to her that he was a diamond in the rough because their conversation didn’t once turn sexual. At the same time though, that might have been why she got a little bored with him. That, and once she got that new message from her friend’s high school boyfriend, her attention was immediately swayed. She ended up messaging this British guy and saying that she just wasn’t ready to meet up with anyone, but wished him the best. She unmatched with him before he could reply.
There’s definitely some things there that she needed to unpack with her therapist. Was the chance to have a meaningful, mentally stimulating conversation on a real date with a nice guy, less enticing to her than a grammatically incorrect (on his part) text convo with a friend’s ex boyfriend from high school?…
Yep, that tracks.