Tinder History #2: Tyler, in Queens.
It had been about a year since my ill-fated date with Matthew, and date #2 began with a spur of the moment decision to skip class, curl up in a dim part of the library and redownload Tinder. Emboldened as only a college student lying on the ground in a semi-public location can be, I mustered my feminist power and decided that I should shoot some messages to my matches…. including Tyler.
Again (a pattern emerges!), I was somewhat uncertain about his pictures — he’d managed to select photos that evaded my height-detecting skills, as well as ones of a relatively low quality, so I wasn’t actually sure which person he was. Also, one of the pictures was just a dog. But hey, I like dogs. And none of the options of which person he could be in the picture were bad… some were just better than others. Later that night, Tyler responded, and we began messaging. Both his massively enthusiastic texting style (every message ending in exclamation marks and approximately 3–7 emojis) and his moderately sad story (new to New York, knew no one, worked a ton) were appealing, though arguably the most exciting part was that he was exceedingly fast to respond to texts (my standards are high).That was Thursday.
On Friday, we began to make plans to meet. In what I now realize is typical fashion, I had little to no concern when his idea for our date was to walk his dog, which, of course, had to take place by his apartment, which was in… Queens. A borough that, because I’m the worst when it comes to actually ‘being’ ‘a’ ‘New Yorker,’ I had never visited. It was about damn time to conquer the 7 train.
We decided to meet in the early afternoon on Saturday — contingent on the end time of a football game. As I sat on the 7 train above Queens (a novelty to a terrible Manhattanite who likes her trains like she likes her men: underground) (jk) (or am I) and the inevitable dread of ‘this is not how human beings were intended to meet and date’ set in, he texted something along the lines of how happy he was that we meeting and doing something casual and low-pressure. Yes! I thought. Although all of my ancestors, all the way down to my parents, would be horrified by the entire situation (online dating, meeting a stranger from the internet, going to an outer borough, etc etc etc), I’d done well. Nice and casual, I thought, looking down at my boots/jeans/sweater, niiiiiice and casual.
Of course, I DID send a ‘hey if I get murdered, here’s where the body will be’ text to my friend Emma, who found the whole thing hilarious and promised to help me if needed. I disembarked from the train by the address where we said we’d meet — his apartment, as I then realized. Tossing aside all regard for personal safety, I chose not to let this move deter me, though I had thought that we’d meet at a park or something. But goddamn it, I was here for love, and a little potential murder was not going to stop me.
Upon arriving to his apartment complex, Tyler came down to greet me and I immediately learned a major lesson about how people define certain things differently. For example, when Tinder wants a picture of me, I like to use ones that look, well, at all like me. At all. And if, for example, I had left college and gained about 40 pounds from a lifestyle of ‘all takeout all the time,’ I would update my photos. He had not done so. And I consider jeans and a sweater ‘casual,’ but it seems that his definition of casual was ‘full sweatsuit, including stains.’ I was suuuuper taken aback by these incongruencies (plus, he was MAYBE my height. Burned again!!!), but did my best to mask my reaction for three reasons:
- 1) I was not raised by wolves. Obviously. Politeness is key, people.
- 2) Who amongst us has not had a weight fluctuation? Who am I to judge? The sweatsuit could not have been doing him any favors.
- 3) The look on his face. It was like the castaways on Survivor when they see the hamburger and beer that Jeff Probst will give them if they stand on a pole in the ocean for 16 hours. It was like I was the first person who had interacted with him socially in 15 years. And y’all, I’m cute, but I’m not ‘Survivor hamburger’ cute. This was a lonely man.
So I followed him upstairs. What else could I do?
While I quietly freaked out, Tyler was talking enthusiastically about how the football game he’d been watching wasn’t quite done, about how his dog was excited to meet me… and then he opened the door to his apartment. First: it smelled like the apartment was made out of a dog. It was the strongest-smelling place I have been in, ever. And the dog in question, while undeniably cute, had ALSO apparently been lacking in companionship and was deeply all up in my business, wiggling and thrashing and barking. Cute, but distracting. Distracting from what, you ask?
From the (frankly insane) furniture situation. The apartment was two rooms: a living room/kitchen and a bedroom. The furniture, in total, was: a kennel. A tv on a table, surrounded by three chairs: a single upholstered dining-room chair (clearly plucked from a set), a foldable chair of the kind that you would keep in the trunk of your car and sit on at a kid’s soccer game, and a Budweiser-themed outdoor Adirondack chair. In the bedroom, there was a boxspring and mattress on the ground in the corner. He could have moved in 10 minutes prior to my arrival.
As I realized that this was a person basically in shambles, and I needed to escape, Tyler began talking about how excited the dog was to go on the walk and to meet “her new friend, (nickname that I don’t go by).” And so, as my (maybe) third interaction with Tyler ever, I was forced to ask him not to call me that, which always just sounds like me being a total dick, especially after he had just fucking told his dog that we would be, like, lifelong BFFs. As he’d said, the football game was still on, and so I was left to sit (on the dining room chair, at least) and watch the final minutes, during which Tyler pointed out that he had purchased ‘mimosa supplies’ for after our walk. I wondered when I could bail — it seemed that he was buckling in to make me his crazy-ass dog’s new mother in his furniture-devoid apartment.
Soon, we set out on the walk. I am, and I hate to have to clarify this, a very fun conversationalist. I promise, I am NOT the reason that I keep having to describe these conversations as painful, but they WERE and this one WAS. At one point, Tyler described ‘How I Met Your Mother’ as “comedy genius” and “the best show ever,” which — listen. It’s a fine show. I’ve watched it. But ‘genius’? PLEASE. Lord. We walked the dog. Conversation did not get any better, though I tried valiantly. Tyler talked about how lonely he was, and how amazing his dog was… in babytalk. We walked back. I declined a mimosa.
Tyler went to the bathroom and I panic-texted Emma. Then I panic-called her. When Tyler came back, I was aggressively pretending that she had called me, and was ‘mmm-hmm’-ing assent to all of her questions, including: “is it bad?” “Do you need an out?” “Do you want me to keep talking?” Frankly, it was the best conversation I had had all day, and I was desperate for it to continue. It was not a traditional distress call — instead, Tyler puttered around for the TEN MINUTES it took me to work up the courage to get off the phone. “Everything ok?” he asked. I told him that Emma had just finished her applications to grad school and was demanding that I come back to Manhattan to celebrate (an exaggeration — the only thing she was demanding was every painful detail of the date). He looked very, very dejected standing there in his empty kitchen, so I said I had a little bit of time before I had to leave.
We talked some, but less than a minute later, he crossed to where I was sitting (in the Budweiser chair this time, as he insisted it was more comfortable) and kissed me. Of course, because I was sitting in an Adirondack chair, which was super low to the ground, and he was standing, it was possibly the worst angle imaginable. Potentially weirder was how he did it, which was with a noise that could have been “oh, fuck it,” as he approached, and with the kind of enthusiasm that led me to assume that he’d been on the precipice of doing so ever since he opened the door to his apartment. Despite the fact that, as previously mentioned, Tyler was kind of a human disaster, he wasn’t too bad of a kisser, and we made out for awhile before I left. (His parting words: “oh, wow, you might be taller than me!” My parting words: “Haha. Maybe.”)
Before I even reached the train station, I had a text about how great of a time he had and how we should get together again soon. I ended up taking way too long to respond, and eventually/awkwardly telling him that I was probably too busy to date anyone. In perhaps the weirdest part (SOMEHOW weirder than the rest of it), it turns out that my other friend, Harper, had ALSO matched with Tyler (also thinking that it was someone else in the pictures) and, though she wasn’t super interested in him, she was coaching him through his angst about this girl who’d showed up, made out with him and then basically ghosted him — a girl who was CLEARLY a bitch, she said, all the while encouraging ME to ghost Tyler. Needless to say, Tyler and I never spoke again.
