The boy on Match says he wants a girl like Proverbs 31:10.
I haul a Rubbermaid from the basement and find the Bible from my Catechism days, sealed inside since seventh grade, resting on a nest of handwritten notes passed between classes. I pull back the cover, to figure out what the boy is after. He wants a girl who’s up before dawn preparing breakfast. A girl who will face tomorrow with a smile. In his carefully curated exhibit of photos, he curls a dumbbell in front a dirty gym mirror without looking up, falsely unaware of being captured. In the photo’s southwest corner is the reflection of a teenage girl holding the camera, the explosion on the flash catching the mirror. Her own dumbbell is waiting at her feet, reps interrupted for this vanity project. The boy on Match wants to know what you can do for him.
In middle school, as a gift to my mother, I offered up two years’ worth of Wednesday afternoons to the basement of a church. It’s a miracle that only once did I get into a fight with the Catechism teacher. Marriage, he told us, has nothing to do with love. He insisted, you find someone that you can make a stable life with and you sign the contract. Outside of church, the world was feeding us Cinderella and Snow White, Jane Eyre and Clarissa Dalloway, and somewhere in there, I’d come across Rosa Parks and Joan of Arc, and I wondered about the contracts they’d sign, the terms. Why would anyone sign such a thing?
Beauty but humility but sexiness but purity but perfection but humanity but independence but subservience. A single pat of butter spread over ten pieces of toast.
The boy on Match wants to pick out a woman the way I have shopped for shelter dogs. Does it bite? Good around kids? Can it be taught to stay? To beg? I tell the shelter worker, I am gone a lot. I do not want something that’s too much trouble, just someone to sit on my lap now and again. She tells me, then you don’t really want a dog. She’s right. The boy on Match wants to squeeze you into his life between a 9am haircut and a midday meeting.
The boy on Match loves family. He has a mother and wraps a stiff arm around her in one picture, eyes straight at the camera, bleached smile a mile wide. She’s facing the day with an apprehensive smile. He seems to notice her in the way you notice the seat on which you sit, only when it slips out from under you. The boy wants you to work out. I am always working to make myself better, you should be too.
He’ll settle when he’s found a girl like Titus 2:4—self-controlled and pure—is what the boy on Match says. Like a decorative plate, pulled from the cabinet and polished only to be put back in its place—pretty and inanimate—the boy on Match wants your perfect, untouched ass on his arm.
The boy on Match wants a woman fully-formed, delivered by drone.
The boy on Match does not mention anything about the man he wants to be. He sips brightly colored drinks, somewhere warm, with other boys who look like they might be on Match. Who all have tans and gel and board shorts with the same bright blooming flowers. Biceps curled jokingly (but seriously) in every photo. Boys who can never find a good woman.
The boy on Match doesn’t ask what you want, but we are getting more accustomed to this, to speaking even when we aren’t invited to, because we so rarely are.
I want a man like Ellison, pg. 1, a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Awake and aware enough to be angry.
I’m waiting to be paired with Darcy in Austen:214, In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you, someone who isn’t afraid of the infuriating complexity of loving a woman who owns herself.
I’ll settle on a man like Salinger: 256, a heartbreakingly broken Holden, moved to tears by Phoebe spinning on the Central Park carousel in the wet gray of February. I go there, to the carousel, on an afternoon in April when I am also feeling broken, watch the kids careen, and connect with a complex emotion I’ve struggled to communicate.
What I want
Ultimately, I guess
is a man who is better read
Who has cracked the spine of more than one book.
For my part, I’ll promise to be Whitman, constantly contradicting myself, but good-naturedly. How could you do anything else with the multitudes within you.
The algorithm has failed; I’m not the woman you’re after. I’m the wrong dimensions—all three, instead of the two you ordered. I don’t lie flat, I’m hard to wrap. You would forever be cutting yourself on my edges and piercing my soft spots.
I have an occasional habit of waking at 3 AM, eyes open and brain alight, and turning from side to back to other side, rolling onto my stomach, pillow clenched between arms, trying to find sleep again. The men I’ve loved have put a hand on my side then. They’ve asked what’s on my mind, and out comes a stream of lyrics and trivia, an article I read earlier, the time in third grade I said the thing I shouldn’t have said, the oven that might still be on, regrets, the phone number of my childhood best friend that must ring somewhere else now (653-0417), regrets, a television jingle, the unprocessed mash of my brain. The men I’ve loved have appreciated that; not the timing maybe, but the show.
If I manage to fall back asleep, I sleep late. I’m exhausted, not yet ready to face the day, and the men I’ve loved—the ones who have been worth a damn—have let me sleep. Have slipped soundlessly out of the sheets and into the kitchen, where they pulled the eggs from the fridge, a frying pan from a cupboard and managed, somehow, to piece together their own damn breakfasts.
Image Credits: Kevin Dooley
