Fleeting thoughts

my first pen pal ❤

Years ago, when I was still living in DC and my friends and I were excited about online dating and the privilege of getting to meet new people after emerging from the pandemic, one of our foundational rules was simple: no pen pals.

What’s a pen pal?

Someone that you meet online but will never meet in person. They will message you for hours on end, staying up late into the night every night to tell you their deepest darkest secrets but they will never meet you.

Why would someone do that?

Great question !! Maybe because they crave emotional intimacy without having time for a physical connection, maybe they’re a catfish, maybe they’re just bored… many theories exist, but the bottom line is that they’re a waste of time. It doesn’t matter how hot the person is, how good the conversation is, if it gives you butterflies or makes you blush or whatever, we can all agree that pen pals are a waste of time. And I don’t particularly enjoy conversing with men or wasting my time so I have been very successful at dodging pen pals.

But it is with much embarrassment that I admit that last month I fell for my first pen pal.

It started innocently enough – a like, a message, and that typical one-message-per-day back and forth game. Then he asked to talk off the app, to which I was excited to give him my phone number and he was not excited to take it.

“Can we talk on instagram?”

The fuck? A huge red flag, maybe the largest of all of the red flags, but this guy had one thing going for him which absolved him of all sins… he was australian. Like just moved here, accent and everything australian. So I figured maybe he didn’t have a US phone number and when I asked my best friend who lives in New Zealand about it she agreed that no one over there actually uses their phone numbers to text. Red flag gone!

We ended up chatting and he matched my energy which is the biggest GREEN flag ever so when I pulled my typical “we should talk about this over drinks some time,” and he didn’t answer, I crashed out. It wasn’t even because I thought this guy was THE guy (although again, australian), it was just the feeling of not being wanted. And in a season of my life where being the maid of honor in two weddings was making me question if I’m forever destined to be a side character, this fresh rejection was not taken lightly. I moped and journaled and complained to my friends and reminded myself that it really was not a big deal. After a few days and some nights out with friends, I was over it.

And then he messaged me back.

Huuuuge eye roll, but he apologized for taking so long to respond and said he would love to go out some time. He sounded genuine and he really only ghosted me for a few days so despite the self-imposed emotional roller coaster, I was down to give it a shot. But when he couldn’t hang out in the first half of the week and I was out of town for a wedding during the second half, I knew we were on the slippery slope to pen pal status.

During that week we talked a gross amount. Perhaps incessantly. About music and work and our lives and things we liked and disliked and sometimes it was flirty and sometimes it wasn’t but it was always fun. I know I should be embarrassed, but I was tired of depriving myself of things that were fun. I had made all of these “rules” to try to get the most out of online dating but I hadn’t gotten anything out of it so far so why was I still following them?

We set a new date for the following Wednesday and I was excited to meet this person that I was getting to know. I was also slightly worried that I wouldn’t like him very much in real life but I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind…that would be crazy! He was going to be perfect, we were going to be perfect, it was going to be perfect. Cinematic.

Until I got a message saying, “Hey, I’d really love to go on a date with you but I can’t right now because of my work schedule.”

Well that’s certainly a different kind of cinematic.

The weird part was it wasn’t quite a rejection. He still wanted to chat with me about this and that and send photos and voice messages and talk about some date off in the future that seemed less and less likely to happen. I was confused. I wanted to shut it down, close off, move on with some dignity, but my friends said I should leave the door open in case things changed and timing worked out. I told him to let me know if his schedule changed, then returned to some other matches that I had neglected over the past few weeks.

When one of them asked me out immediately, I knew australia was only ever going to be a pen pal. Because it really was that simple. If he wanted to go out, we would have. There was no point in waiting around. Was he busy? Was he a pen pal? Or a catfish? We’ll never know, but the allure was gone. There wasn’t much left to say.

The next guy I picked was the complete opposite in that he didn’t talk to me at all except for his nightly “come over” texts. We didn’t meet either, but I will always be thankful to him for breaking me out of my pen pal haze.