FRIENDS & BENEFITS

I Fell for a Hot Guy Until I Dug Through His Social Media

The revelation evaporated any interest.

Welcome to Friends and Benefits. Follow Tootsie Haine, our sex and relationships columnist, into the lives and psyches of men and women, young and old, gorgeous and tragic, divine and insane. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the bachelors in question.

I met Theo at midnight. It was late summer in the Lower East Side. He was true to his Hinge profile: tall and gorgeous. He wore seersucker and Doc Martens.

We had a smoke on the stoop of his cousin’s condo while he professed hatred for the Rolling Stones, crediting his deadhead dad for the disinclination he felt towards Jagger et al.

We then went up to the apartment: like the waiting room of a high-end dermatologist, the lighting was good, the clutter was nil, and the plants protruded. Theo had a beer, while I drank the three canned Moscow mules I’d brought with me in a black plastic bag from a discount liquor store.

A friend once said that talking about music was his least favorite kind of conversation. Theo and I talked about it for three hours. The subject was weak, but our intensity seemed strong. We knocked back drinks and got louder.

Eventually, there was a pause in the conversation. He shot me a hot little look and lunged at my face.

Given what it had been (or, rather, not been) so far, I did not yet have illusions that my presence was forever welcome, so I was intrigued and delighted when Theo invited me to spend the night.

The price of this was his dog: a yappy thing that slept between our heads.

I feigned amusement and affection for the sake of a connection with her owner. Hang in there, I thought. He is incredibly good-looking.

In the morning, after a few strokes of sexually oriented affection, Theo left me to walk the dog. I stood at the mirror fixing my hair until he returned, thinking I looked good. Surely he would be pleased to see me there on his return: naked and ready for anything he might want to do or say.

He had no such interest, and told me he had to get on the road for some family shindig down on the Jersey Shore, but that he would be back within the week.

I kissed him goodbye and said something about “next time,” whereupon Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” began to play in my head (Next time? There won’t be no next time, I apologize even though I know it’s lies). Yes, the subject of music had turned sour.

I was embarrassed by how obvious the evening had been, and imagined Theo cracking up in his head at my assumption that we would see each other again.

Reader, let me tell you now that we did not. I wondered if dating someone incredibly hot was worth the agony of increasingly acute self-doubt.

I picked up Thai food on the way home and ate it while perusing Theo’s Facebook page. I discovered that he had unironically been wearing salmon colored shorts less than two years prior—a time when, I quickly calculated, he should certainly have been old enough to know better. The revelation soothed the sting of rejection.

Honestly, the inconsistency of his aesthetic creeped me out. Personal growth is one thing, but surely you were supposed to have set your sense of style—whatever it was—by your mid-twenties, even if you still didn’t quite know who you were.

For the next ten mornings, I awoke in despair. I had proof that Theo had only figured out what was “cool” very recently, that our relationship hadn’t evolved in the least since it had begun, that we weren’t compatible—but pragmatism wasn’t going to cure me.

Only when his beauty had faded from my memory would I be able to really grasp the truth, that we were just strangers with opposing music tastes, drunk enough to simulate a kind of passion that lasted only as long as the intoxication.

Got a question about dating, an opinion on intimacy, or a comment about Tootsie’s tales? Share your thoughts with our dating columnist at tootsie.haine@thedailybeast.com.

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