Story: ‘A Good Match is Hard to Find’
“Their frailties showed through their expressions, like light through a split lampshade. The few people I was drawn to were distant, disinterested … The abundance provided by the apps highlighted the astronomical unlikelihood of my ever meeting someone who wasn’t broken, weird, attached or my polar opposite.”
I’m happy to announce that my latest short story, ‘A Good Match is Hard to Find’, is published in the latest issue of the excellent The Cabinet of Heed. If you’re one of those people who met someone ten years ago in college and never quite understood why modern dating is the worst, this one’s for you.
Online dating reminds me of that lonely whale that sails around the Pacific singing at a frequency no other whale can understand. It can feel like a real connection is impossible.
Paddle the dating pool for a while and I’m sure you’ll agree: there are plenty of weirdos and creeps out there. Many of them, like many of us, seem simply troubled, also looking for that human connection but unaware of how to actually attain it. But these suspiciously-discoloured waters are, yes, shark-infested, polluted, and unquestionably salty.
Really the troubling crowds of cuckoos, saddos and raging narcissists seem so large to the lovelorn swiper because they stand out so completely - unapologetically themselves, as most people should be - an illusion enhanced by a little confirmation bias. Then, where are the truly compatible?
Compatibility becomes a matter of making sure you’re speaking the same language: a person unversed in 90s pop bands might forgivably ask, “What’s a Sclub?” Like the lonely whale who we so peretually project upon, it can feel as though we’re wailing mournfully into a void. Know me! Understand me!
Thankfully, in each bad date there is usually a little humour to be found, and that’s why I’m here.
It’s hard to imagine that I’ve found anything new to say about online dating that hasn’t already been said by about thirteen gajillion people on Twitter, but I hope the publication of this story, ‘A Good Match is Hard to Find’, is small evidence that I’ve touched upon something meaningful if not original.
After all, something meaningful is what we want in our literature, as well as in our matches. Sometimes.
If you have any thoughts on this story, please do share them on this page or on Twitter, where you can find me @davidbrookesuk.
—-db
