I don’t even know why I wanted to meet up with Matt, based on his Ok Cupid profile. Yes, he was 6’4, but he was also a 50% match. He’s a very striking presence- he’s tall, impossibly skinny (his hips are probably half the width of mine), tattoos haphazardly scattered across his torso, not quite covered by a thin wifebeater. His jeans fit close to his lean body, and were held together by several safety pins at the fly. He always wore boots with a 2 inch heel. He had piles of red hair in loose curls surrounding his sharply angular face. His pale blue eyes would fixate intensely in one direction and abruptly shift to another equally intense focus, the way a squirrel moves. I didn’t plan this date very well at all, having tacked it on at the end of another, last minute. I was wearing a conservative BCBG sundress, with lots of ruffles, in a print of white carousel horses on a bright blue background, with pearl earrings and espadrilles. I looked like a character on Glee. I’d also spent all day in the sun at a street fair on date #1, and my proximity to someone so unconventionally and effortlessly attractive made me aware of how wilted and plain I looked.
Matt was a drug dealer, in the sense that he made his entire living by selling drugs. He did not pay taxes, but he did collect food stamps. “It’s not that I’m poor!” he said, “It’s just so I have more money to spend on cigarettes and booze.” He lived in a house that he owned, and rented some rooms out to friends. He did not have any kind of credit card or even a checking account. He kept his cash and his weed in a Spiderman lunchbox. He had this amazing dog, a Boxer, whose sweetness and affection offset Matt’s emotional detachment. He had been a vegetarian since he was 10. It had nothing to do with his own health, or carbon footprints; he just couldn’t tolerate the idea of killing animals.
He holds the record for my shortest duration of time between meeting someone and having sex. We drank some wine in the park and played with his awesome dog and had one of those very frank Ok Cupid date conversations where you hash out your sexual interests right up front, and I think this made me feel somewhat at ease with him, quickly. (Although one is never totally at ease around Matt- while he is unfailingly honest, he is also unpredictable. There’s an absence of vulnerability that is captivating but makes him seem not entirely human.) We made out and he told me he didn’t think I was very good at kissing. (He also told me all the bands I like sucked, but I’m used to hearing that.) This wasn’t negging; it wasn’t that deliberate. Matt didn’t pull any shit like that, he just said whatever was on his mind regardless of your feelings.
The sex was addictive immediately. Maybe his approach of not giving a fuck was contagious, maybe it was he was so far removed from my everyday life that inhibitions went out the window. And like any narcissist, he was great at it. Narcissists care so intensely about being liked that they notice every slight physical or auditory response, they know exactly what it means, and they use that information to make you like it even more. They do this in conversation too, but it leaves me feeling unsettled and overexposed. Sex is a much better venue. Of course it made me want to be just as good. Better. The fucking best. First-time sex is usually plagued by a few main concerns- Is he enjoying himself, am I enjoying myself, and does my body look alright. Matt left me with no doubts about any of those. He was truly enthusiastic about every inch of my body, including the parts I hated. The praise was not for my benefit. He’s say he loved my fat ass or the way my thighs jiggled when I came. At 20, I’d have died of shame if someone said that to me. Instead I marveled at the thought, that maybe he really did?
It was that unyielding honesty that I liked most about him, and why I kept going back for more. He could not stop telling me I was hot, that my body was perfect, that our sex was amazing. Hearing all that from anyone else would have been embarrassing and contrived. In fact I’d never believe that from anyone else, because objectively I am not that beautiful and my body is dramatically different from the cultural ideal. But Matt wasn’t someone who said anything just to be nice. He was basically a very charismatic toddler. He didn’t really acknowledge any aspect of the world that didn’t serve his own self interest. There was no semblance of a social conscious, and morality was entirely based on what he could get away with.
Don Draper is a shitty person, objectively, but he’s a protagonist that most people seem to really like because the shitty things he does are things we’ve thought about. Maybe we’ve all wanted to be womanizing hedonists at some point, but our damn conscience gets in the way. We can’t, and we don’t really want to, but damn is it fun to watch. Going out with Matt was a way to indulge in this world where I get to live everything I thought I wanted so desperately when I was younger. What would it be like to be so popular that everyone in the club knows you and is visibly excited when you walk in? To get access to every VIP room and every stash of free drinks? To have strangers tell you you’re beautiful all throughout the night? To go out with someone who wants to make sure all his friends see him with you? To be so intensely desired by someone who seems like he could have anyone?
When you’re young, being popular and desirable seem hugely important, probably even more so when they’re as unattainable as they seemed to me. It’s almost always just a scapegoat- maybe if I was thin, if boys wanted me, if I went to parties, then maybe this sense that everything about me is wrong would go away. The most gratifying part of growing up is how, when that cloud is lifted, those things don’t matter, and you realize they never did. But to Matt, that was still what he needed.
One night, at one of many hipster bars, he didn’t get the rockstar treatment he’d come to expect. A significant fraction of the people there didn’t know who he was, and this threw him into a kind of angry funk. “There’s just kids, when did they even get here, yesterday? I’ve been in this scene forever, I help my boy build that fucking bar!” Hipsterism seems based on cultivating a semblance of apathy, while at the same time caring so fucking much. How exhausting!
Suddenly I felt so bad for him. What a terrible fate, to be 15 forever! To worry about what a room full of strangers thinks about you! In an attempt to salvage the rest of the night, I tried to remind him of the great circle of friends he had, how those people are so much more valuable than some 20 year old hipster girl from New Jersey, how they’d all gone out of their way to take care of him when he broke his leg jumping off a bridge. (I knew these were huge sources of pride, both the injury and the support from his friends.) As it came out of my mouth I worried it sounded trite, but it seemed to do the trick.
Why was I even trying? I had little attachment to Matt, and even less respect for him. I was fascinated by him, and a little seduced by the idea of being cool and beautiful, by association. Everything about him had seemed so effortless, but now the cracks were starting to show. After that night I took a break from him, and started dating someone else. Over the course of the next year he’d periodically check in via text, asking if I was single yet, saying all kinds of generous things about my body. I sort of knew I’d see him again at some point.
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