My quarantine boyfriend is six foot, dreamy, and probably has a wife and kids

Written at the beginning of lockdown, publishing in grim celebration of a year of distance. Names have been changed to protect the sensitive men of Bumble.

A friend told me that she was using this time in quarantine to fall more in love with herself. I was like, oh, that’s cool, I’m using mine to troll men on Bumble. So far, everything’s really going according to plan.

Turns out my thumbs are total sluts.

• There’s Andrew, his flex is that he’s 6’2” and has the same Adventure Time watch as seen in Deadpool. If that’s the kind of thing you look for in a guy. Our conversations have been mundane at best. But his cheekbones keep me coming back for more.
• There’s David, he’s a Virgo gardener who likes a woman with integrity, and pretty much only talks about plants. I’ve used up all eight of my sentences about seeds, and have no idea where to go from here.
• There’s Logan, he’s a vegan artist. We’ll just leave it at that. He once sent me a 6am message about zen sanctuaries. I really can’t do zen sanctuaries before 10 in the morning. Pros: Doesn’t use crystals in his energy healing. Cons: Energy healing.
• There’s Ryan, he’s an engineer who boasts he can pull off any shape of sunglasses. I probably should have given Ryan more of a chance. As he still messaged back after I told him I had a third nipple and my ovaries are shriveling up. What a champ.
• And then, there’s Zach. *Swoon.*

Thanks to all this free time, every single contact in my phone, with the exception of “Don’t pick up she wants to sell you a cruise” lady, knows about Zach, my quarantine boyfriend. He’s six feet of pure sarcastic wit. The only background I have on him is that he’s a “former baby,” as stated in his bio, and a “teacher” at “school.”

Our interactions are mainly dank memes, and me telling him what I’ve eaten that day, and him pointing out their phallic resemblance.

But I’m pretty sure he’s the one.

Sometimes I get a little concerned that Bumble is going to add a new feature because of me. One where they notify someone if their profile is being looked at a creepy amount of times.

While he’s five miles and one month away from me, I can practically feel his stubbled cheeks grazing the back of my neck as he whispers to me about the chicken piccata he had for dinner.

I almost lost him the other day, and I’m still getting over it. We had been carrying on in one-liner bliss as usual, when I casually made a bad joke about webbed toes.

It was met with crickets. Which immediately sent me spiraling. I convinced myself that his entire family has webbed toes.

And spent the next 32 hours obsessing over why he hadn’t responded.

Ok, so maybe my joke was lame, but did I really want to spend the rest of my life with someone who couldn’t even take a webbed-toe joke?

The answer was yes, yes I still did.

Dammit.

I set an alarm the next day for 7:09pm, that’s when I was going to allow myself to message Zach an apology. In case I was so busy mid-quarantine, dare I forget to reach out to him.

Actually, the alarm was more of a restraining order, like a — you’re not allowed to message him until this alarm goes off — type thing. And, like most restraining orders, it didn’t work.

I caved and messaged him early, apologizing and wishing him happy trails and all the best in life. He replied back pretty quickly saying that no, he had not in fact been horrifically offended. And that he’d written me a response the day before, but had just fallen asleep, forgetting to send it.

How fucking chill do you have to be to write a message, and then not check and see why they haven’t responded for 32 hours? Can I please be a dude in my next life?

Meanwhile I’m over here practically breathing into a paper bag cause I might have insulted this guy I’ve been swapping penis jokes with for three days.

In my defense, I did other things during those 32 hours as well, besides just mourning the loss of my one true love.

Like, I… wrote an essay on him (Exhibit A). And, I… learned how to tie a headscarf from a nice lady on YouTube. And then decided that I should never leave my house wearing a headscarf. And, I… swiped. I swiped full-time.

And then, without so much as a warning, after 8 days of getting Bumble, much to the horror of my insatiable, man-eating thumbs, I ran out of people to swipe on.

My cocky, holier-than-thou ego sputtered to a halt. There could be months left in this quarantine, and I had unknowingly exhausted my options. Swiping left recklessly just because of a simple neck tattoo.

I began to reconsider my strategy. Nothing puts things into perspective like an empty calendar and an open-ended quarantine.

Zach’s still clearly the love of my life, but no one’s six foot and that witty without a wife and children he hasn’t yet mentioned.

Telling Ryan my ovaries were drying up was hilarious when I thought I had an inexhaustible supply of men, but now it felt a little too real.

And in hindsight, maybe I could have been slightly more patient with Logan about the whole zen sanctuary thing.

And now that I think about it, I might be able to come up with another sentence or two about seeds for David.

And as for Andrew, well, he’s got two inches on Zach, and I’ve dated men with worse vices than mundane conversation.

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