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My friend Larry has horror stories about dating apps, but is there a happy ending?

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My friend uses various dating apps in order to try to find anything from a woman to spend his life with, a committed relationship, a short-term relationship with no determined goals or length, or just to hook up with a woman and at least have one night of pleasure. It’s all not been very successful. He’s been using the apps for four years, not all at the same time, but abandoning one app and moving to another, always making sure to sign on for the shortest term possible so that he can exit quickly if he needs to without having spend too much money.

He—let’s call him Larry for the purpose of this accounting—has had some success, but very limited when he takes into account the amount of time he’s spent scrolling and swiping and waiting for replies, and the amount of money he’s spent.

“Jesus, Wayne,” he told me recently while we were having iced Canadianos at one of the DeVille cafés here in Calgary. “Jesus,” he said, “I feel like I’m jumping from one cesspool to another.”

I don’t have any experience with dating apps, given my advanced senior citizenship, and, like Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposer, I have no interest, either personal or social, in these apps succeeding. To paraphrase and adapt Swift’s fictional character, I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this activity, having no other motive than the happiness of my friends. I am advanced enough in years that several parts of my body do not function with the vigour that they once did, and I lack the financial resources to improve my lot.

I pick up on his use of the word cesspool. “Cesspool,” I say incredulously. “Do you really mean that in four years there has not been a single attractive woman who has expressed interest enough so that you went on a date together?”

“No, no, no, of course not. I’m exaggerating a bit but what I mean is that—well, two things. There seem to be more men chasing after women, and the women I have, well, caught, so to speak, have tended to be on the range that includes, let me see, recent widows and divorcées who have not been able to get themselves out of the memory holes of marriages that lasted thirty, forty, even fifty years; women who were physically or emotionally abused, or both, generally during relationships that lasted a lot shorter; women who want my money so that they can pay off their house they can’t afford, or just to get groceries; escorts and erotic massagers who see dating sites as a perfect market for their services (like a guy saying, I’m sick of this fucking shit, at least I’ll get laid to take the edge off); women who are not women at all but are probably like twenty-something dudes still living with their parents who have nothing better to do than to catfish another man; women who haven’t had the company of a man for so long that they talk for 98% of your date and don’t ask you a single question; and, I could go on, but I have to add as well, the women who are certifiable psychos.”

I sip my coffee and think a bit before I reply. “Out of all that mess of humanity,” I ask him, “how many dates did you get, and more importantly, how many second dates did you get that led to relationships of any length?”

He looks me in the eyes. His own eyes look like pools of defeat, with tributaries of red blood vessels on either side of the eyeball that make it look like an island where the entire population has been slashed to death and thrown into the surrounding river system.

“I wish I had kept track of the numbers, but the last other thing I want to be doing when I’m going on horrific dates is also maintaining a goddamn spreadsheet. Here’s my guesstimate, after four years of being on about ten sites off and on, not continuously, because I had to take breaks so that I didn’t go crazy myself—I would say I’ve had about fifty first dates, and brief relationships, meaning anywhere from two dates to two months, with maybe five women tops.”

“Those are not good numbers,” I say, stating the obvious.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I want to know about those short relationships, especially the ones that went beyond a third date and into a couple of months, but tell me some of the particularly bad ones first.”

He laughs. “Oh, shit, where to start.” He looks in the air like he’s calculating and after a few seconds his head comes down, he takes a long sip of coffee like a man preparing for a gunfight in the Wild West, and says, “Okay, let me start with this one.

“As I mentioned, one of things about most of these dates is that they never let you talk. And that’s not because they are talking about the nuances of heterosexual relationships, or how to carry on an ethical life in a godless universe, but about mundane shit, sometimes a string of mundane shits, and sometimes one huge turd of mundane shit. I can’t forget the twenty-minute disquisition from one woman about Plato’s Republic”—he pauses, smiles—“no, no Plato. It was all about getting her summer tires taken off her car and her regular mechanic was all booked up and so she had to go to Canadian Tire and beg to get fitted in, but then Canadian Tire only put three of her summer tires back in her trunk and she had to spend an hour on the phone trying to track down the other one. Twenty fucking minutes on this where I mostly listened like a trapped animal, but occasionally asked a question like an idiot because I wanted to hear my own voice, like, ‘So is your car a four-wheel drive and were the tires studded?’ And so it went.”

“Go on,” I say.

“Another one was a woman who lied about her age on her profile—this is almost standard practice by the way—and after I drive about four hours to Westlock to meet her, it turns out not only that she’s in her early 70’s, like way beyond my acceptable range, but she’s dying from cancer. What the fuck do you do with that? She was super sarcastic too, like entering cranky-old-woman territory, but with the twist of death, and somehow we ended back in my hotel room, and I went down on her and made her squirm like she hadn’t for years, and she gave me a blowjob that lasted ten seconds, no cumming, but I still ended up with genital warts. Fun times! And of course if someone has uterine cancer and either a year or two, or a month or two to live, then it’s hard to complain about genital warts to her.”

I can see his point. Kind of. He continues with a kind of opposite case.

“And then there’s this other woman just, like, a few weeks ago. Lives in a small town between Edmonton and Calgary. There’s an element of sadness in it, because after our first coffee date, I did what I almost routinely do, and that is give her a polite hug. I noticed a kind of change in her that I couldn’t figure out at the time. She later told me that she had never been hugged by a man, and so she accepted my invitation for non-sexual holding and cuddling in my hotel room. Fully clothed, like we were fucking Mormons or something. I kissed her pursed lips and that’s as far as it went, because, as she said about French kissing, “I don’t like it.” When I woke up in the morning—it was a king-sized bed and she slept right on the edge as far away from me as possible—but when I woke up she was already dressed. She downed two cups of coffee and left. I plopped back down on the bed and wondered whether this was some kind of hellish dream. She was like a fossil, which was appropriate given that my hotel was in Drumheller: just permanently preserved in behaviours that she could not imagine changing. Her hairdo dated from the Mesozoic Era.”

I stop talking there and look him in the face, and he has stopped talking too. I can see that the emotions are swirling around in his head, in his gut, and what is anger is coming out as sarcasm, and what is happiness is being muted, and what is excitement is having all the passion drained out of it. It’s like when you are in the midst of a trauma, and eventually the buttons don’t work, or the one that used to be for resilience now leads to depression, and the one that used to be for self-protection leads to giving in to your abuser.

I don’t use this power that I have often, but in the course of staring straight in his eyes for a full three minutes, I have him frozen, and I generate a kind and beautiful and sincere person into his dating app, and she likes him, and when he comes out of this trance I have him in, we’ll say our goodbyes and hug like the great friends that we are, and he will check the app when he’s in the driver seat of his car but before he heads off, and there she will be.