Twenty-two.

Ironically, "closure" was my Taylordle word of the day.

When I was in my twenties, I kept telling myself that the man I wanted to date didn't yet exist. I wanted someone in my age group so that we could go through life together, not having to experience the problems resultant of income or maturity disparities because I'd already done that and it was miserable. I wanted a true partner, but everyone at my age just didn't seem to be mature.

It's probably a consequence of being gay. Unlike the straights, who are much more likely than we are to begin dating in high school, most of us have to go through a couple extra years of introspection (finding ourselves, coming out, finding our kind, etc.) before we're able to start dating for real. Therefore, we're about a decade behind, and every gay person who was born before me has advised me that dating in my thirties would be an unquestionably better experience. I looked forward, for years, to a future where the men I met would finally be worth my mettle. (Unfortunately, as of late, I've been singing a new tune: I thought they would be better by now, but they aren't—they're still too immature for me.)

I, at the end of my twenties, downloaded Hinge for the very first time about a month after my separation from Henry. He was in Singapore for Eid al-Fitr and, according to his Instagram stories that I read through friends' accounts because mine was blocked, to reset his mental state after our breakup. I was on my way back down to earth from a steroids-induced mania, prescribed with unfortunate timing, given the breakup-related depression, for an esophageal tear that had formed from my first COVID-19 infection. My sleep schedule was nonexistent: unused to sleeping without him by my side and terrified of the nightmares I was having about him, I was an exhausted insomniac. Yet, the steroids pumped me full of nervous energy, such that I was spending hours every day at the gym determinedly drumming up endorphins in my brain to stave off the emotional breakdown that I knew was coming. I was doing anything and everything to distract myself from my upset, like playing Taylordle (Taylor Swift Wordle; I am not a "Swiftie") and creating a profile on Hinge.

Although everybody, including myself, could plainly see that I wasn't ready to date again, I wanted to get the ball rolling on meeting new people. I wrote Two about following one such thread to its end, and it's a fair example of the adventures I was ordaining for myself. Between dates, I wrote to Henry daily in my diary. My second Hinge date involved one such letter that I mistakenly sent via LinkedIn and tried desperately to recall; my third was with a man named Lee.

Hailing from Shanghai, Lee had gone to college on the East Coast and moved to New York post-graduation. He was my age and came off as amiable as we chatted, so I decided that it would probably be safe to meet him in person. I mentioned my Hunanese origins as we texted, to which he responded that he lived above a Hunanese restaurant—as it turned out, it was actually one of my favorite Hunanese restaurants in New York. Thus, when we made plans to meet, it was easy to pick a location.

In person, Lee was just an inch shorter than me. He was pretty cute and was as affable in person as he was in my phone, so I immediately felt at ease. We facilely agreed on which dishes to order, and then got straight to business as we waited for our food to arrive.

It's been said that dating is like interviewing for a job, and I think I've got it down pat. I know which parts of myself to bring out, which sordid anecdotes to expose so that the other person will like me, which questions to ask to probe for what I want to know about them without coming off as invasive. Lee was a good date.

As we performed the requisite ritual of following each other on Instagram, we talked about our mutual friends. Then, as the waiter brought out our dishes, I began to tell him about my recent breakup. Being that we're all gay Asian men who lived in Manhattan, were born in the same year, and had some overlap between our social circles, he looked up Henry's account to check if he knew him (he didn't). Lee was sympathetic about my travails, and I wondered if I would end up dating him for real. He invited me up to his apartment after dinner, where I met his dog and platonically explored his apartment before I finally went home.

Later, my therapist told me that I was precluding myself from forming new romantic attachments because I feared that a breakup would be both inevitable and identical to the one that had so shattered me. I was refusing to properly open myself up to new connections because I was feeling defensive. I didn't want to risk it. But, he said, I needed to give myself a break. The fear wasn't just holding me back—it was also irrational. By virtue of no two people being identical, it stood to reason that no two breakups would hurt the same even if those relationships traced familiar echoes. Still, I was cynical, because it occurred to me that guaranteed dissimilarity did not preempt the possibility of my future breakups being worse. The older I get, the deeper I want the partnership to be, and therefore the more awful the separation would be.

Throughout that summer, I decided to spend more time with Lee to see if anything would naturally come out of it. I tried to rope him into playing mahjong with the other Chinese friends I'd made that summer; he commented that it's as if I was assembling a team of superheroes. I frequently invited myself over to his apartment under the pretext of playing with his dog, and I dragged him to an evening public screening of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together in the rain. However, when he offered to let me sleep over at his apartment, I declined. I chose not to make a move on him.

In all honesty, I don't know if he would have wanted me to escalate our platonic friendship. Were I to trust my intuition, I'd say there was about a fifty-fifty chance of such an attempt going either way. Above all, I was terrified of rejection. I didn't think my heart, slowly doing its best to heal, could handle it. I was afraid that he just meant that I could spend the night on his couch when what I really needed was to feel a heartbeat against my own. I felt orphaned, searching desperately for a home.

In the end, while on the way home from a Bridget Jones's Diary movie night at my friends' apartment, I deleted Hinge. I made some friends, but I didn't think I would find anyone worth actually pursuing from the app. Moreover, I didn't think I even wanted to—it felt as though the men with whom I "matched" were only online to collect matches and validate their own attractiveness; extremely few were serious about dating with intention, and even fewer were both that and my type. I'm certain that at least some facet of that comes from dating in New York City, because the next best thing is just around the corner, but I wanted to meet people who shared my belief that the grass is greenest where it's watered. Idly, I toyed with the idea of being single, as a deliberate choice, because then I couldn't bemoan not having a partner: it would be a consequence of my own doing.