Lone Star

Notes on a soft landing after a hard fall + an anthropological venture into the apps

In the late spring, just months before my 30th birthday, I found myself freshly untethered in a new city after having been in a committed relationship for over a decade.

At my request, I had been whisked away by fiercely protective loved ones to San Antonio, Texas, a thousand miles from the lakeside rust belt city I called home. A friend aptly told me that my entire life had been like I was a joint, passed back and forth at a frat party, not entirely of its own volition.

When I decided to take the plunge, I only knew that I was fed up with my life and needed things to be different. I wanted so desperately to be someone other than myself, not realizing that wherever you go, there you are.

I’m not sure if this impulse to cry out for help and be extricated from my miserable relationship came from my adult self, or from my inner child—voiceless, not allowed to name the abuse she was suffering at home, quietly imploding. I think I just wanted to be rescued.

I had never lived in San Antonio before, but I grew up in a town on the border in West Texas; everywhere I looked, I felt a kind of low-grade ambient dread, rooted in my childhood—the cacti, the mesquite trees, the oppressive heat, the angle of the sun—it was all too familiar.

After the rush of my triumphant escape wore off, I moved into my new apartment, and my generous rescuers and I went our separate ways. They had dropped everything to help me, at great personal expense. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it in me to care for anyone’s needs but my own, nor did I have the money in my checking account to pay them back. Our group chat, once lively and voluminous, fell silent; I couldn’t think of the right thing to say.

I had no plan, no savings. I had burned through all of my paid leave at work and was living on donations from the kindness of online friends while I tried to figure things out. I felt almost like a little child who runs away with a bindle on a stick, only to end up camping in their own backyard.

As any pick-me with friendship issues would do, I decided to witness the horrors of dating apps with my own eyes, seeking to distract myself from my sorrows and assorted delusions with the sweet, fleeting high of male validation.

I hadn’t used a dating app since I was 18; back then I would mostly just insult every man who messaged me for having the audacity to think I would be interested in them. Men who did meet my exhaustingly high standards, apparently, all of whom were aged 30 and over:

1. A libertarian business development exec for hospitals traveling in from Austin with a bit of a dadbod situation who picked me up at my parents’ house in the dark of night, drove me to his hotel room for sex, and warned me that he was a stranger and totally could have just murdered me (I later antagonized him over text when he wanted to legitimately take me on dates, to which he replied ‘???’); 

2. an aggressively goth man with a methadone addiction who lived with his mother in middle of nowhere rural New Mexico and wanted to pick me up and take me back home to hang out (probably one of the men Guy Number 1 warned me about); and

3. an owner of a French restaurant in Portland, Oregon—we exchanged phone numbers and I somehow ended up in a  chaotic group chat with a disarmingly large number of young women accusing him of sexual impropriety.

Times had changed and there was a breadth of apps to choose from, beyond Tinder, Bumble, and OKCupid. I heard that OKCupid was worse than ever before; from my experience, Bumble was aggressively woke; and I had never used Tinder because it scared me, and it seemed to me that it was a hookup app for normies. Feeling overwhelmed, I settled on Hinge.

Now that I was essentially middle-aged myself, if I wanted to date old-ass men and stay on a suitably uneven playing field (in my favor and to my personal comfort), they had to be even older than they’d been in my youth. According to my calculus, the optimal way to avoid paying even a single penny on a date was to tactically target men who were old enough to have been largely raised to believe in benevolent sexism. I slid my max age to 50, wincing.

Of course, being that I am a lady with a pulse, and not too bad looking to boot, the matches poured in. I chatted with a silver not-fox real estate agent and pickleball court entrepreneur about writers; I sent him the following Gore Vidal quote after he messaged me that he loves Hemingway and that the protagonist in A Farewell to Arms is emasculated by his lover:

“Well, almost all American male writers are alcoholic, and as a result of the alcohol they become less capable sexually as they get older. They also become confused about which is their penis, which is their pen. Think of all those clones of Hemingway, drinking and worrying — fortunately they write very little.”

I got bored and icked out, and I slid the max age down to 45.

A young lad, aged 24 or so, called me a pretty lady and we spoke about his family’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. He asked me what I meant when I said I was looking for casual dating and he told me that he couldn’t date me if I was seeing other people; he said he didn’t want to be “just one of my side pieces.” I could not rely on this child to be my sole provider of transactional free meals and cocktails; he would probably even insist that we split the bill. “Aww, best of luck, buddy,” I said, bidding him farewell. I unmatched and slid my minimum age up to 30.

We don’t need to get into the sea of other undesirables, though there were a handful I was fond of from our preliminary chats (I would shout out the ones I had sent my Substack to who liked my writing and tell them I’ll never forget them in case they read this, but that would be a lie because clearly I cannot remember their names. Hey… you…).

From my observations, nearly every man I matched with who was possessing of two or more brain cells lived in Austin, about two hours away from me. Only the bravest and probably most desperate of them could be lured by my siren song to the hipster pizzeria and bar which was conveniently directly across the street from my apartment.

R., an estate attorney, owned his own practice and lived in the rural outskirts of Austin. He replied to a saucy photo on my profile—wearing a fur hat, lounging in an armchair at a gay bar, drinking a martini—saying he hoped that it was gin and not vodka. I told him that, yes, it was; gin happens to be my longstanding favorite spirit, ever since I was an underaged drinker pilfering highball glasses of my grandmother’s Beefeater, filled to the brim. Desperate to ply me with liquor, he made plans to brave Friday evening traffic and meet me at my designated pizzeria.

I looked him up and read the Google reviews of his firm; for being a lawyer, they painted him as an unusually honest and principled person, with clients singing his praises for taking on complex but not at all lucrative matters no one else would deign to touch. This put me at ease and helped me to understand that he enjoyed wasting time, which explained his willingness to schlep it all the way to my doorstep.

A friend had recently taken me aside and magnanimously informed me that she wasn’t trying to be a mean girl, but when you fall into a depressive funk and neglect to shower on a daily basis, people may find it off-putting—or, in her kind words, even stomach-churning—and if I don’t switch from crunchy nontoxic deodorant to an antiperspirant, other people might judge me and be unwilling to associate with me; she wouldn’t want for me to be unable to bring the hoes to the yard. When she repeatedly asked me if her words were cruel, stunned, like a deer in headlights, I reassured her that of course they weren’t, and thanked her for her honesty. I regret that I couldn’t be honest myself in that moment; the best I could do was to hold back my tears and muster up a smile.

Thankfully, shame does serve a social function—so the evening of my date, I finished work, hopped in the shower, washed my hair, and slathered my pits with my new, hopefully effective, crunchy nontoxic deodorant. R. texted me On the Road Again by Willie Nelson, signaling that he had set off on his journey.

As I hurriedly scribbled and smeared makeup onto my face, I considered dressing down. Ultimately, I decided on an all-black ensemble: a skintight, ruched minidress in sheer lace layered over an equally short tank dress, with pantyhose and heeled boots.

R. texted me that he was almost there, and joked that he was wearing a dog collar and black leather assless chaps for a casual vibe. “Perfect,” I replied, “you’ll fit right in with this crowd.” I slicked red lipstick onto my lips as the finishing touch, apologized to my dog, and stepped out the door, my hair just barely air-dried.

The pizzeria had no parking lot, so cars lined the street outside my building. I jumped when I heard him call out to me just as I hit the sidewalk—I hadn’t expected him to have arrived yet, but there he was, walking up from his car. He went in for a hug immediately and I pivoted my torso to hit him with the side hug. I couldn’t help but notice that he was very small; his wiry frame reminded me of that of a bird.

Neither of us had made reservations and the restaurant was full, so we were seated on the patio. It started raining and the cloth table umbrella overhead was angled just so, with him taking the brunt of the falling water, splattering onto his face, while I remained perfectly dry. He ordered us dirty martinis with Tanqueray 10. We shared appetizers, many of which featured cheese. “Shit,” he said, after our waitress brought us our food and walked away, “I just remembered I’m lactose intolerant.” I let him have most of the broccoli rabe.

He said he couldn’t believe I had dressed up for him, and that he regretted changing out of his suit. We talked about the market dipping amidst rising tariffs, the general bleakness of the political landscape. I launched into a protracted doomer rant about the state of things—the gutting of federal agencies by DOGE, Trump’s latest executive orders—which led us into discussion about the lack of checks and balances, the illusion of stability and fragility of our social order. He said now he was depressed.

He talked about some Gen X alt band I had never heard of that he had recently seen for like the 14th time; the name drifted in one ear and out the other. He told me most of his friends from college were lesbians. We dipped our toes into Freudian and Jungian psychology. He told me he just barely passed psychology in college; he tried to shoot his shot with a cute girl in his class and got curved, so he stopped going to class for the rest of the semester and scraped by on his final exams. He asked me what the deal was with the id, the ego, and the superego. I tried to explain, but by that point, we were both a few martinis deep. I requested to the waitress that my next drink be extra dirty; R. said he knew I was that kind of girl.

I asked if he would mind if I smoked; he said he no longer partakes and switched to cringe vaping. I pulled out my art deco cigarette case and told him they were organic American Spirits with a charcoal filter, and they’re so smooth it’s barely like smoking at all, really. He seemed to be jonesing for a hit, so I offered him one. He declined, but said he would share one with me—it’s kind of intimate, sharing a cigarette, he added. I lit it and we passed it back and forth.

He called a boutique hotel he’d always wanted to stay at to ask about a last-minute reservation because he couldn’t drive in this condition. They were asking $600 for the night, but said they’d try to get him a better price and call him back. I told him he could just save the money and sleep on an air mattress on my floor. He would not be sleeping on an air mattress, he said, but he would accept the invitation.

Our waitress came back and sheepishly informed us that we’d officially cleared them out of Tanqueray 10. We decided to switch to beer. He ordered a grapefruit Shiner and a pecan porter, which I immediately claimed—I only like dark ales. I mentioned I’d never had Guinness, and he couldn’t believe it. They didn’t serve it here, so we set out to find somewhere that did. I was vaguely aware of a bar down the street, near the college, so I proposed we walk that way. I asked if we could stop and pick up my dog, to which he enthusiastically agreed—he had a beloved senior Australian cattle dog back at home. I handed him the leash, and he walked my lurching, excitable teenage beast the whole way there.

I confidently gave him the wrong directions and insisted I was right. He looked between me and Google Maps on his phone screen with mock shock. “You’re gaslighting me,” he said. He asked how I could walk in those heels. I called him old, several times.

When we made it to the bar, they did not serve Guinness. He was disturbed when the bartender said their manager didn’t “let them” have limes, and questioned what kind of place this was. We drank more gin on the deck at a wooden table, beneath dim pink neon lights—bottom shelf, this time, with tonic, from plastic cups. We shared another cigarette.

We were both trashed when we arrived back at my pied-à-terre. I ended up crying in a hot bubble bath about my life while he sat outside the tub, holding my hand and comforting me. He told me it would all be okay. He slept on the far edge of my bed and left early the next morning to take care of his dog. The next time I took a shower, written in the steam of the mirror was a message: don’t ever doubt yourself, you’ve got it.