After 10 months away from dating apps, I went back in, for just a week and swiped back on a man I quickly fell in “live” with.
(I am writing most of this post with a feverish urgency, flouting the rules of punctuation, grammar etc. this is urgent. read it like its a stream of consciousness prose.)
This post is difficult for me to pen down because of the mixed feelings I have for this situation. I feel, at the same time, delusional as well as confident in my feelings for this almost-stranger. I feel gratitude and sadness in equal measure. I feel delighted and jilted/ defeated. I feel like my heart opened up wide whilst getting injured and shut down, and now cowers in fear. Will it open up again? I don’t know.
I feel like I was treated (by the universe) like a bloody joke as well as was given a huge gift. Its all very confusing. But I must write it out since it feels instrumental in my journey so far.
So here I go…
As I mentioned in my previous post, in June 2026 I decided to go back (just for a week, I told myself) to Bumble & Hinge to see what’s out there in terms of a potential for a serious relationship or romantic love. I had only tried dating apps the year I turned 40 (2 years ago) and had thoroughly enjoyed free-wheeling conversations with all sorts of men, all ages, all inclinations for about 14 months – with the clear filter of ‘casual’ ‘of no consequence’. I had told myself that after being with one man for 13 years, I deserved to explore as many men as I could, safely, from a distance. I ended up in bed with just one or two because I am deeply selective even when I am slutty 🙂
[FYI – ‘slut‘ is simply ‘lust‘ rearranged]
After all, sex and intimacy is a high-stakes energy enmeshment and I don’t intend to be casual about my body. I did make out with about eight men over the course of my dating app stint. I flirted and sexted with tons of men. So much fun!
But this was the first time – a whole new world for me – to go to apps seeking something serious and monogamous. It made me nervous and quite cynical. But since I was living in a small city like Kanpur with a negligible social presence/ life/ circle, most people my age are married with kids, and I would assume/ imagine that men my age who are single would be morons or below my standards (sounds arrogant, it is and also isn’t, trust me).
I am explaining the above because someone might say ‘Why would you go looking for actual real love on those bastard dating apps?!?‘ – I felt like I had no other recourse, at least to begin with. I was hungry and eager to be in love etc. hehe.
So this is how it went…
After a couple of dead-end conversations (that lasted a mere few days) I began sifting through the 1000+ likes I had received on my profile and ruthlessly started ‘passing’ on the ones that didn’t make me feel anything intuitively. Additional filter this time around was their ‘what am I looking for‘ answer. The only acceptable answer to me was ‘long-term relationship‘ (has to be stated that I felt scared of the ‘looking to marry/ settle down’ folks still – facepalm emoji).
With the above filter, the list of thousands naturally gave way to mere double-digits. Out of those, I intuitively brought the list down to about 5 or 6 men only.
Lo and behold, at the end of that list was Amit, from a city nearby. This nerdy looking, serious looking, quiet looking, muscular man with big sculpted arms, a gym-picture, a beautiful dog and a sleeping cat next to him in a couple of pictures, a few melancholic pictures of him sitting in the lap of nature.
(Something gave me the urge to hug him tight, to kiss his face and to hold space for his pain, an ocean of pain he may never own up to – this I felt like doing, not as a rescuer/ saviour, but as someone who herself holds immense pain & loneliness within).
His profile said next to nothing (which is usually what makes me ‘pass’ on profiles), but one of his answers implied that he had had an unhappy upbringing/ dysfunctional family life. He was 37 – an age I do not naturally feel drawn to (I was looking for 40+), but as they say ‘what has to happen, will happen somehow’ – against all odds, I swiped back on him on June 4th, 2026.
This dude is 5’11 – How fucking sexy delicious! (re: big strong man vibe) (muscular arms) (swoon) (yes, I felt stupid crazy) – I mean for me at my mere 5 feet, even a 5’8 or 5’9 is beautiful. 5’11 is the exact height of my first ever big love (early school best friend turned boyfriend – my most fav human on the planet back then) Just saying.
My opening question was, “what’s that beautiful dog’s name?” (Referring to his foremost profile picture on Bumble). He responded with an unnecessarily cocky yet cute response (I liked it – hand-on-forehead emoji).
Hen we continued to chat – initially I wasn’t impressed to be honest. For the first couple of days he was rather confusing to me – he asked me so many questions (which was lovely) but he also said a lot of asinine things that made me want to unmatch (I conveyed that to him on Day 2). For some reason, I decided to sleep on it, this urge to unmatch and take a call the next day.
I have deleted all our text-exchanges some time ago, so I cannot for sure know what made me change my mind the next day but I recall vibing with him, in fact vibing hard the next day onwards. He went from sounding like an over-eager nervous boyish moron who just wanted to flatter an older woman TO being a loverboy who was saying lovely things, getting my humour, making me laugh, making me blush, making me wet (haha!).
(I need to state this here – this is mighty difficult to write about, confusing and also steeped in nostalgia and yearning; and also I feel like an idiot for writing about it)
As per him, he was deeply curious about the ‘psychedelic exploration’ aspect of my bio and said he wants to know more about that. I shared my blog link with him. He actually read some of my ayahuasca posts and texted about them with me the next day.
I learnt that he was ex-police, recently divorced (maybe in 2025), that he had been unhappily married for a long time too. I learnt that he was a wannabe nerd, like me, but maybe far more successful at it than I have ever been. He flattered and praised me a lot, more than I have ever been gushed over by any man before.
My pictures, my words, everything was sexy & intriguing to Him. At this point, after having received such attention from tons of men the previous year, I was quite immune to this sort of thing. Wasn’t going to fall for it. Well, maybe a little (facepalm emoji). He claimed to have ‘fallen in love with my profile the minute he laid eyes on it’ (Fuck!)
He said that he felt about my pictures, the same way people feel about cute little puppies or kittens, but also deeply attracted to me sexually. He said it year in for me felt ‘painfully beautiful’ or ‘beautifully painful’ (bastard!)
[I am sort of afraid of mis-analysing what transpired, so I have decided to, from memory, pen down snippets of our texts intermittently, especially the ones that impacted me the most.]
He asked about my divorce and marriage, I told him a few details (I am happy to have frank conversations about almost any topic, no matter how personal). He shared some details pertaining to his failed marriage as well. I felt that he was my kind of guy, honest & candid. Not afraid to talk about uncomfortable things. I sensed an ability to laugh at himself and his life choices from the past – again, my kind of dude. (I love him! facepalm emoji)
I mentioned something about a failed marriage and divorce being great teachers, great revealers of who we are (at that moment in time) as humans. I mentioned that there are some things we learn about ourselves only once we go through them. “For instance“, I said, “I had no idea that I wasn’t a ‘go down on one knee and give her a ring’ proposal type of girl till he (ex-husband) proposed to me“. This is totally true. The minute he, so sweetly and with true intentions, went down on one knee, in the middle of that cafe we were grabbing brunch at, with a cute classy ring, I imploded within, in a mix of embarrassment as well as repulsion instantly. Going further into that story might be irrelevant here, but the detail of ME NOT BEING A DOWN-ON-ONE-KNEE-PROPOSAL TYPE OF GIRL IS what’s relevant. Amit and I went on to have a lovely fun chat about this after which he asked me “So, what kind of proposal would you not dislike?, a blood oath under a bridge?” That made me laugh. I asked him about it and he mentioned some Tarantino movie reference which I didn’t know of, but it made me giggle quite a bit nevertheless. (I love him!)
After this chat, he warned me that, in the coming days, he may keep asking me to marry him, and I can comfortably keep saying No, repeatedly. (WTF!?! How unnecessary & cute is that!? WTF!) (I love him!) (This is so fucking stupid, but I liked it and that scared me) (I loved it, I still smile when I think about it) (how stupid am I?) (am I stupid?) (fuck!)
He said “I am pretty emotionally self-aware, and I have never felt this way about anyone in a long time” – (WTF, bastard!)
He said “a dating app is as absurd a place as anywhere else to meet someone and have a real connection with them“, when I was mildly freaking out about our already over-familiar (within 4 days) and cutesy sexy crazy conversational vibe, being skeptical about the dating app culture & love in general. (WTF! fucking bastard!)
I mentioned that I had just restarted working out after a long gap of 6 months – wherein I was dealing with medical things, being homebound/ bed-bound for the first five months of 2026 (first fracture, then breast lump surgery) – and I was whining briefly about being out of shape, fatter than last year, and not being ready for rigorous workouts yet (it had just been a week since I went back to aerial yoga, swimming & pilates), he sweetly remarked, “its the act of ‘showing up’ that’s most important according to me”. (awwwwwwww! I love him!) (small kindnesses really get under my skin) (am I a simp?) (i love him) (i want him)
[Mind you, all this happened within just 4-5 days of chatting, after which we had a few fuck-ups and make-ups and then the grand finale that led me to months-long Amit-withdrawal & hangover and yearning. (bastard!)]
[I did find it odd/ weird that he did not even once say anything about the medical turmoil I had gone through] (red flag?) (shrug emoji)
He told me, ‘the sound of your laughter is life-affirming’ (asshole! Bastard!) (I want him!)
When I said, ‘I doubt I’d be able to live up to the super-sexy-beautiful image of me that you have cooked up in your head‘, he replied, ‘even if you are a percentage of what I think you are, I’d be floored/ lucky’ or some such. (what an asshole!) (WTF!) (Why so fucking cute!?)
When I said, further sharing my insecurity with him, ‘I am really motu (fat) right now!’, he said, ‘are you going to deprive me of your motu self?!?!’ (bastard!) (i did remark that i suspect he has a fat older woman fetish to which he said ‘I do, but you are neither of those things’) (What a fucking sweet-talking bastard!) (I mean, I was already swooning at our conversation by then) (i perceived him as a sincere albeit troubled man by then) (troubled because of other aspects of our conversations about his past, his ‘depression’ due to his job and marriage, family etc. even though he never spoke about himself in any real detail, he was too occupied with asking me questions or sexting with me – which I fucking loved!)
Just before it got fucked, it got absolutely adorable/ cutesy/ crazy-cutesy between us. I do not know what he was thinking, but I was swooning.
On the day before we had our first mutual fuck-up, I said something about ‘having a daydream’ where he was ‘loving up on me so good’ (I was sexy-talking with him of course) (by then I had already shared my beautiful voice with him, he had heard me laugh/ giggle/ moan over voice notes i sent him intermittently) (i was already orgasming to him on the daily haha, i was loving it, i wanted to be held in his big strong arms) to which he replied ‘be my love‘ and i was flummoxed. i had been discouraging him from being so fucking cute with me, repeatedly. so i replied “well, thats basically like saying ‘marry me’!!” “stop it!” etc.
we giggled, and then i pushed my luck with this thought i had in the moment, ‘maybe to fuck with people, i will change your name in my contacts to ‘husband‘. to which he said, ‘that’ll be the day‘, ‘maybe to continue fucking with people, we will get married and do the whole honeymoon thing too!‘ (i honestly did not know whether to laugh or cry or what) (what was happening!?) (this kind of unchecked cuteness should be illegal and punishable my law) (bastard!) (am I ridiculous for falling for this man and his banter?)
(i was aware that he was recently divorced, and i probably should have left him alone once i found that out on day 1 of chatting, but hindsight is 20/20. i say that because i myself took so much time to isolate and process my own divorce. and i have a belief that it takes a long time to come out of it semi-healed. i should’ve not gotten talking to this dangerous tall nerd while he was freshly divorced and in complete denial about being ‘broken or lost’) (my bad) (i am an idiot) (i love him) (fuck!) (hand-on-forehead emoji) (I kept to myself for 6 years after my ex and I separated before I began hoping for some sort of romance/ flirtation – sure, that might be a bit extreme for some others but I genuinely prescribe that one isolates for a significant amount of time after a failed relationship because one could very easily hurt others/ use people as mere distractions while we are still hurt, without having sat down fully with our failures, low self esteem, anger, rage, jadedness, hopefulness, darkness etc.) (Amit had not even had a year off from people since his divorce) (I should have stayed away) (I take responsibility for my failing here but I also assumed that at 37 he is a grown man who must know who he is and what is in his heart)
that same day, he was calling himself ‘mediocre’ in general and i shut him down quickly by being cute myself, referencing our earlier crazy chat by saying, ‘don’t talk crap about my husband!!!‘. I think he loved that, coz he said, ‘i’d fuck you just for saying that‘ or some such. (oh god, yes, fuck me please!) (haha slut) (me, yes) (fuck)
(i have to state here that it was becoming clear that we were not entirely on the same page in terms of sexual fantasies, more or less i was turned on by him and whatever he wanted us to experience together, but it was clear to me that he had more intense and specific fantasies than i did – but this didn’t really give me a big pause – its mere detail, not something that felt like a deal-breaker – having said that i did wonder if we became partners, would he be satisfied with me considering he needed more specific shades of sexual play than i did) (shrug emoji)
when he heard me moan, he said, ‘i just imagined you cum, while i watched you playing with yourself with your Pyaari toy, and i felt content by the idea of just lovingly watching you near me and hear your moans‘ (evil cute bastard!)
he had joked, ‘you should move in with me and see if you like me’ (WTF!)
half the time he spoke as if he was lucky to be getting to talk to me. He once texted, as if talking from a deeply insecure part of himself, ‘we should meet quickly because if you don’t like me, it’ll save me a lot of time typing on my phone like an idiot’. I am no stranger to low self-esteem or self-doubt. I might be cute and funny and sexy but I am also fat and impulsive and loud and aggressive and impatient and over-enthu and I have suffered a lot of humiliation at the hands of people I trusted and loved the most in the world due to how I look / express myself – ex husband, parents, family etc. – I haven’t fully recovered from all of that yet. Yes, I am much more in love with Me than ever before, but I also worry about being liked/ accepted for who I am. So I get it. I get insecurities and I want to hug/ love those insecurities out of people I like.
Even though he kept sounding like a man convinced of being rejected by me in person, later it was obvious that i liked him as much as he did me, if not more. (maybe that freaked him out, maybe he didn’t like being liked by people he put on pedestals, i don’t know! sigh)
[And of course having said the above, it’s not guaranteed that we would certainly like each other when we met. People are not static, not just how we look. we are combinations of so many of our personality traits, behaviors, preferences etc – there must be 50/50 odds of 2 strangers liking or disliking each other when they first meet. And yes this can be terrifying. Hell, I was scared to meet this dude in case he might be disappointed in how I am. Scary shit.]
anyway, i do think now that he ‘fell in love‘ with a pedestalized cool older woman who seemed like an unreachable goddess-type, ayahuasca-babe, who probably wasn’t human at all, with human intensity and human emotions and neediness and loneliness and affection or any fucking flaws or insecurities. i don’t know, only he knows. more on this later.
he said, ‘you make me feel good about my own existence‘ – which i perceived (contextually) as his immense dislike for himself and assumption that someone like me would never engage with him, let alone like him (i really liked him) (moron!) (bastard!) (most divorced people feel this way, people who have reduced self-esteem due to their ex’s rejection of them during the marriage etc.) (most unloved children feel this way too – i recognise and empathise with this immediately – i have spent years feeling this way)
he said, “i don’t just want to sleep with you, i want to wake up with you” (WTF!) (cruel, no?)
we were flirting till late at night, a friday night & i had mentioned that i’d want to go for my early morning reformer-pilates class the next morning, so ‘goodnight mr muscles‘… to which he cutely asked me to stay for longer (on chat), he also faux-whined and said, ‘why do you always say these words mr. muscles to me only before you say goodnight‘, explaining that the insecure little girl in him (as opposed to little boy – shrug emoji) loves it when i call him ‘mr muscles’. so i began calling him that intermittently. i loved it. he loved it too apparently. we were stupidly cute for a very brief period of time. sigh.
anyway, we continued flirting and sexting till late that night, so i decided to skip my morning workout (saturday morning) – i think we checked in with each other the next day and i must have mentioned that i didn’t go to pilates, to which he said, ‘that’s not cool… i can’t be making you skip your workouts‘ – i thought that was sweet of him. i also reassured him that i do not make a habit of missing workouts in general, but since this was my first week back (after fracture & surgery recovery) into the workout foray/ routine, it was okay to miss a saturday workout. I had already exercised beautifully for 5 days, and a weekend workout would have been me being greedy and not giving my body enough time to recover.
to ensure he doesn’t feel fucked about our late night naughtiness causing disruptions in my routine the next day, i went swimming another morning (after another late-night conversation between us) and told him about it. to which he complimented me on being so self-motivated and disciplined. he said he would also soon be synced to a routine similar to mine (this needs a mention i suppose – he was awaiting a career shift which would give him 9-5 office hours as opposed to his previous role, at that time when we matched, his routine seemed deeply disturbed/ fucked – he was up almost all night, woke up very late in the day/ noon. hence, only attended to his phone by 1pm) and ‘we’d be able to communicate better‘ etc.
anyway, soon our first fuck-up happened. i had an emotional reckoning, he thought/ did something random, I overreacted due to my own triggers, we spoke two different languages, seriously miscommunicated – but in hindsight, no matter how much i blame myself for the overreaction, i know that its highly okay for 2 strangers to miscommunicate massively in the beginning, esp. over the limiting medium of texting.
but that morning broke me open and triggered me like crazy. it was a gut-punch.
that morning, i think it was a Wednesday morning (coz it was ‘back day’ at my aerial yoga class haha). I was driving to my yoga class and its a long-ish drive (which i love), and i remember bursting into tears of joy, but then also tears of fear. tears of joy because i was feeling so cutesy and playful with Amit. the whole ‘marry me’ ‘husband’ thing was beyond anything i had allowed myself to indulge in, or allowed a man to engage me in. i had not felt the urge to be this playful with anyone in over a decade. i had not allowed any man to speak to me that way since over a decade (not that anyone had even tried – the men i had engaged with were only interested in casual fooling around etc, & so was i – enter Amit!). i had not been this playful with ANYONE AT ALL! IT WAS A HUGE LEAP I WAS TAKING.
to me, BEING PLAYFUL & CUTESY WITH A MAN WAS/IS A MUCH BIGGER DEAL FOR ME THAN HAVING SEX WITH HIM WOULD BE. HUGE HUGE LEAP.
psychologically speaking, esp for people like Me who say only what they mean, do not want to mislead or miscommunicate, are deeply self-aware & honest, when We let our guard down and let our inner child come out to play and be silly/ playful/ cutesy with someone, we are giving them our trust, we are showing them our heart, we are ‘falling’ so to speak. AND WE FUCKING MEAN IT. (i don’t fuck around with my emotions, nor with others’. so if i playfully call you ‘husband‘ or ‘play along‘ with your ‘marry me/ move in with me‘ joke or your ‘be my love‘ line i am quite clearly suggesting that i am choosing you, i want to know everything about you, i want to be yours, i want you, like seriously, i’m saying ‘i’m ready to take this leap whatever it may look like, are you?‘) (there was a clear line in my bio – ‘i only say what i mean and i expect you to do the same’ – do men not read!?!?)
i was involuntarily crying, in my car, with a stupendous terrified joy, feeling like i was standing on the precipice of a huge fucking leap. trust. hope. love.
you know what i mean?
i cried. i was freaking out. i couldn’t believe that this was happening. wtf was happening. i am a lovergirl, eager to love a man who would love me back. to take leaps with a man who wants to do the same. to feel safe with a man, just as i would be a safe space for him. (i am confident about the latter part since i am a solid rock of a human, esp after all the shit i have been through) (in various birthday testimonials and farewell parties and heart-to-heart’s i have been described as someone who would walk through walls for those she loves) (i am not bragging, i just know who i am)
I was feeling loved by this dude, and i really liked him back too. not only was i being playful with him, but i was feeling safe being playful with him.
and then came the tears of fear and disbelief and trauma – how could i become so open with a stranger, what if he is fucking with me, what if i’ll get hurt, what if he is love-bombing me, what are you doing to yourself anjuri, what is this nonsense, what if this goes to shit, how can this be real, is this wise, is it stupid, am i stupid etc.
i was crying like a little baby, with quivering chin and everything – i felt so happy, so crazy, so unsafe, so out of control, so playful, so fearful, so stupid, so free, so safe, so scared.
this blew my mind.
by the time my yoga class began, and i had to leave the sanctaury of my car, i somehow steadied myself and got through it with a neutral expression, that was also the day when (after being away from aerial yoga and exercise of any kind) i observed that my body had amazing muscle memory from last year and i was able to stretch and hold poses/ aasanas as well as, if not better, than the last time i tried them 6 months ago. i was over the moon. my teacher took pictures of me. i instantly thought, ‘i’ll show Amit!’. (he had cutely said, ‘you do impressive things‘ after he had googled aerial yoga and found out that i have swum 2-2.5km in 2025).
that’s how my mind was working already. fuck. i couldn’t wait to text him and receive his cute replies. fuckkkkkkkk. i texted him a few different texts, i can’t for the life of me recall them. but they were 7am, 8am, 10am, 11am texts. he didn’t reply. i was waiting, particularly because i knew he had slept earlier than usual and would’ve been awake max by 10am that morning. but no replies till 1.30pm.
and get this – after i came back home from my workout, went about my routine, Koko’s routine, settled in my room, listened to music and continued to involntarily break out in fat tears because of everything i was feeling that morning – a potent mix of love, hope, fear and terror (some part of it is definitely linked to the spine getting an intense stretch and exercise that morning i.e. ‘back day’ – tons of emotions are stored along the spine; and compression, decompression would have you cry madly or feel deeply exhausted for hours).
through my tears, i decided to text my girl-bestie and tell her about Amit (i hadn’t yet, because i was being cautious not to make a bigger deal about him than there was) – and ironically enough i texted her stuff along the lines of ‘i can’t believe that i feel safe being myself with this dude, i am being ridiculous with him re:husband/ marry me etc…. but Amit seems like a really safe space for me be silly and cute!!!!’
i expressed a lot of my elation and disbelief and blushed while i did so. she replied sweetly too.
so – Amit doesn’t text till 1.30pm, and i text him something like this, ‘hey mr muscles, i am a breaking up with you coz you haven’t replied to me since morning… i’ve been waiting all morning‘
get this – he replies ‘hey, i have been since 10am, i just wasn’t looking at my phone‘
follows it up with, ‘i remember you had mentioned that you found it impressive when someone doesn’t check their phone till later in the day’ (context – in the first couple of days, i noticed that he would only text in the afternoon, even though he was heavily ‘chasing’ me. i mentioned, back when i wasn’t taken by him at all, that wow i am addicted to my phone, and its impressive that you can spend your entire morning without checking your phone – meaning, wow you aren’t addicted to your phone – how cool etc. back then i hadn’t known that he was simply waking up at 2pm etc.)
when i read his innocent reply, something in my brain broke. i wanted to puke. i felt sick, seriously. it felt like i had been slapped.
let me explain.
i had been up since 5am. i had been crying almost all morning. i was falling in love. i was waiting for this man’s cuteness and safe virtual arms to feel some love and reassurance, but he was trying to ‘impress me‘ by not checking his phone!!!! WTF!
two strangers, two different brains, two completely different realities.
also, dear reader, i want to point out that before you think i am making a mountain out of a molehill, i’d like to point out that i was having a fucking monumental epiphany moment in my single-for-a-decade-never-opened-heart-to-any-man-since-divorce-but-now-quickly-calling-someone-husband-cutely-and-freaking-out feelings, while he was simply existing in his own little aloof world.
FUCK ME!
this broke my brain. how i reacted is embarrassing, honestly. i am embarrassed. i don’t have a defence for myself. i won’t even bother with that here.
i fucked up. but i swear in that moment, my brain exploded. i scolded him. i said i don’t need him to be impressive, for i wasn’t pageant judge who was evaluating him on his ‘impressiveness’. i asked, ‘how is it impressive to ignore texts from a woman he has been madly wooing for 5 days?‘.
he, in turn, said equally ridiculous things back to me, ‘please don’t spoil your day because of me, a stupid man’
he had already done this ‘i am stupid, and you are very sensitive – i might hurt you with my stupidity‘ – i hate it when people do this. what a cop-out. don’t be stupid then. i am aware that i might hurt someone because of my personality or my words, but i’m not scared of that – if something like that were to happen, i would take it head on, even if it makes me feel defensive, and try to work it out and apologise and move on with them, if i care about them.
my ex, by the way, had said this to me some time before he asked me to marry him, ‘you’re too good for me, i will end up hurting you‘ – WELL IF YOU’RE A MORON WHO HURTS PEOPLE, STAY AWAY FROM ME AND DO NOT PROPOSE TO PEOPLE, DO NOT BE IN RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEM, WTF!!! He was right – he fucking hurt me, in seemingly irreparable irreversible ways. I HATE THIS KINDA DRAMA. ‘i’m stupid, i might hurt you’. Am i supposed to consider this a fucking deal-breaker and stop talking to you/ engaging with you the minute you tell me this about yourself!?? Maya Angelou has said famously, ‘when they show you/ tell you who they are… believe them‘
UGH!
Anyway, i called Amit out there and then by saying ‘calling yourself stupid is not an excuse to hurt someone’ etc. the whole thing was stupid, my god! cringe! i ended the chat that day by saying, ‘i think i’ll need to dial back how i am feeling and being with you, becuase yeah i’ll get hurt’. ‘let’s not talk for some time’.
i had to pause and clear my head and come back down to earth. how fucking embarrassed & foolish i felt that i had just that morning texted my bestie, gushing over Amit. fuck! fuck!
he did this patronising shit (i know he wasn’t being patronising, i know he genuinely believed what he was saying), ‘you are the wiser one, if you say let’s not talk for some time, you must be right’ etc. (he had truly assumed that I was the wiser one coz of my experiences with psychedelics and life journey so far) THIS infuriated me further. (facepalm) (i am repeating – i am embarrassed)
i replied, ‘i’m not the wiser one right now. i am the vulnerable one, the emotional one’.
he backed off for good that day, after the above text I sent. (again, i am embarrassed by how i behaved that day, but i do hold empathy & forgiveness for myself re: the epiphanies i was having)
i was traumatised by the rollercoaster ride that morning/ day had been for me, internally. i kept mum all day and night afterwards. (he might have thought I’m insane, rightfully so. at the very least, i must’ve confused him as to what he did wrong. facepalm emoji)
then the next day, i woke up to his texts. long paragraphs. hilariously, he was off on some other tangent. it was a case of a person processing his own concerns/ fears on top of being unclear on what mine really were. he said stuff about having taken some drug late the previous night (his friend had come over with what was supposed to be E, but he wasn’t now really sure what it was) – he said that before he took the drug he didn’t really know what to say, couldn’t articulate what he needed to say but the drug gave him courage or clarity. this is funny coz he went on to say that yeah we should dial back down our passion for each other coz if we met and i didn’t want to engage physically it would become awkward for me (what!!!) (i wish i’d told him that as a grown woman, no situation is truly awkward for me and i can navigate anything that comes my way, however clumsily, but that was besides the point. wtf was he talking about!?!?!)
he wrote long paragraphs about the above, about missing me that night and some other subject that i cannot recall now. this was really late at night, 4am types (the man had a fucked up sleeping schedule those days – he was clearing going through some personal shit). then a few hours later (when it was actually morning) he wrote this text that made me smile and feel like kissing him. ‘see, now i get it – its frustrating waiting for a reply’.
that’s all – that’s all it takes for me to fully melt. consideration, realization, ability to be honest and human and admit that you see someone else’s pov. thats it, that’s all the proof i need to move on from any situation honestly. i am a softie who is fucking reasonable when calm (lol).
when i saw his texts, i waited to formulate a response coz the earlier paragraphs had confused me, and it was clear that no part of my drama yesterday had managed to convey to him my inner weather. so, as a placeholder i replied, ‘i am not trying to teach you a lesson, i am figuring out how to respond’. i genuinely do not believe in playing games, trying the power-play bullshit of who will text first, let’s make him wait etc bollocks. i am way too grown up for that shit. i love/ communicate wholeheartedly without calculations. and i expect grown ups to do the same with me.
earlier in the interaction, a few days in, when i was making it clear that i liked him too, he had asked me why. and i listed a few things that i liked about him from whatever little i knew about him, to which he retorted, ‘oh, you are scary, can’t play games with you’. yes, sir. i don’t play games. i just express myself as clearly as i can, whenever emotionally possible (haha re: the explosion of drama i mentioned above).
we continued to chat, it seemed we had made up. he revealed that he had been ‘off’/ ‘numb’ since he ingested that drug the previous night and i was concerned. i cautioned him against taking any stimulants/ substances for a while, till he was in a good state of mind. why fuck with yourself when you’re already going through life circumstance that’s evolving/ uncertain (recent divorce, relocation to hometown, looking to change career to be closer to ageing mother, ageing father’s wonky health etc.). he revealed that he had been watching porn for hours under the influence, but not to masturbate, but just to watch the storylines or some such. that gave me pause. clearly he was experiencing ‘darkness’, right? i understand it, i do not judge it, but i do know that its his ‘darkness’/ ‘shadow’ to process and move through. i am no one’s psychiatrist. so, i decided to give him space and not communicate that day, but after some time he said he wanted me to talk.
that afternoon he asked me a question about what i thought about sexual abuse and ‘degradation’ kinks and if i had anything to share in terms of my psychedelic wisdom about that. i did, but i said (maintaining the above resolve to leave him to process his shit by himself that day) i will talk about what i know/ feel some other day. he cutely insisted that i respond in my sweet voice (voice notes, coz what i had to say was too long to type)
[that morning on the topic of us dialling back our intensity a bit, i had told him He had to stop being so fucking cute with me all the time, with his ‘marry me’ and other bullshit. he said he couldn’t help it coz he was ‘sooooo in live‘ with me (bastard!). oh yeah, i should state this random crazy detail here – his phone, i assume iphone, kept autocorrecting ‘love‘ to ‘live‘ all the time – he kept saying ‘i live’ you or this or that about you – it was hilarious. i remarked on it multiple times – it had become our shared joke and even i had started saying ‘i live’ you. i think it was a good way to express fondness/ closeness without using the loaded sacred word ‘love’ anyway.]
anyway, i sent him my voice notes with what ayahuasca had taught me about porn and kinks and guilt and shame and sexual abuse. he replied (he never shared voice notes, i was soon going to ask him to get on a call with me, but sadly we never got there) (i feel/ know that he had really stupid inferiority complexes, god knows what idiot taught him that he wasn’t good enough in various aspects of his ‘being’ – fuck those assholes! i know that someone/ society had programmed him to think that 5’11 was not tall enough, that wanting to be the little spoon after sex was somehow unsexy – i am rolling my eyes as i type – i mean what the fuck does our culture teach us men and women about what’s acceptable as per our genders – its fucking ridiculous) (because once when i asked him to send me a video of his dog the next time he refused to walk halfway through his 4km nightly walk, he had sent me a video of training his dog, i could see the dog following Amit’s commands, but i could hear Amit’s confident voice commanding him – and i kid you not, i wanted to smooch the man behind the camera. fuck. i was impressed and turned on by how well he had trained his hyper dog. i babytalk with my Koko, so anyone who has such an alpha vibe with their dog, esp a man i liked, oooofffffff – i would instantly want to sit in his lap and smooch the daylights out of him if i happened to be in that room!)
he replied to my voice notes in text, saying that we must be soulmates/ twins, because he felt pretty much the same way. i won’t go into detail here, but what i found in what he wrote was a man capable of intelligent thought, clarity of expression about a loaded topic. i also felt, without him stating it out loud, that he had been sexually abused or humiliated in some way maybe when he was younger. i wanted to hug him, i wanted to talk to him about it some day (if he wished to), i wanted to erase his pain, and i know no one can do that for anyone else, but just to love someone enough so that there is space for both in their being afterwards – the pain and the love.
we discussed a bit more about sexuality, sexual preferences, how sexual trauma influences our sexual preferences and kinks etc. i really liked that i spoke in such a confused way, whereas he was clear in what he said. oh i loved that. i am happy to admit that i can often talk in circles, not being clear in how i explain important concepts/ thoughts (i had mentioned this to him as well, that i know i am intelligent in the sense that i can intuitively understand things in my own way, but i struggle to explain them clearly to another person), and so i really admire people who can be sharp in their understanding and also who are able to express their understanding clearly (clearer than I can) – i think its especially sexy in a man who is humble. that’s how i saw Amit post that conversation.
i was falling in ‘live’ with Amit, quickly – despite his darkness. and he was obviously holding tons of it within him. i didn’t want to cure him of anything, i just wanted to know him more and more and become a friend, and ‘love’ him soon. immense affection, immense curiosity, immense liking. fuck!
might i point out here – during the first few months of retiring from dating apps in late 2025 and henceforth focusing my energies and imagination on the ‘big strong man’ Shiva ‘divine masculine’ archetype, i was getting carried away with potential ‘perfections’ of a man, of a relationship dynamic. while falling in love with Amit, all that flew out the window. he was far from perfect, and i didn’t give a fuck. and this in itself was such a gift. a gift of ‘real human love’, REAL, not perfect, but perfectly human, messy, dark, complex, struggling, adorable, funny, deeply imperfect.]
[what i am saying is that there is a lot of noise out there by relationship experts about being perfectly embodied woman, divine feminine, so that you can attract a perfectly embodied divine masculine, perfect man – but the truth is that we are all messed up in our specific ways, and ‘perfection’ is traumatising, to strive for, to look for, to wait for.]
despite us having miscommunicated royally as two nearly-strangers the previous day, when we ‘made up’ it was hopeful and lovely to see that both him & i were willing to talk stuff out and egos were not at play. this was clear to me, even in the fog of two people speaking two different languages.
i liked that i could say my piece and be agitated and he wouldn’t cut me off in a male ego way. or shut down completely. it was encouraging that he was not the disappear at first fight/ disagreement type of guy.
he also retorted that it seemed we would fight madly and these fights would end up in hot ‘make-up’ sex (single-minded idiot! hehe) (i liked all his joker nonsense even though i was worried that he was missing the point) (am i stupid!?) (a 42 year old stupid woman) (hand-on-forehead emoji)
one thing has to be said here – i was saying to him earlier in this ‘talking it out’ chat that a wise person has said, ‘do not ignite a woman’s flame if you can’t handle it, or if you will abandon it’. i was obviously talking about a woman’s emotional fire. he possibly received this as ‘sexual fire’, because he said something about being confident about ‘handling it, but not sure how to maintain it’ (i’m pretty sure that once again we were talking diff languages here – ugh, i will learn a lesson here – i will stop talking metaphorically to strangers from now on!) (hand-on-forehead emoji) (and its incredibly sadly poetic that ironic that that’s exactly what he did eventually – ignited my fire and vanished into thin air)
at some point when i had first called him ‘husband’, i had mentioned that i aspire to be a inter-city driver, but as a solo woman i often worry about safety in general, and also out of my ignorance about car-copmponents-functionality-and-mechanics, i would love a ‘secure in his masculinity’ male partner who would be my security guard and road-trip companion, who would act as buffer between me and the potentially unsafe world outside, who would just sit in the passenger seat while i drove to my heart’s content, and possibly take over the wheel when i felt not-so-confident (hilly roads etc driving on which i have no experience yet) – to this he had said, ‘i would be happy to be your passenger princess, while i enjoy the view‘. i mean, c’mon. i love him. i was already planning road trips in my head. silly hopeful me.
i was already thinking about how uncomfortable a 5’11 man might be in my tiny car, and if that would be a problem for him. i was already thinking about driving to his city soon, when we would decide to meet/ date, spending time with him. he had said ‘i’m an introvert, you’ll see when you meet me’ even that had turned me on in every way – an introvert. of course the idea of a man quieter than Myself, a man who is calmer than I, who can think clearer than I, who can express clearer than I – if beautiful to me. i would love to be quiet, sit in silence with an introverted 5’11 muscular man, preferably while he is cuddling me.
i am madly in love with this jackass. fuck my life. do i need an intervention? am i crazy? i have gaslighted my own self over this dude and the feelings i have had for him. and so that i stop gaslighting myself, i am writing this down in as much detail as i can. to prove to myself that i am not fucking delusional. that i fell in love because of how he talked to me.
oh i have to state this – this is very important to me – never once did he show disdain or judgment about my lifestyle, about the fact that I am unemployed, choose to stay unemployed and continue to live a creative passions-based life (i had begun a pottery course a few days before we matched), he had actually said ‘i love your life’. men (rarely, but still) have actually unmatched me the minute i say ‘i do nothing’ to their staple question of ‘what do you do?’. i think it freaks people out to talk to someone like me. someone who is ex-corporate-minion. of course i get it – people who are looking for marriage partners want double-income relationships, but excuse me this is a dating app and your profile says you’re looking for ‘something casual’ – grow the fuck up before you judge my lifestyle choices. and of course it makes some people uncomfortable that i don’t really need to work, that i am a privileged fucker. whatever it is – i myself feel insecure about not earning, but not enough that i would look for a means to earn. meh.
so amit’s reaction to my life was lovely. he didn’t seem to judge it at all. he praised it at one point. he also mentioned that his own decade long career with the government had resulted in, in his own words, ‘a depressed man’ and was trying to break away from it and transition into small city stability after being a nomad with a crazy stressful job for years. also that he wanted to be near his ageing mother, with whom he had a loving relationship. he said that he understood why i left my job and moved to small city and was living with family. he didn’t even give me a chance to feel self-conscious about my ‘unemployed’ status. (i respected this about him, liked it very much and wanted to kiss him hahahhaaa)
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