A few months ago, I started seeing someone new.

We met on Feeld, my dating app of choice. Feeld is known for its sex positivity, openly kinky user base, and functionality in organizing sex parties via a handy group chat feature. I cannot deny it’s a shocking app to log on to at first. No other dating app encourages users to list their kinks- what they have branded as “desires”- in their bios. When making a Feeld profile, you can click up to 10 pre-written “desires” such as bondage, masochism, threesomes, and massage. In the year I have been a user, it has become clear how many people love feet. Call it naivety, but I kind of thought we were all joking about that.

We’ll call my new lover “R”, the “Feeld name” he chose when he created his profile.

R is actually very “vanilla” for Feeld. He’s not into group sex and doesn’t have any violent or degrading kinks. He doesn’t particularly enjoy bondage; he’s not a sadist or masochist, and he prefers the sensual and exploratory rather than rougher expressions. What he and I have in common is the reason that we are both on the app: we have very high libidos, and we don’t care if our sexual partners are romantic partners or not. Furthermore, neither of us minds if our sexual partners are seeing other people, as long as they don’t talk to us about it in detail. R and I both identify as solo polyamorous. This label is a very new development for me, but the desire to date this way is not.

My last long-term monogamous relationship ended over 4 years ago. In the interim, I have graduated with my bachelor’s degree, moved to Brooklyn, entered and graduated from eating disorder treatment, gone back to school to become a dietitian myself, and have unsuccessfully dated more people than I can count (or remember) at this point. I have a reputation amongst my friends - especially the ones in relationships - to always have a new silly hookup story every time we see each other. My therapist likes to joke that I “attract chaos.”

To many, I’m a slut. I’m ok with that label, but only because I have found that when I don’t approach dating with this kind of reckless abandon, I become fucking miserable.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not a romantic. My heart aches for me to be chosen by someone: to be their singular love, forever. I believe that there is someone out there waiting (well… not waiting. Surely the person for me is as sexually adventurous and fulfilled as I), and I hope to find them someday. I hope that when I meet that person, I feel ready to embrace monogamy again.

But in today’s dating landscape, I find that I am at a disadvantage for traditional “serious” dating for a few key reasons.

First off, I live in New York City. Dating here is notoriously difficult and soul-sucking for several reasons I will likely write about another time.

A much more significant hurdle to dating than my zip code is that I live in a plus-size body. My body is highly fetishized, but not at all respected. The desirability of my fat features is not in question. But I can't help but notice, since gaining a significant amount of weight, the nature of the dates I am being asked on has completely changed.

When I was thinner?

“Let's see a movie.”

“When’s the last time you went to Prospect Park?”

“My friends and I go to trivia; you should come.”

Now that I'm plus-sized?

“I live above a bar. They're not closed yet.”

“Why don't you just come over?”

“Hey, are you still up?”

It is absolutely fascinating and extremely disenchanting that becoming fat has made me seemingly sexually irresistible to most men, while simultaneously making me impossible to imagine as a girlfriend or wife. How could I not have found myself in casual relationships under these conditions? Am I supposed to live like a Puritan? I refuse to sit around untouched while I wait for someone to respect me enough to commit to me!

But the most significant reason that I find dating difficult is that I am mentally ill and enduring the Sisyphean tasks of overcoming or managing my diagnoses. How sexy.

I make semi-annual attempts at “serious dating” at the urging of my mom and close friends.

I change my dating app preferences to “long-term relationship” and “monogamy.” I go on a first date in the daytime, and I don’t drink alcohol. I dress nice, but don’t wear anything low-cut, revealing, or lacy, as I do on my other dates. I even wear a bra! To be taken seriously as a woman who is girlfriend or wife material, I go through a process of stripping myself of my sexuality. I arrive at my date in disguise.

I wonder if something is wrong with me; why I am not effortlessly the kind of woman people can adore, revere, and dedicate themselves to. It’s endlessly depressing. I obsess over flaws that I perceive in myself and pick myself apart. I replay the few “serious” dates we had in my head over and over and cry in bed and cry in therapy and cry on the phone with my mom. I don’t take rejection well when I am trying to be “serious.” Rejection is manageable when I keep things casual.

I came of legal age in the dating app era, so I only know the adult dating world as such. It’s a scene where everyone answers dumb little prompts with the same hackneyed, uncreative answers. Or even worse, they posture as better than everyone else on the app by sarcastically bucking the premise, making jokes at the expense of the poor loser reading their profile. It’s not an environment that lends itself well to the vulnerability necessary to make a strong connection. Every attempt at such comes off as desperate, corny, TMI. If photos or bios are too revealing, a very strong signal is received: this user is a weirdo, a pervert, a creep, a loser, a dweeb, and unattractive. Swipe left.

On traditional dating apps, the polite thing to do, the thing that will keep you from getting banned, is to playact that you are not thinking about having sex with your suitors. Is it so bad that I want to know if I can enjoy sex with a person before talking to them about things like the logistics of paying off student debt or parenting philosophies?

To me, Hinge and Bumble are completely sexless.

Neutered.

I can’t fall in love with someone who doesn’t have their balls.

Which led me to Feeld.

Which led me to answering the inevitable “what are you looking for?” messages with “I would like to be in a long-term monogamous relationship, but I don’t like putting that pressure on new connections. I’m open to having short-term relationships when the chemistry is right, and I’ve had friends with benefits before.”

Which led me to realize that “casual” dating is satisfying, fun, and not at all depressing to me. It makes me feel desired, not discarded, the way that “serious” dating does. I felt understood and respected for the first time in years.

Which led me to have many fulfilling casual relationships.

Which led me to eventually having a few at once, who all know I have a few at once, who may also have a few at once.

Which led me to connect with R.

On paper and in photographs, R is exactly the kind of man I envision myself dating “seriously.” He is slightly older than me, 31 to my 27. He is taller than me, standing at 5’11. He has great skin, great hair, and great hygiene. He’s a fellow Scorpio (read as: sexy.) He’s muscular but not shredded, one of my favorite male body types. He has these thick legs and juicy pecs and big biceps, all gorgeously layered with fat that he likes me to bite. He has a well-paying, yet not bougie or pretentious job, and he lives alone in a beautiful apartment. He has an artistic passion that he is dedicated to and works on in his spare time. We have similar tastes in music, but we truly connect over film. He has a sprawling physical media collection of some of my favorites: Raising Arizona, YiYi, and The Before Trilogy. On his bedroom wall is the poster for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Now that’s dreamy. He has a good sense of humor, but isn’t sarcastic at all. I hate sarcasm, especially in men. He never assumes he knows better than me, or at least you would never know by the way he expresses himself. Recently, while lying in bed together, I brought up hockey, something he knows nothing about, and he asked thoughtful questions about how the playoffs are structured and how I think my team will fare this year. Sometimes he’ll pose questions related to the science of nutrition, my current topic of study, and stare at me starry-eyed while I debunk diet culture myths. We are extremely sexually compatible and had an instant, crackling connection.

I love spending time with him.

After our first night together, I invited myself over for our second the very next day.

The only problem with R is that he reminds me entirely too much of a past version of myself. For this reason, I cannot be this man’s girlfriend.

The first night I slept with R, he took Viagra and Adderall. He treated me to the sex marathon of my dreams and instantly cemented himself as the man at the top of my roster.

But after our third round, while I was lying in his arms in a literal puddle of sweat, in what I hoped would continue to be a post-coital glow, he began to pick himself apart meticulously. He couldn’t resist the anxious urge to completely obliterate the mood.

R is deeply insecure about his aging.

While barely in his thirties and with an intact hairline populated by thick dark follicles, he takes minoxidil and finasteride out of fear of inheriting his father’s baldness.

I have an unbecoming habit of peeking into my lovers’ medicine cabinets and showers when left alone in the bathroom. That night, when I sneakily snapped open the closure on his bathroom mirror, I found hundreds of dollars’ worth of both prescribed and over-the-counter skin care.

When we were making plans for our first meeting, I suggested I bring over a bottle of wine to share. Less than a minute after I sent that text, I received a firm, adamant “No. I don’t drink.” in response. It didn’t take long for me to put together that the reason R doesn’t drink isn’t that he doesn’t enjoy the buzz of alcohol or have a medical need to abstain, but because he doesn’t want to accelerate the development of fine lines on his face.

By the end of our first night together, he confessed to me that he obsessively refreshes a subreddit dedicated to before and after photos of cosmetic surgeries that he will never be able to afford. I instantly flashed back to sitting on his couch earlier that evening and telling him about my recent trip to South Korea. In response, he mentioned he knows many tourists go to receive cosmetic procedures. What straight man knows that? When I talk about my trip, most people mention the food, or K-Pop, or Korean cinema. I would’ve loved it if he had mentioned Korean cinema! I had already told him Park Chan-Wook is my favorite director.

To many people, a young man possessing this kind of attention to grooming would be a green flag. I have many girlfriends who have horror stories of first dates gone wrong due to their date’s bad hygiene. I myself think about the times I’ve gone in for friendly hugs and gotten a whiff of BO, or made a man smile with a well-timed joke and realized that he doesn’t make a habit of flossing. But R experiences a level of obsession and insecurity that reminds me of the woman I was before I entered treatment for my eating disorder.

He is willing to tell me, not a girlfriend, a woman he has sex with once or twice a week, that he cannot stop thinking about how the shape of his head is unseemly. He speaks with disgust about his perfectly average amount of body hair. He wishes he were skinny, even though he is already thin, and cites Timothée Chalamet as a beauty ideal he knows he can never meet. (It doesn’t matter to him that I think he is leagues more attractive than Timothée Chalamet. I would not sleep with Timothée Chalamet.)

He is so obsessed with his self-perceived imperfections that all of his free time and spare income are dedicated to his insecurities. It breaks my heart, but because of my lived experiences as an anorexic with OCD, when he began speaking about it, all I could say was “I’ve been there.” I couldn’t bring myself to look this thin and extremely conventionally attractive man in the eyes and say “No, baby, you’re wrong. You’re so sexy. I love your body. Your hair looks great. I like guys with body hair. The fat over your abs drives me wild. You don’t look 31. You’re thin.”

All of those things are true (save for not looking 31. He looks his age squarely).

But I know that my saying them wasn’t going to help anything or change anything.

It almost feels irresponsible for me to do so.

It definitely would feel like a betrayal of my past self.

When I was 23, I had an extremely loving and dedicated boyfriend who would hold me and whisper in my ear that I wasn’t fat, that my body was beautiful, that it didn’t matter to him how much I weighed or what the circumference of my thighs was. I still compulsively weighed and measured myself. I still exercised for more than 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, to keep my body as small as possible. I still restricted my diet to as little food as I could manage, eating the same few meals every single week, obsessively doing the math to ensure that I wasn’t accidentally consuming more calories than I had the last time I ate that meal.

When I was 24, freshly recovered and freshly single, I had already figured out I loved casual sex. But I would go out with new people, go home with them, and do exactly (and I mean exactly) what R did to me that first night. I would somehow end up talking about how I was recovering from an eating disorder. Somehow always while naked, somehow always after sex. It was a sick and deeply embarrassing impulse. I hated myself for doing it, but I felt like I couldn’t stop. I felt I needed to hear from my new partner that they were attracted to my body, that they enjoyed our encounter, that I seemed pretty normal to them even though I was mentally ill. I would hear these things from strangers I knew didn’t care about me (so I knew they didn’t have any incentive to lie), and I wouldn’t feel any better about myself.

It’s worth noting that this was years before I received an OCD diagnosis, something that has completely reframed the way I look at my constant desire to ask people for reassurance and validation. I didn’t know yet that what I was doing was a symptom of yet another mental illness I would have to come to blows with later.

Those of us who suffer from the unpleasant obsessions of body dysmorphia or OCD understand that the compulsive reassurance seeking we do to ease our stress doesn’t ease our stress in the long term. Having a loving partner tell me over and over again that my insecurities were delusions didn’t make the delusions go away. Having one-off sexual encounters with attractive New Yorkers who couldn’t tell I was recovering from a serious illness didn’t either. I had to sit through hundreds of hours of therapy instead. It was hard fucking work. Part of that work was accepting that my life might not be so bad if the delusions came true one day. I’m not the size I was when I entered treatment in 2022: I’m fatter! I had to accept that I was going to be a fat person if I wanted to be a healthy (even just alive) person. That took effort, but I’m on the other side. My therapists (all Dialectical Behavioral Therapy practitioners) call this act “radical acceptance.”

R is in therapy and on medication for his anxiety (thank God; I probably wouldn’t have been able to continue seeing him if he wasn’t). He knows that I am in recovery from an eating disorder and in school with the intention of helping other people in recovery. He has asked me for advice on how to let go of insecurity and reject perfectionism. I told him the thing that I’ve told just about everyone: everything comes at a price.

If I wanted to, I could’ve kept pursuing thinness, but I would’ve paid for it in fistfuls of hair, my teeth and bones gaining pores, continuing to lose my close friendships, and the risky heart failure events that likely would’ve led to my death. Healing came at a price, too, but I blessedly realized it wasn’t as big. I told him that fighting the inevitability of aging has a cost. It’s costing him money he could be using to live a more comfortable life in a crushingly expensive city, and it’s clearly costing him his mental health. It’s getting in the way of building a more intimate connection with me. It has cost him hours on the internet on plastic surgery forums, and in his phone’s camera roll dissecting old photos of himself, and in the mirror in the morning before he goes to work. That’s a steep toll to pay. But I can admit, in the exact way that living my life in a larger body has had a social and emotional cost, so does allowing yourself to go bald and get wrinkles. There’s no freebie option; you’re gonna have to pay up somehow. “That’s life, baby. Accept it, or keep doing Patrick Bateman’s skincare routine. I’ll still be in your bed, so it doesn’t really make a difference to me.”

I know that I am not capable of “saving” one of the men that I fool around with a few times a month. It’s not my intention to do so. It’s part of the reason why I’m trying so goddamn hard not to give in to the impulse to shower him with affection when he expresses his insecurity.

I imagine it may be hard for someone outside of his bedroom to believe, but R’s hypercriticism is entirely internal. I can tell that he worships my body by the way he looks at me and touches me. He handles me with a care he is not yet capable of extending to himself. I know I’m not at risk by placing myself in his gaze. My certainty that his body baggage can’t touch me, that it has nothing to do with me, feels like proof that I’ve healed.

The problem with these cycles is that they’re extremely hard to break. Eventually, inevitably, I had to tell him that I don’t want to have these conversations with him anymore. I told him point blank that I want to be a friend he sleeps with, not a therapist or a well for validation. He took it really, really well because, as I mentioned before, he’s humble, kind, and self-aware. He’ll probably slip up. I’ll probably have to keep setting this boundary. At some point, if I decide I don’t want to anymore, I’ll leave. It’s that simple when you’re not dating “seriously.”

Before we finally laid this topic to rest, he addressed what I had been feeling since he first let it slip that he doesn’t like his hairline: being together is kind of like looking in a mirror.

“You’re so much younger than me-”

“I’m not.”

“Ok, you’re four years younger than me. But you’re so much further ahead of me when it comes to this stuff.”

“Yeah. You remind me a lot of myself. I’ve worked really hard on this.”

I paused and took a moment to play with his hair that he hates so much, that I swear to God isn’t thinning at all.

“You should turn the record over.”