My prospects for fornication are looking up

Forgive me dearest gentle reader for I have sinned.

I like somebody new.

It has been one year since my last relationship.

I was dreadfully in need of platonic friendship. So what did I do? Downloaded bumble for friends. BFF. Fantastic acronym that.

This is how it went.

Every man I matched with ultimately wanted a romantic or at least sexual relationship. Every woman was cool, engaged and engaging.

I met a girl and her friend, tattoos, coloured hair, personality half made up of the Korean government’s success at soft power. They work as Baristas in the town I live in. Fun.

I met three men. The first held promise. A Nigerian with shared heritage. We met at a dodgy car park the first unseasonably hot day. The next time he made me banga soup and attempted to cuddle. I made him wear my hoop earrings. Texted him when I got home saying perhaps this was revolutionary but I was on the app for friends looking for just friends. And to not text if the parameters of his friendship included genital friction. Not a word since.

The second man is Indian. A 30-year old virgin software engineer. That kind of naivety does things to me. His flirting was encouraged and reciprocated. Jokes too. Like the one he made about his client who had recently been through a cyberattack costing the business £300 million. Three times we planned to meet. Three times those plans fell through. Two times he ghosted me for days. Once I did. Evenly yolked, our flakiness. So I blocked him on WhatsApp. He called, texted on iMessage, of course. I am unsatisfied with the intensity and frequency of grovelling so we’ll see.

Now to the person I like. He was the first one I connected with on BFF. I could tell by the end of the first call he fancied me. I had the fancies too in three days. The inevitable kind born of incessant speaking. Then he said he’d recently picked up vaping. And when I had a non proportional reaction to that his turnaround time for grovelling left much to be improved. So I unmatched. Instantly regretted but it was done. All we knew of each other were our first and middle names.

I went on meeting the aforementioned people. Randomly logged into Instagram three weeks ago and there was a DM request from him. Tempered my excitement, dispatched a non impressed response. He said a lot. I said, finally, you can call me.

Three weeks later two things are happening. He is either intense enough for my tastes - needy, clingy, curious - or I am being love bombed. I suspect the latter. Either way, stimulation of the infatuative nerves.

He’s saved on my phone as Slut. We meet for the first time tomorrow. I ordered a new dress. I tried to go on a three day fast two days ago. But then walked into the kitchen, found pepper sauce with smoked fish and soaked egg and that was that.

He’s going to ask me to be his girlfriend. He’s just patriarchal enough to pay for my salon visits moving forward. I’ve put out sexual feelers and am confident he is something I can play with.

I may say yes. On the condition of comprehensive STI screening, n dates, with a set timeframe.

This is all I have to report. It’s 31 degrees today and I am unfortunately wearing a bra. Hope you are weller than me.