He Told Me Not to Write About This and Then He Ghosted Me

I fit more first dates into this summer than I care to admit. They’ve mostly been good, leading me to believe that while democracy may be dying all around us, romance is not. Robin Hood and I matched on Hinge a couple of weeks ago. He was an ambitious lawyer who started his own law firm focused on bringing financial justice to people who can’t afford it– hence the pseudonym.

In our first conversation, he asked if I was okay with him not being Jewish, since his last relationship ended because his ex wanted to marry a Jewish man, and he wasn’t one of those. I thought about showing him a scratch map of all the nationalities of the men I’ve dated. I did make one. If the UN won’t get the job done, then I will.

We set a date. He made a reservation at a nice restaurant and we spoke on the phone far longer than I like to before meeting someone. I find it kills the romance. You probably won’t marry every person you go on a date with, but shouldn’t you both at least want to have a good time? To Robin’s credit, that wasn’t the case. Having grown up in Syria and New Jersey– you know, the Syria of the Americas– he was interested in my investment in the Middle East, as well as in my writing. He was a yapper, and we yapped about international affairs with equal gusto. According to him, I’m bursting with let’s argue and make-out energy. I should add that to my bio.

I caught myself oversharing with a man I hadn’t even met and reminded him that I’d rather get to know someone in person. Then came the day of our date. It was Yom Kippur, and I was breaking my fast at a hand roll restaurant on the West Side of Los Angeles with a Syrian man who hadn’t fasted, but who had made a deposit on a reservation. As the afternoon rolled on, I didn’t get the habitual reconfirmation text from a man who seemed genuinely excited to meet me. Breaking one of my dating rules, I texted him.

Robin was embarrassed to admit that he thought he texted me a couple of days ago to reschedule, and since no reply had come his way, he assumed I ghosted him. “Online dating is fickle”, he explained, realizing he never sent the message. Truthfully, I was more offended he thought I’d ghost someone than I was about the hate crime he committed by cancelling dinner plans on a fasting Jew.

He called to reschedule with a crazy proposal, and I thought I’d at least get a story out of it. A lawyer Robin needed to network with invited him– and by extension, me– to an ABBA tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl. A group of lawyers and their wives were going to sing their hearts out to Dancing Queen and Mamma Mia, and if Robin was going to position himself the way he needed to, he’d have to make a good impression. I agreed immediately.

The caveat was we couldn’t say it was our first date, because that, of course, would have been insane. We agreed on pretending, like an improv game, that it was our fifth date, and because he was embarrassed to say we met on Hinge, our story would be that we had met at the restaurant he didn’t take me to. I made him look very cool and confident as I manufactured the meet cute for the lawyer wives. Robin watched me as I danced and made friends with strangers outside of our group. This wasn’t a typical first date, and we were getting to know each other more deeply than we would have otherwise. There was intimacy in pretending we already knew each other.

Robin opened doors, put his arms around me, held my hand, bragged about me to the lawyers he was trying to impress, and whispered flirty remarks in my ear as we realized how good we were at pretending we had been seeing each other for the last month. Nevertheless, ghosting a girl after kissing her while Not ABBA performs Take a Chance on Me should count as psychological warfare.

Looking back on the date, I realize it was one of those ghost or wed situations– a story so good it has nowhere else to go but the altar or just… nowhere else. Our group nearly demanded that we keep seeing each other because they wanted to see more of me. We debriefed on the way to his car, his arms wrapped around me like he wanted to keep seeing each other, too. We made out in his car. He asked thoughtful questions about my schedule and hoped to see me soon. I had been a very successful cool beard.

Something’s happening with how we approach relationships, not just romantic ones, but between friends, neighbors, and compatriots. I write about dating and politics, though sometimes I struggle to connect the perfect forearms of the man who recently poured me another glass of wine with the latest headline or political concept people may not be familiar with. I find myself banging my head against the wall of realization that what’s wrong with us isn’t just that we’re misinformed. It’s that we’re afraid to feel. Most of the time, I get why we’re afraid. It’s safer to perform closeness than to admit we want it. Safer, still, to disappear before anyone can discover how much we did.

“Text me” were the last words out of Robin’s mouth when he dropped me off. I thought it went against my dating rules. I like to be pursued. I like to know a man can lead, make decisions, make a reservation. I texted him anyway, and was met with hardly any follow-up and zero follow-through. Yet there he was, responding. I was honest. Laughing your standards and feelings off is unbecoming of a woman in her thirties. When I told him I’d had a great time with him but liked more intentionality when getting to know someone, Robin Hood ghosted me. I didn’t think we were still doing that.

It is so easy to let fear of rejection determine how much to invest in someone, how open you decide to be with a stranger. My first and only date with Robin Hood will go down as one of the most fun, and weirdest, first dates I’ve been on. Yes, it was strange, but it was also romantic in a world where very few things retain that quality. That’s what made his disappearing act jarring. For one night, we had skipped the studied indifference of modern dating and pretended to be people already choosing each other. The performance was easy. The real thing was…apparently harder. As I joked about how to connect a pretend fifth date to geopolitics, Robin dropped the bit and told me that this was all confidential. I thought about the last man I had gone on a date with, the one with the great forearms who poured me a glass of wine, who had put his hand on mine as he said, “It would be an honor to be written about by you.”