Unhinged

He gave me a book about relationships and took coke in front of me; I dropped the roast chicken then my bed collapsed. We lasted a month, I loved it.

I started calling him Crazy Chris after the second date. 

The first date was fine, it was spontaneous. We met at a bar called Macke Prinz which I like because it is dark and feels like you are in the under belly of an old ship. I drank Campari Soda and thought I might vomit before he arrived even though the room wasn’t swaying. I smoked Vogues; wore a transparent long sleeved top, ankle length black skirt and knee high DocMartens. 

We matched on Hinge, two nights before. 

Hinge is a dating app used widely here in Berlin but there is nothing special about it. You put up several photos, write witty captions or plant a voice message on your profile to lure in dates.

Humans are reduced to their random food preferences when at a loss for what to say and are defined by a liking for Szechuan noodles, Bánh mì or “A nice cold beer.”

Not to make fun; I wrote “cake” beneath my interests, well aware of how ridiculous it sounds but reluctant to reveal any more or play along despite being in the game from the moment I signed up.

At first I didn’t want to go back to dating. 

After a four year relationship every man I saw gave me the ick until the prospect of someone else started to give me the yum.

I signed up to Hinge and found dating at 36 wasn’t as dismal as I had imagined. After a couple of days there was a gentle tattoo artist who took me out for coffee and asked “When do you feel most attractive?” a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who never replied, then Chris. 

We hit it off in our initial chat through the app, messaging back and forth for several hours discussing our attraction to each other's pics, roast dinners, movies, work and turn ons. 

The first date was planned for Friday but we ended up meeting on Wednesday because Chris said he was in the area. It ended around 4am when he left my apartment after taking a surreptitious photo of me on the couch in my leggings under the guise of booking an Uber. 

We got on. He made me laugh, often interrupting when I was speaking to put his hand round my neck and kiss me. He was full of compliments which came as a welcome change. 

On our second date Chris chose the bar, somewhere in Rixdorf. I was late. He said he had met with his ex-girlfriend to pick up a book for me, it was called Conversations on Love. He told me about the secret photograph he had taken and showed it to me. He paid for all the drinks, booked a cab, bought a bottle of Prosecco and took me home. 

Back at his apartment he started to play music, snorted coke off his phone, became melancholic and then took coke again by which point I wanted to go to bed. 

That night as we got to know each other, we did not sleep. At one point he said he might be falling in love with me. I turned over and texted a friend, telling her that he was on coke and to please remind me in the morning. Twisted in his soft white bed sheets I worried I was rolling in a red flag. 

A few days passed and my concerns calmed down, he seemed more docile. We went to the cinema and spent another night at mine. 

Over the next week he asked for pictures of what I was wearing; I liked this. 

I also liked that he wore silver rings in both his ears and the same fragrance each time we met which smelt amazing and clung to my skin like his kisses.

Eager for more personal reminders I asked him to give me love bites which he did. One on my neck actually blistered, perhaps I was allergic to him. 

He told me he used to work in finance in London and after that I couldn’t stop thinking of him in a grey suit on Liverpool Street, smoking Marlboro Lights, wearing his thick gold rings; the trashy Saint Christopher tattoo hidden beneath his shirt sleeves. 

I am brilliant at making up stories about potential suitors, I’m sure there must be a clinical term for this, maybe delusion. 

Ask me what I thought of his silver hair and shaved chest and I’ll tell you; I loved it all. 

There were parts of him which I did find perfect. I have videos of these on my phone, illuminated by the dim light of his laptop. 

It was a welcome distraction, we said. 

There are memes about online dating in Berlin. Perhaps this whole essay is a meme or perhaps I am? 

A dating caricature; big hair, big boobs, smudged red lipstick, 36, single; 70% Carrie Bradshaw, 15% Bridget Jones, 15% Virginia Woolf.

Though I was enjoying him immensely I still couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe something wasn’t right; the coke freaked me out, communication was inconsistent, the initial flattery and declarations of desire were tailing off. I found myself online reading about narcissistic behaviour, love bombing, red flags and psychopaths. I couldn’t tell if it was he or I who planted this seed. I was the one that called him crazy but he was the one who behaved erratically. It was hard to see the wood for the trees because he was from Northern Ireland and everything he said sounded nice, even when it was rude.

One Sunday we planned to cook dinner together at my place and make a roast as discussed in our first conversation. We played a card game while we cooked called “We’re Not Really Strangers” which is designed to help people connect on a deeper level. 

When the chicken was ready I unceremoniously dropped it on the kitchen floor. 

After dusting the chicken off, dinner continued. We went to the bedroom and when Chris lay down my vintage bamboo bed collapsed. We had to remove the mattress and put it back together. I fell asleep laughing.

We had one more romantic encounter before we ended. He arrived at 2am, missing the friends that I had visiting from England. 

In the morning he asked me to watch him shower which I did, wondering what that was about. He did not want to watch when I took a bath but relented after some persuasion and faltered in the bathroom with the door wide open. 

In the days that followed I lost my voice, found myself irritated by all of the above and ended up copy and pasting our Whatsapp conversations into ChatGPT to try and shed some light on the matter. “Alice frequently initiates conversation and asks how Chris is doing” ChatGPT replied. “Chris occasionally initiates conversion and occasionally asks after Alice’s well being”. 

A robot knew better than I did and I’m a poet. 

I ended it before I gave it a chance to get any better or worse. Then swiftly changed my mind, upon which he ended it. Touché?

Chris came to meet me and said that he was worried we didn’t have anything in common apart from desire. He said he wasn’t sure he was ready for a relationship and wondered after all of it, if he was better off alone. We said goodbye with these thoughts still hanging in the sticky distance between us. 

These days everything I read about dating begs the question how do you leave it feeling empowered? But I think power is not the question, it’s more about keeping the high. I thought he got me high but actually I got myself high on the idea of him. Deciding whether to retain that feeling is a choice within my control. 

There's this joke going around that you are humbled by your Hinge proposals but I made the first move so I guess I am humbled by myself.

There's peace in that. 

Chris was not crazy, he was in fact perfectly normal.

But he did make me feel undone and gorgeous. 

I enjoyed it. 

I didn’t even feel like eating after my breakup, until I met him. Then I became incredibly hungry.

There were two bottles of wine involved; the first the night I ended it, the second the day Chris did. Both were finished by me but we drank each other's fill. A month can be long and short, February was both.

Occasionally I still check to see if he is texting me. 

He isn’t; this is reality after all.