I Dated a Mirage and Realized My Life is a Mirage

How a few dates with a sort-of special someone triggered existential self-doubt.

Aeryk Payne

To go with the cliché seeing water in a desert metaphor, the mirage represents the meaning of life we’re all searching for—the prescriptive solution that impersonates reassurance and encouragement. Just as we think we’ve constructed a compelling plot that gives reason and purpose to everything that has ever happened to us, it disappears. We then become desolate and aimless wanderers, digging through the sand, hoping to find water in an otherwise futile exercise. When this mirage is a potential lover, it can devilishly invade everything you thought you knew about yourself, evaporating before you’ve had a chance to stop yourself from sublimation.

This mirage came in the form of a woman who, for the sake of confidentiality, I will call Reagan—a whip-smart lawyer lady who sold herself with pronounced confidence that careened from overachiever to Coachella attendee to unashamed feminist in a way that was both endlessly enrapturing and complimentary of how she looks disarmingly sexy in a black leather jacket. I pondered this as she’d casually toss out lines like “dating as a female lawyer is a landmine,” locking eyes with her and garbling when presented the opportunity to blurt out something more charming to respond with.

We met at a tequila bar for some happy hour margs, and a bubbly discussion about a random assortment of topics jolted into inescapable, irredeemable joy, shooting through me like lightning and vanishing just as quickly. The semi-darkness of the bar, the unexpected arrival of snappy and crackling flirtations gently dismantling all my assumptions about dating, and the novelty of her legs gravitating toward mine—they all caused me to see her in a different light.

A noteworthy first impression bloomed into consistent energetic text exchanges, and shortly, into a second date that would last eight hours, in spite of me Ubering to the wrong location and opening with a story of how I spent the previous night at a strip club wing-manning my friend to secure a date with a dancer named “Ronnie.” We’d sit at the bar and watch the much-hyped Brady vs. Bellichik Sunday Night Football matchup, which barely sustained my attention as the delineation between her and I diffused into vapor.

And at the end of the night, I, bleary-eyed and burnt up from bliss and a dozen pints, was no match from the start. She offered a half-smile and unexpectedly leaned in for a kiss. I gave a sloppy and unprepared peck, no doubt. Another bafflingly dweeby and undisciplined decision we’re all guilty of making when someone flashes just the right facial expression at just the right moment. And there we stood in the waning hours of a weekend, slowly soaking in a drizzly night, taken aback by its unrelenting reciprocation, and I was imagining fireworks as the chorus of Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” played on a loop in my limbic system. Fuck, I am screwed.

Eventually, we’d embark on an afternoon whirlwind sojourn of some trendy spots in Toronto. We crushed Korean BBQ, wandered through some exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum, shot pool, made a pizza at her apartment, and alternated between sensual make-outs and intimate cuddling as How I Met Your Mother played on her TV. I lived each day a week at a time. “Text me on Wednesday,” she instructed me as I left her apartment, “and we’ll figure something out for next weekend.”

I dutifully followed her command, inquiring about her week at the trials of lawyerly things embedded itself as the consistent throughline of her weekly stress. Expecting an enthusiastic response, instead, I was greeted with a somber message stating that “while I enjoyed our time, I do not want to take things further,” and “you’re a great guy, I just don’t see anything long term and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.” Her swift and stern delivery felt more a rejection of my whole self from a person I thought was on the verge of Really Getting Me. Our brief encounter was revoked, and the days that followed were raw and wet and cold, the autumn wind reinforcing the overwhelming bummer gravity of that particular moment. It was one of those times where you have to force yourself through the motions, sitting on the edge of your bed for just one more minute, psyching yourself up to put on the other sock, and set your intention for yet another goddamn weekday.

The problem with these breaking things off exchanges is that only one party has rehearsed, or even drafted a script; the other one sits there with their mouth agape, flailing in shock, texting something like: “Do you mind if I ask why?” I tried reconstructing the exchange, Monday Morning Quarterbacking it all, coming up with belated rebuttals in a way that was both tactful and grasping. My ability to delve into my emotions had gotten so flaccid and atrophied that it left me heartbreakingly unguarded—like mollusks with their shells ripped off, gelid and flinching at the unfamiliar air.

Maybe I was naïve the whole time, confusing a whirlwind erotic daze with something more real. It’d be easy to misremember this vignette as a gilded idyll before it all slid over the brink in the same way people either overlook or rationalize overt red flags because of their own misguided infatuation over someone. I am a 29-year-old single hetero dude, which makes me, by nature, a blustering idiot who shouldn’t be trusted to cat-sit. Although, I’ve dated enough to have some decently thought out schematic of what I’m looking for.

Reagan—at least based on early impressions—stood as a prototype of a litany of qualities I found attractive in a woman, disorienting like an acid trip. She’d do this cute thing where she jerks her head when she gets excited, her voice perks up, and her wavy hair whisps from side to side. I was hooked whenever she could dive into the intricacies of legal theory regardless of what question I asked her. Or how she’d be down for whatever plan no matter how whimsical or half-baked, and follow through with a kind of enthusiasm that could make sifting through paint swatches almost seem like it’s not a crime against attention spans.

Of course, anyone worth knowing will inevitably reveal themselves to be complicated, difficult, and even exasperating at times—relapsing into self-defeating tendencies, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant hypocrisies, and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them anxious. Everyone has their past, their baggage, and all the bullshit that comes with it. I’m not looking for perfect, just something that’s worth the effort.

On a superficial and visceral level, Reagan’s blunt severance triggered something within me, perhaps from the whiplash of emotions attached to finding a potential something unexpectedly, and it vanishes as soon as I let down my apathetic defenses. A more Freudian exploration would reveal something that I wouldn’t go as far as to say is an insecurity, but a bit of a recurring theme in my dating life that has become more acutely clear in recent years. What I thought was an endearing balancing act of making multiple women laugh and blush and flirt in pursuit of juggling several casual flings has been revealed to me as an emotionally walled-off, and a bit immature, stunt. “The time I spent with you was a lot of fun, and it got me to open up and be more assured of myself,” they’d tell me in some form after things between us resulted in an amicable-ish departure. “And now I’ve found a great guy. Maybe once you get all the fucking around out of your system, you can be that guy too. I see glimpses of it in you if you opened up more.”

My 20s were spent careening from one-night stands, to casual faux-relationships, to amorphously defined arrangements as I chased copywriting gigs that would propel me to having a respectable LinkedIn profile, resulting in me living in four cities in seven years. I never wholeheartedly committed to any one thing, tantalized by the false promise of bottomless choice, withholding a certain emergency reserve of affection in the interest of self-preservation. I wanted to sample everything, have as much fun as possible, learn as much about women as much as I wanted to learn about how I can best relate to them. Ironically enough, as someone I was growing fond of was fading into my peripheries, I found myself profoundly ill-equipped to formulate any connection of substance, my brain short-circuiting like those fembots in Austin Powers.

Now I was faced with a reflection of my own neurotic resistance to change. There was a growing suspicion in the recesses of my introspections that I was becoming a sort of Good Luck Chuck figure—the guy that could give women a sugar-rush thrill, maybe resuscitate their confidence after a dating lull, all of it precipitating a more serious phase in their life with a follow-up guy who was ready to offer them something more fulfilling than I was too maladroit at the time to give. As someone who’s at least self-aware enough of the limits of their career and living instability, I perceived my emotional detachment as a necessary trait of a cleared-eyed practitioner of responsibility. But one reason people cling so devoutly to their maladaptive patterns is that, once you’ve made an honest effort to diagnose them, the narrative you’ve constructed to rationalize them unravels and suddenly your whole life can look like a figment of self-deception.

This began a spasm of open-ended interrogative phrases of all the possible missed opportunities I could’ve capitalized on. When Reagan fretted over how men become more distinguished than women as they age, I had no worthwhile reply. My neurons had fizzled and sapped me clear of sentences like how her hipster style and elegant posture could leave any guy shivering under the heat of her glow. When she mentioned the men who broadcasted their insecurities in the face of a career-driven woman with a gaudy income to boot, my only response was a terse and passive “those guys are lame,” when I could’ve expounded upon the ways I found her independence attractive, as I want someone with their own separate life I could support and compliment. On two occasions, she joked about the line between creepy and charming and would elaborate on a story of how her grandfather showed up to her grandmother’s work 20 times until she agreed to go out with him. “You idiot,” I grumbled to myself, “she was dropping a hint that she’s into being wooed.”

The Saturday after the call-off, I walked a lap around the downtown Toronto core, venting debilitating rage inside my head in the same way people only do when they’re yelling at inanimate objects. I passed by the Royal Ontario Museum, where we spent the previous Saturday, albeit in a starkly different emotional context. My febrile infatuation broke and I realized suppression only sustains and intensifies passion instead of letting it deescalate into something more manageable. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting at my laptop over a beer, trying to think of a condensed version of all the things I wish I had said to her in person, staring into space with longer and longer pauses between typing, wondering what would make for an ideal Hail Mary to resurrect this fleeting connection.

After I amassed a 300-word note, the inherent absurdity of this low-stakes romantic gambit was fully apparent to me and embedded itself in the insecurity that comes with doing the unfamiliar. A female confidant vetted the message to assuage my ongoing pallid fear of posting cringe, that the sentimental didn’t veer into creepy or harassment. “If she likes you,” my friend assured, “she’ll think it’s sweet.” That following Monday night, after work hours, I fired it off with the wobbly confidence of a man with nothing to lose and waited anxiously:

Hey! I know you said you didn’t see anything with me long term, but I can’t seem to shake you from my thoughts. I’m still wondering if your decision on this is final and there’s no chance of it changing, or if you’re not 100% certain about me, but wanted to end things sooner rather than later.

I’m aware of where I stand after a few dates, and I’m under no impression that you owe me anything. However, I’d be disappointed with myself if I wasn’t sincere with you before waving the white flag. So here I am, with a metaphorical jukebox standing outside your metaphorical window, treading the contextual and near-indescribably thin line between charming and creepy. (I may or may not also be stealing a page from your grandfather’s playbook 😝).

Not to get all sappy, but in the brief time that I’ve gotten to know you, I see someone who’s intelligent, ambitious, independent, energetic, considerate, and spontaneous. I’m not asking for some ironclad exclusivity contract, or a steadfast affirmation that things between us will go the distance. I felt like something was there, and if you feel similarly at this fork in the road, I don’t need a definitive destination; I would consider myself a very lucky guy if you also wanted to take this one adventure at a time.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that to reap the full benefits of romance, you must submit yourself to chance. I’m ok with ambiguity. I don’t view any future date with you as a waste of my time, or denying myself the opportunity of finding some hypothetical soulmate out in the ether. If all this blows up in my face and I subsequently eat shit, well, at least I’ll have no regrets.

Regardless of what your answer (or non-answer) is, there are no hard feelings on my end. Even the consideration is appreciated.

To my surprise, she replied within a few hours, confirming she received my message, appreciated all the “lovely” things I had to say, respected that I put myself out there, that she’d take some time to think about where she’s at, and capped it all off with a smile emoji. My initial gut response was if she went through the effort of responding, that I must’ve aroused some emotion within her. I figured the note revealed a side of me she wasn’t anticipating, or she wouldn’t expect most guys to put in this kind of effort, or maybe she was reevaluating whether she had the right read on me, or deliberating over what she wanted out of a relationship. Several days would pass with no response, then a week, and then my initial optimism enflamed into hooting frenzies of anxiety and existential sighs. Maybe she took too long to mull things over and she assumed I lost interest. Maybe she’s testing me to see if I respect her space. Maybe her initial response was an easy let-down and she wanted to remove herself from this situation altogether.

A week and a half after my outreach, I crafted what I thought was a lighthearted follow-up: “So my roommate put on How I Met Your Mother the other day and I now realize how relatable Ted Mosby is. How’s everything with you?” Hours would slog by until I was pressed to interpret her non-response as a recusal and a not-so-subtle clue that I should commence the acquiescence phase of whatever this was. It was only fitting that all this tension would dissipate into an anti-climatic ghost. Despite how many times you may or may not faceplant in the process, the desire to connect is still fundamentally healthy, even if its execution is hamfisted or misdirected. Affection is no less heartfelt, even when the intended object is ambivalent toward it.

I can rummage through all the what-ifs in the world, but there’s the daunting possibility that there was nothing I could do to alter this trajectory that may have been the product of—depending on how seriously you take your Zodiac sign—astrological fate or a series of metaphysical accidents. I tried to register my impotent protest against a ceaseless cycle of ruminations and self-recriminations that I figured would lead to something both useless and profound. It became my main objective to try to micromanage Reagan’s perceptions of me and do tireless PR and spin control for myself, which is clearly psychotic. Despite my best attempts at panicky revisionism, the only information I’m cross-referencing this against is what she described as “just a feeling,” something so intimately subjective and tangential that it shouldn’t warrant this much analysis.

During a more recent evening, an old flame texted me to see if she could swing by my place to scoop up an umbrella she left in my room a few weeks prior. We sat in her car and talked for roughly an hour. She leaned back in the driver’s seat and confirmed to me, “You’re great and fun, but you need to be more serious,” and sounded so laid-back and matter-of-fact about it that I wondered if she was part of a collective vendetta of previous flings engaging in Project Sam Corey Ego Death. I found myself feeling a little deflated, even though all she did was vocalize my own interior suppositions back to me.

What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that her candid observation was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in this world and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light you hope they will. What she articulated was something I had no factual quarrel with but nonetheless made me wince to hear. There’s something existentially scary about being objectively observed. It’s proof that you are seen in all your naked stupidity. She also proselytized about how “you can’t say the wrong thing to the right person,” as if a trite dating truism can transcend the incredibly subjective and contextual nature of interpersonal dynamics. (It’s worth noting she said this moments after expounding on her recent date with a guy who she thought was charming and polite until he cracked an offhand and offputting anti-Semetic joke.)

The dissonance between official reality and my own fugitive perceptions was so complete, it all felt less like the usual glum defeat than it did like I was living in some unprecedented historical aberration, a brutal discontinuity with a version of myself I became accustomed to. When your immediate, concrete problems get tangled up with bigger abstract ones, What This All Means becomes irrelevant. The past doesn’t exist—it’s only a story, one we keep rewriting and reinterpreting with new perspectives. It’d be nice to believe we’re replacing old narratives with truer, more useful ones, spiraling asymptotically in on the Truth, even if we’ll never quite touch it.

Now that I’ve assured myself the basics of this scenario, I get to despair that there’s just no point to anything because I may never get the chance at another coffee date or a walk along the Harbourfront where I can vomit some haphazard and unbearably cheesy spiel to Reagan about how she deserves someone who affirms her greatness, and even if I can’t predict how long I may be that guy, I’d like to be that guy for as long as she gives me the chance. These are the horrors you’re spared if you’re abducted into a child army or die of measles before you can even crawl. I didn’t know anyone still liked each other this much; I assumed people dated just to split rent on a one-bedroom. Though, I suppose it’s a remarkable and precious rarity to encounter someone who motivates you to relinquish all your moronic nonsense and muster what could constitute a more aspirational version of yourself.

It sometimes feels like the older I get, the less life makes sense, and the more all attempts at explanation seem like a mirage, as comforting as an oasis within a lifeless expanse. In all honesty, I have no idea why any of this happened or if I gleaned the “right” lesson, as I maintain an ongoing flicker of doubt in the back of my mind, a ratio of ambivalence to conviction, cynicism to sentiment. I never concern myself with Triumph of the Human Spirit narratives because self-affirmation isn’t nearly as validating for me as the frank acknowledgment that we’re all wading through a grey morass between optimism and despair. But as long as my feet are above ground and are pointing toward a hopeful direction both unidentifiable and contingent, this would presuppose I’m at least 51% committed to making it through this journey called Life. It’s exciting to imagine you’re living at some crucial historic turning point instead of another unexceptional period in the annals of banality.

In that rambling text note, I promised Reagan that I’d never regret the time I would spend with her regardless of the outcome, and it’s an on-the-fly proclamation that has held up despite our abrupt conclusion and lack of resolution on my end. I still suspect I blundered across something beautiful in the wild. My brooding, bohemian charm has finally lost its post-adolescent sheen. I reconnected with a subdued, but addictive romantic intensity—its exhilaration and beauty, how it summons what’s finest in people. The task, now, is to refine it into a new kind of passion, one less idealistic and futile, something like a precision instrument instead of a bludgeon.

Sex and laughter and sighs and wheeze, all releasing into the ether of a nostalgic past. How we navigate through the haze where the magical gives way to the mundane gives shape to our future selves. Change, love, death, and the present are the only concrete truths. Everything else blurs them and makes us gradually go insane forever. The sooner we can detach ourselves from these mirages, from the weight of heartbreak, the suffering of incessant hand-wringing, the freer we will be. We’re more than the mirages we encounter, more than how they shape the stories we tell ourselves, but I can’t help but wonder if this was all a prolonged exercise in self-deception.

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