Catfish Anthropology

going on dates with twitter tech males who think i'm a girl

I’ve been meeting people from Twitter in my first months in New York City. New York is a social city, and I have a big but mysterious platform on Twitter, so some of my followers are interested in saying hi and learning more about who I am. The vast majority of these meetups are not dates, but sometimes one person wants the meetup to be a date and that’s okay. X is a beautiful name for an online dating site, and it’s okay for dating to be asymmetric. Love is asymmetric until it isn’t. 

An experience that I’ve now had twice is someone from Twitter thinks I’m a girl and wants to go on a date with girl coldhealing. I’m not a girl, and I only occasionally pretend to be one on my Twitter, but people still get confused sometimes. 

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DATE 1

On my first week in New York I got a message from someone I didn’t follow who wanted to meet up. He repeatedly insisted “this is not a date”, but he protested a bit too much in a way that revealed further intentions.  Before we met up, he talked about how much he vibed with the coldhealing vision, speaking really affectionately about the world of my posts. He told me he wanted me to attend his New York dinner parties. He sent some selfies and some photos of his parties, full of beautiful male and female coastal elites, and nice spreads of food. We planned to get drinks after work, and he said he might take me to his work holiday party afterwards. 

I told him I was male when he was on the way there, because I was interested in meeting him but didn’t want it to be awkward in person. When we got there, he told me that he doesn’t drink unless he’s on a date, which was funny because he had invited me for drinks and said it wasn’t a date. We had non-alcoholic cocktails at a fancy hotel bar in Manhattan and he paid for them. Honestly, he was really nice. He asked me lots of questions about the Midwest, about my career, about my plans for New York. He had a lot of takes on my tech-adjacent female Twitter mutuals. I did not end up going along to his holiday party, and I haven’t received any invites to his dinner parties. 

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DATE 2

The fault for this one going so badly is on me because I didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening. I’d been in New York for a month now, and I received a direct message asking if coldhealing does West Village coffee dates. I love walking around the West Village so I said yes. I skimmed over the word date in his message without really internalizing the implications. I was honestly more struck by the implications that I was a celebrity, because he used “coldhealing” instead of “you”. He seemed really excited to hang out, telling me about a novel he was writing. I love talking about writing with people I meet from Twitter because I feel like we always can learn a lot from each other. 

I had a few other things planned that day so we had an early morning meetup. He’s a busy tech worker, so he sent me a screenshot of his calendar booked for “Theoretically Wholesome Coffee Date With Coldhealing” which also should have once again clued me in that he thought this was a flirtatious date with a girl. But I was trying to coordinate many other things I had planned for the day, so I just looked at the calendar time window he had set and saw okay cool I have time to get to my next plans for the day.

I go to the West Village coffee shop on a Saturday at noon. There’s a guy who I think is the person I’m trying to meet sitting towards the front of the shop checking his phone, but he doesn’t give me any signs of recognition when I walk up to him. I don’t say hi because I’m not 100% sure it’s him. I think it’s weird because he had read my message that said I was almost there and what I was wearing, but hadn’t yet responded and wasn’t giving me any signal that it was him. I go up to order a coffee to see what happens, and the guy walks out. A few minutes later I get a twitter DM that he had a “work emergency” and we’d have to reschedule. I hit him with an “okay” in reply which he never responds to, despite his previously high enthusiasm for hanging out. 

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I don’t want this writing to be about specific individuals, which is why I’m not writing anything that identifies my two dates. There’s no ethical wrong committed by either person. But these meetups happened to me too, not just them, and they made me as an individual feel discardable to people who purported to want to be friends. Not catastrophically discardable, but enough to where I think I’m allowed to write a Substack about it and be a tiny bit mean. 

The tension that bothers me here is that both dates purported to want to be friends with me, not making interest in a romantic relationship an explicit prerequisite of our meetup, but then discarded me as a person they had interest in once they realized that a romantic relationship was not something that could happen. I think that’s a basic kindness that’s lacking often even in more normal dating. I don’t know why people can’t be friends with their former Hinge matches, invite them to birthday parties, keep them in the loop on things. We live in a world where lots of people are alone and I think showing some basic kindness to people that go out of their way to meet up with you one-on-one is something a lot more people should do. Friendship is important, maybe even more important than love.

The other side of this is misunderstood attachment. This doesn’t bother me as much, because I’ve done it too, but it’s important to watch. Both of my dates knew the coldhealing account enough to want to spend time with it in person, with potential for a friendship escalating even to a romantic relatonship if the meeting went well. That kind of attachment towards girls on the computer is well-chronicled. But I’m literally not a girl, and so the attachment they formed wasn’t even directionally correct. They were grasping their perception of an online image that wasn’t close to real, and not even what I was trying to present as real. This is a particularly obvious misunderstanding, but I think that many people form images in their head of people they know from online that are untrue in significantly more subtle ways. These fantasies are harder to dispel, but I think it’s important to be aware that they’re fantasies.

These were two smart people who will do great things in their lives, and they have busy schedules. But as they look for love they’re still jumping at images online, at the idea of dating a highbie well-connected Twitter girl who makes silly but gentle jokes about product managers. They’re jumping in small and responsible ways, quick dates for coffee and drinks, but still, they’re jumping at images. I think all three of us are going to make it, but let’s try to be kind, perceptive, and forgiving as we work towards it.