The most intimate first date imaginable
The Experiment: Could performing intimacy lead to real intimacy?
In the photo, I’m wearing black lace panties, cross-hatched on the sides, and a push-up bra whose padding the saleswoman told me was designed by NASA.
S is laying on the bed, fully clothed, in tight, plaid pants and a white dress shirt. The faintest suggestion of a smile appears on their lips, though their eyes are very much creased by something else…nervousness, perhaps, or the hardening that sometimes comes from being watched.
S is lean and dapper, a compendium of right angles, right down to the tortoise-shell glasses that rest against their perfect shard of a nose. They remind me of a leading man from the 1950s—they own more bowties than I own actual shirts—and they are kind in a way that feels almost antiquated, bygone.
The photo doesn’t capture any of this. I am merely unzipping their pants. I am a woman performing desire. The image doesn’t betray the panic coursing through me in that very moment. It doesn’t register at all actually. Only lust comes through. Only two people eager to connect. Only the feral longing of beginnings.
As I pull the teeth of the zipper down and down, a smile in reverse, I think I might cry.
The intimacy is too much. Lust has hopped the border into love, annexed it, and become its own country. I am not a citizen here. I am not even a tourist.
Somewhere, near my hip, the camera clicks.
***
You might remember Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” which simulated a 20-year-old experiment that explored whether love could be fast-tracked with a specific set of 36 increasingly vulnerable questions involving “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.”
(It was later short-handed to just The 36 Questions.)
Like the 8 million other people who read Len Catron’s piece, I was taken by the idea of short-circuiting closeness. Could we skip right past the awkward small talk please, the stilted conversations about weather and oat milk, and get to the good stuff?
Could we step off this escalator altogether?
Then, feverish in my aloneness, thumb poised to swipe past yet another “fun-loving” face, I thought, why stop there? What if, in addition to having vulnerable conversations, we added vulnerable acts and activities to the escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure?
Could staged intimacy lead to real intimacy, in a much shorter time span? Would that even be desirable?
The more I thought about it, the more radical it felt, and the more desperate I became to find out.
More than anything, though, I wanted to fall out of love with you.