A Match Made Online

Nick stood and crossed to the kitchen. The floor was cold through his socks. He poured the last of the coffee from the pot, took one sip, and grimaced at its bitter, burnt taste. He could have gone to bed. He could have closed the laptop and returned to the safer version of wanting love - the version that involved imagining it without risking an answer.

Instead, he carried the mug back to the table.

The site displayed a row of questions beneath the profile box.

What are you passionate about?

Nick stared at it.

He typed, My work.

Deleted it.

My family.

Deleted that too.

Finding the right person.

His finger hovered. The phrase felt both honest and embarrassingly large. He could almost hear someone laughing at it, a woman scrolling past his picture and thinking, Who does this man think he is?

He replaced it with: Making dinner when I have time. Walking without a destination. Trying to get better at being honest.

He read the line twice.

“That’s not terrible,” he said.

The apartment offered no opinion.

A prompt asked what he wanted from dating. Nick clicked the menu. Casual dating. Friendship. Long-term relationship. Marriage. He moved between the choices while rain blurred the city lights beyond the glass.

Long-term relationship.

He selected it, then immediately felt exposed. The words sat there in a neat little box, more definite than anything he had said aloud in months.

His phone buzzed.

A message from a friend: Still hiding from the world?

Nick glanced toward the dark screen and let it go quiet.

He had not joined Match.com because he wanted to collect conversations. He wanted a woman to date, someone who would notice when he became quiet and ask instead of assuming. Someone who would understand that his silences were not indifference, only the place where he sorted through what he was afraid to say.

The problem was that none of that fit neatly beneath a photograph.

He returned to the pictures.

The first was taken at a restaurant months earlier. Nick had been laughing at something outside the frame, his face turned toward the person holding the camera. The expression was unguarded, almost boyish. But the photograph had been cropped badly. A stranger’s elbow cut across the lower corner, and the top of Nick’s head disappeared into a strip of empty wall.

He considered replacing it with the polished one - the photograph in which he wore a dark shirt and looked directly at the camera.

The polished one promised control.

The candid one admitted he could be caught off guard.

Nick clicked the candid photo into the first position.

His pulse gave a small, unreasonable jump.

The site suggested a headline.

He tried several.

Ready for something real.

No.

Coffee, conversation, and a good reason to stay out late.

Too rehearsed.

Still figuring it out.

He left the headline blank until the empty space began to bother him. Then he typed:

Hoping to meet someone I don’t have to pretend around.

Nick read it and felt the room change, though nothing had moved. There it was - the thing he wanted, stripped of cleverness. Not romance in the abstract. Not a perfect woman appearing at the precise moment he became worthy of her. Just the possibility of sitting across from someone and not performing.

A warning appeared near the bottom of the screen: Your profile is incomplete.

He laughed once, without much humor.

“Of course it is.”

He filled in the remaining fields. Favorite music. Cooking, though he had burned rice twice that month. Weekends spent outdoors, though lately he had spent them inside. He wrote that he liked old movies and hated crowded bars. He nearly added that he sometimes stayed awake imagining conversations he never had, then decided there were limits to honesty.

When he finished, the profile looked uneven. Some answers were careful. Others were plain. One contained a joke that only made sense to him.

The button at the bottom read Publish Profile.

Nick placed his hand on the mouse.

The apartment seemed suddenly too small for the decision. The screen’s blue light sharpened the edges of everything - the unopened mail, the damp towel over the chair, the photograph of his parents on the shelf. He thought of all the ways a woman could misunderstand him from a few lines. He thought of how easily he could misunderstand her.

Maybe the site was built for that: turning complicated people into bright rectangles and hoping desire could survive the translation.

His cursor moved toward the button, then stopped.

He opened the headline and changed it again.

Hoping to meet someone kind, curious, and brave enough to be honest.

He frowned. It sounded like a request aimed at a stranger, but also a promise he had not yet earned.

Nick deleted “brave.”

Hoping to meet someone kind, curious, and honest.

He published the profile.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the page refreshed, and his photograph appeared at the top beside the words Available to Match.

Available.

The word made his stomach tighten.

He picked up his mug, forgot it was empty, and raised it anyway. The gesture felt ridiculous enough to steady him. He had expected some grand sensation - a rush, perhaps, or relief. Instead, there was only the quiet awareness that someone, somewhere, might now be looking at him.

He checked the profile once.

Then again.

A notification appeared.

Your profile is live.

Nick’s first instinct was to hide it. His second was to search the site for women who had already viewed him. He clicked into the search page and immediately backed out. The names, photographs, and small declarations crowded together, each one offering a life in miniature.

He was not ready to choose.

Not yet.

The rain strengthened, tapping hard against the window. Nick closed the search page and returned to his profile, wanting to see what a stranger would see.

That was when he noticed the photograph.

The crop was worse than he remembered.

The top of his head was cut off entirely. The stranger’s elbow looked like a pale, accidental limb growing from his side. His smile remained, but only because the rest of his face had been pushed toward the edge of the frame.

Nick stared at it.

He could replace the picture. The site offered an edit button beneath the image. One click, and he could upload the dark-shirt photograph instead. He could look composed, deliberate, like a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

His hand moved toward the button.

Then he stopped.

The flawed photograph showed him laughing. It showed the moment before he remembered to be careful.

Nick looked at the profile again, at the uneven answers and the awkward headline, at the image that made him seem less finished than hopeful.

A message icon appeared in the corner.

No new messages.

He felt foolish for noticing.

Still, he left the photograph where it was.

Someone might see the bad crop first. Someone might decide it was not enough. Someone else might wonder what had made him laugh.

Nick closed the laptop halfway, then opened it again. He was not ready to sleep. Not with the profile live, not with the possibility of a woman reading his words in the dark, deciding whether they made her curious.

He rested his fingers on the edge of the screen.

For the first time in a long while, wanting something had placed a choice in front of him instead of a memory.

He could revise the picture in the morning.

For tonight, he let the imperfect version remain.

End of chapter one. 39 more chapters and about 90,509 words in the full book.