In the break room at work, my friend Wesley and I sit across from each other on our phones. I’m texting Max, a guy I met on Hinge and have been out on a few dates with. Wesley is texting Aubrey, someone he just matched with yesterday on Tinder. “How am I supposed to respond to this?” Wesley asks, handing me his phone. The last message received is just one word: “Absolutely.”
Wesley and I actually met on Hinge before we started working together. We talked for a week , sent each other selfie-videos on Snapchat to prove we were real people, made plans to go out on a date to a local brewery for pizza. He was attentive, and messaged often – sometimes to see how my day was going, questions about myself, photos of plants and pets.
We hit it off right away. He had recently left his PhD program and returned home, and I was home on winter break. We discovered we had gone to rival high schools and had many similar hometown memories – and we both loved books, politics, traveling, and had similar aspirations of leaving our hometown for good and living a big, beautiful life somewhere else. We had our second date on New Year’s Eve, and by the end of it, I was certain that our relationship would be something special.
I have Mexican and Indigenous ancestry, and often pass for Latina when people glance at my face or my photos. I’ve read countless comments on how “exotic” my skin looks, or even invasive ones like “Why do you have a White girl’s name if you’re Mexican?” and “So where do you come from, Amiga?” Not to mention the hidden racists who glance at the color of my skin and instantly make a judgment about the type of person I am before rejecting my profile altogether.
It took a few years to actually notice a difference in the way that I carried myself and the things I shared with my dates. Before, I would let people walk all over me, afraid that they would give up on me the moment I pushed back. But one date I went on during my junior year, there was a boy who was a little too handsy. I pushed him away and canceled the rest of the date. He apologized, but the damage had been done, and I didn’t reach out to him again.
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