Future Sex

I was very sad but my sadness bored everyone, including me

He’d been reading Joan Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect.” I laughed—it was her worst essay—but he was serious

My avoidance of any overt reference to sex meant that Internet dating was like standing in a room full of people recommending restaurants to one another without describing the food. No, it was worse than that. It was a room full of hungry people who instead discussed the weather. If a person offered me a watermelon, I would reject him for not having an umbrella. The right to avoid the subject of sex was structurally embedded in the most popular dating sites. They had been designed that way, because otherwise women would not have used them.