Getting Ghosted After Making Plans: A Real Week Back on the Apps
He made the plans. Not me. He called me, asked me out, picked the day and the time himself. And then he went silent for four days and flaked the afternoon of the date with a text I still haven't heard back from.
Welcome to being back on the apps.
This is week nine of The Summer of George, and I'm out here dating again in a way I haven't in a while. Some of it is fun. Some of it is baffling. And this week gave me a little of both, so let me walk you through it.
Getting Back Into Dating in Midlife: What Two Years Off Taught Me
I've been out of the dating game for a couple of years. Not because anything went wrong. I got comfortable. I built a life I love, I got independent in a way that felt good, and dating just wasn't the thing I was reaching for. So when I got back on the apps this summer, I figured it would feel like riding a bike. It did not.
Dating When Your Past Is Public: What Happened When a Hinge Match Googled Me
When I started The Scarlet Edit, I wasn't thinking about my dating life. I was thinking about the show. It didn't cross my mind that putting my whole story out into the world would follow me onto the apps. But it does. I'm single, I'm on Hinge, and I'm Googleable. My Instagram bio says I was the other woman for five years. Anyone I match with can find that in about thirty seconds.
So what actually happens when a date knows your past before he knows you? This week I found out.
Listener Questions: What I'd Do Differently, How I Date Now, and What I'd Tell the Other Woman
I asked my Instagram followers what they wanted me to talk about that I hadn't covered yet, and the questions that came in were so good I built a whole episode around five of them. This is what happens when you ask a community of women who've been through it what they actually want to know — they don't ask softballs.
So I'm going to walk through the five I picked and what I said in the episode, because some of these answers I had genuinely never said out loud before.