There is a small but significant difference between talking to someone on Instagram and talking to them on WhatsApp.
Instagram is still public-adjacent. It is the foyer. You are wearing shoes. There are other people milling around. At any moment either of you can wander off to look at a Reel about an unusually large cat.
WhatsApp is different.
WhatsApp is giving someone a key.
Not to the house, obviously. I’m not completely unhinged.
Just to your actual phone.
Suddenly they are there between your children, your closest friends, the group chat and the person you’ve been meaning to reply to since February.
They have crossed the digital border.
And, somehow, he crossed it.
I don’t remember there being a grand ceremony. No fanfare. No declaration that we were now Moving This Relationship To The Next Level.
We were simply talking too much.
Instagram could no longer contain us.
And then came the words:
Read more.
If you have never received a WhatsApp message so long that the application itself politely folds it away and asks whether you really want to continue, I can only assume you have never flirted with a man who has multiple degrees and opinions about almost everything.
The emotional support Scotsman had a lot of opinions.
Fortunately, so did I.
This was not a courtship conducted through “morning beautiful x” and photographs of dinner.
We talked about philosophy and feminism. Law and sexuality. Identity. Politics. Doctor Who. Films. Relationships. Books. Cats.
Sometimes all before breakfast.
There was very little small talk because neither of us appeared to understand what small talk was for.
I have always said that I flirt by downloading every fact I have ever learned directly into another person’s brain.
Apparently I had finally found someone whose response was not:
Please stop.
It was:
Interesting. Here are seventeen paragraphs in return.
My people.
Or, more specifically, my person.
At one point we discussed why he liked older women.
His answer was that they had more depth.
Which, obviously, was an excellent answer because I was an older woman and therefore perfectly willing to accept this extremely scientific conclusion.
There were less intellectual discussions too.
He once dyed his moustache because, somewhere in his mind, there existed the possibility that this might make him look like Tom Selleck.
Reader, it did not make him look like Tom Selleck.
It did, however, tell me something important.
He was ridiculous.
I like ridiculous.
Not performatively ridiculous. Not the exhausting sort of man who needs to be the funniest person at every table.
Just quietly, unexpectedly silly.
A man could be discussing jurisprudence one minute and conducting experimental moustache-based masculinity the next.
This, frankly, is catnip to me.
The messages got longer.
Then came the voice notes.
The first few times his name appeared on my screen attached to several minutes of audio, I would put my headphones in and wander around the house listening.
Sometimes I would answer immediately.
Sometimes I would have to sit with something he had said.
Sometimes I would realise halfway through my own reply that I had been talking for four minutes and had somehow moved from the original subject to Simone de Beauvoir, capitalism and whether a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich.
This is what flirting looks like when two people are slightly over-equipped in the brain department.
There was disagreement too.
That mattered.
I didn’t want someone who simply echoed me back to myself. I already have mirrors.
We could disagree about films, ideas, interpretations. We could go away, think about something and come back to it.
There was a pleasure in being challenged by him.
Not diminished.
Not patronised.
Challenged.
There is a difference.
I was beginning to learn the architecture of his mind.
He was beginning to learn mine.
I could sometimes predict where his argument was going before he got there.
I suspect he could do the same with me.
And perhaps that is one of the strangest forms of intimacy.
Not knowing everything about another person.
Knowing how they think.
Somewhere in those conversations Simone de Beauvoir appeared, because of course she did.
I had always loved her idea that the best kind of love is not two incomplete people desperately trying to become one whole thing.
It is two complete people.
Two freedoms.
Two people going out into the world, discovering things separately and then returning to one another bearing gifts.
Look what I found.
Look what I thought.
Look what I learned.
That made sense to me.
I didn’t want someone to complete me.
I was already complete.
Complicated, occasionally held together by caffeine and misplaced optimism, but complete.
I wanted someone who would go away and notice something peculiar on a train and immediately think:
Mandy needs to know about this.
And increasingly, that was what was happening.
A film would become a conversation.
A conversation would become an essay.
An essay would become an in-joke.
An in-joke would turn up three days later in an entirely unrelated discussion and make me laugh in the middle of Tesco.
There was a rhythm forming.
Without either of us announcing it, he had begun to occupy parts of my day.
I would see something and think of him.
A philosophical quote.
A terrible take on the internet.
A ridiculous product.
A man with an ill-advised moustache.
I would reach for my phone.
That is how these things happen, I think.
Not with violins.
With accumulation.
One more message.
One more joke.
One more you have to see this.
One more Read more.
And beneath all the intellectual showing off and ridiculousness, something else was happening.
I felt safe.
That word would become important later.
But even then, before hotel rooms and train tickets and photographs and everything that came afterwards, there was a softness underneath it all.
I didn’t feel as though I had to make myself smaller.
I didn’t have to pretend I was less intense, less interested, less opinionated.
He did not seem frightened by the amount of me.
If anything, he appeared to be wandering around opening cupboards.
What else have you got in here?
This was extremely inconvenient.
I had spent years constructing an excellent emotional fortress.
There were walls.
There was a drawbridge.
There were probably crocodiles.
I had become very good at being on my own.
And now some Scottish lunatic with a questionable moustache was standing outside lighting up my synapses and asking what I thought about existentialism.
Rude, frankly.
The drawbridge did not crash dramatically to the ground.
That would make a better story.
It lowered by inches.
A joke.
A voice note.
A conversation at an hour when sensible people were asleep.
A message long enough to require its own user interface.
Read more.
So I did.
Again.
And again.
And again.
