By Katharine Smyth, Photo: Millennium Images, The Atlantic, January 12, 2022
Thirty-seven minutes after sitting down to lunch, Francesca and I hugged goodbye in a strip-mall parking lot. We were both fairly certain, I think, that we would not be seeing each other again. The high-school classmate of a friend’s friend’s husband, she’d been such a promising friendship prospect: She was a professional violinist and fellow New Yorker who was writing her dissertation on pollen. But I was awkward, smiling too much and saying things like “That’s so funny” in lieu of actual laughter, while Francesca (not her real name) was overworked and seemed full of derision for Bozeman, Montana, the town to which I had just moved, and from which she and her husband were determined to flee.
As I drove home, the distant mountains laid out like a postcard I might have mailed back to Brooklyn, I was beset by an acute and familiar emptiness: an echo, I suddenly realized, of my many years of online dating, and of the disappointment that arises when the person on whom you had pinned your hopes for the future turns out to be a total mismatch. Indeed, I’d thought that I was finally done with dating, having moved across the country for Ben, a literature professor at Montana State University. But I saw now that I would have to start that dispiriting process over again, this time in search not of love but of friendship—and at the age of 40, no less, a decidedly late time in life to be seeking new soulmates.
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