The saddest category I’d noticed was the Left-Behind Guys. They would not have been aware that they gave off any particularly melancholic personal brand, but they did. They were normally in their late thirties or early forties, with big grinning faces betrayed by their half-dead eyes. Photos showed them giving a best man’s speech or reverently beholding a friend’s baby during a christening. Their fatigue and longing were palpable. They came up, on average, every ten clicks, and each one broke my heart afresh each time.

The most simultaneously reassuring and unsettling discovery I made in those first few intense weeks of compulsive right-and left-clicking on Linx, was just how unimaginative humans are. None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality – it would be too painful to process. I-like-the-outdoors-also-like-the-indoors-I-love-pizza-I’m-looking-for-someone-who-can-make-me-laugh-I-just-want-someone-to-come-home-to-and-feel-wriggling-next-to-me-in-the-middle-of-the-night unoriginality. There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we’d like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

Here’s what I knew about Max before I met him: Max had hair that was a shade between sand and caramel and was cropped but just long enough to show its loose, messy curls. He was 6 foot 4, a full foot taller than me. His skin was surprisingly tawny for someone with fair colouring – he was tanned from being outside, which his photos made a point of declaring he did a lot. His eyes were moss green and gently sloping in a way that suggested he was benevolent and might have an elderly, incapacitated neighbour who he sometimes bought groceries for. He was thirty-seven. He lived in Clapton. He grew up in Somerset. He liked to surf. He looked good in a chunky roll-neck. He grew vegetables in an allotment near to his flat. We’d established the following shared interests, experiences and beliefs: the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was the soundtrack of our childhoods; we loved churches and hated religion; we liked to regularly swim outdoors; we agreed strawberry was the best and most underrated ice-cream flavour due to its obvious nature; Mexico, Iceland and Nepal were next on our respective travel wish lists.

I showed Lola Max’s profile and she eagerly said she’d ‘seen him on there’, which I didn’t love. I had thought of these men as offerings from Mother Destiny – hand-selected possible partners, chosen especially for me (‘It’s not cock couture,’ Lola said). While speaking with pictures of my potential soulmate, I had forgotten that hundreds and thousands of other women were assessing their prospective futures from their sofas and commutes too. Lola told me this was a classic reaction of a co-dependent monogamist who hadn’t properly dated before and that if I wanted to get anywhere in dating apps, I’d have to toughen up. ‘It’s cut-throat,’ she informed me. ‘You can’t personalize this process. You’ve got to be in it to win it. You need to be fighting fit and stay focused. It’s why it’s a young man’s game.’ She told me that Max could be something of a Linx Celebrity, which she had encountered a handful of times – dastardly men who were prolific on apps thanks to their good looks and pre-packaged charm (she once discovered she and her colleague were dating the same one: all the messages from him had been copied and pasted). They wouldn’t commit to anything substantial, she explained, because they wouldn’t stop being single until they’d finally run out of options and they knew that women would never, ever stop right-clicking on their profile.

Max was ten minutes late. I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument. I tried reading my book, a detailed but digestible account of North Korea, but I was so nervous, my eyes kept flicking up from the page in search of Max and I couldn’t absorb any of the words.

‘Hello!’ I finally texted him after fifteen minutes had passed. ‘I’m at the bar. What are you drinking?’

‘Got us a table outside so I can smoke,’ he replied. ‘Pint of pale ale would be great, thank you.’ This slightly annoyed me, not only because he had not checked whether I smoked before planting us outside on what was quite a cold evening, but because he hadn’t sent me a text to let me know he was sitting outside. Was he waiting for me to do a full external recce of the site to happen upon him before our date could begin? How long had he been waiting there? I was reminded that the behaviour around dating had its own set of rules and standards, which all the participants had to seem overly relaxed about at all times. It was completely different to having a drink with a friend. How strange it would have been for Lola to have done this if we’d agreed to meet at a pub she suggested that I’d never been to before.

I ordered a gin and tonic and a pale ale and took one last glance at my face in the mirrored panel that lined the back of the bar behind the bottles. I had put on some token mascara and little else, and my fringe was on its best behaviour. I walked out to the beer garden, which was empty other than for Max, who was sitting on a bench reading a book. I wondered if he was reading it, or just pretending to read it like I was. He wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans and brown leather boots. The first thing I noticed were his very, very long legs, one of which stretched out to the side of the picnic table.

I walked towards him and he looked up and smiled at me in recognition. He glowed like an ember – his eyes shining, his beard golden brown, his skin burnished from sunbeams. His tousled hair looked like it had been washed in the sea and dishevelled by the windy afternoon. There was dirt on his boots. There was dirt on his jeans. He was as solid as a Sequoia, high as a Redwood and as broad as the prairie. He was earthly and godly; elemental and ethereal. Both not of this earth and a poster boy for it.

‘Hey,’ he said and stood up to tower over me. His voice was low and soft; the distant rumble of thunder.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked. He kissed me on both cheeks and held up the cover for me to see.

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s a story told from the perspective of a man on his deathbed looking back on his life and reflecting on what he’s learnt. It’s all about the passage of time, which I used to find moving and I now find terrifying.’

‘The passage-of-time stuff is the worst,’ I said, sitting down and placing the drinks on the table, hoping he hadn’t noticed the nervous warble in my voice. ‘My favourite genre of literature used to be old-person-inches-towards-death-and-thinks-about-the-past-with-epiphany. I can hardly bear it now.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

He looked older than thirty-seven in the flesh. His pictures hadn’t captured the strands of grey in his hair that laced through strands of white blond, streaked by the sun. The camera also hadn’t caught the creases, crinkles and lines of his skin, in which I could see cigarette smoke, late nights, sunshine, hard soap and hot water. This softened his sturdiness and made me like his face even more – I wanted to know all the pleasure and pain that had left his features rumpled. I also resented how much the visibility of his ageing seduced me – had it been worn by a woman, I might have found it haggard rather than weathered. Only a species as accommodating and nurturing as women could fetishize the frame of a sedentary middle-aged man and call it a ‘dad bod’ or rebrand a white-haired, grumpy pensioner as a ‘silver fox’.

He rolled a cigarette and asked if I wanted one. I told him the truth, which was that I was desperate for one, but I hadn’t had a cigarette in three years since I gave up. As I spoke and he rolled, he glanced up at me from time to time in a gaze that made his irises seem all the more verdant. In the milliseconds in which he licked the edge of the tobacco paper he looked me in the eyes.