dating doppelgangers
When Avery sat down for drinks with her Tinder date she was shocked to see the familiar visage of her ex, Isaac. There he was, across the table – a white guy, glasses, coiffed hair, a nerdy-but-athletic type – it was Isaac 2.0. If she closed her eyes, Isaac-2 sounded exactly like Isaac-1.
When she opened her eyes, Isaac-2 says he’s looking for something semi-serious, a real relationship. Avery’s recently broken a two year long dry spell and has spent a couple weeks having fun dating and sleeping around, but it would be dishonest to say she’s not also looking for a semi-serious boo thang.
Avery and Isaac-1 had gone out for 8 months. n the thick of it, Avery had unwittingly gotten herself roped up in a non-consensually polyamorous relationship – which is to say, Isaac-1 was in love with his best friend (who he also lived with) and was possessed with the spirit of devotion for this best friendsband (best friend husband), religiously prioritizing him over Avery in every aspect of their relationship. If Avery wanted to go on a date with Isaac-1, he would check in with the friendsband first. Isaac-1 would take calls from friendsband mid-date with Avery. Isaac-1 called the friendsband “his first priority." Although Isaac-1 would never admit it, Avery was the unwitting tertiary partner. He already had an anchor holding it down at home.
Things with Isaac-1 ended abruptly when Friendsband decided that they really didn’t have the capacity for other people in their life, thereby voting Avery off of the island. I remember the break-up coming out of nowhere. One week we were all hanging out at Queer Prom†, the next week Isaac-1 has a surprise gift for Avery, and the week after that he’s revoking the gift and dumping her, like cold turkey in the compost.
The date with Isaac-2 seemed to have gone well, but Avery was perturbed. Was that actually good, did they really have chemistry, or was that just the familiarity of Isaac-1 lingering over their drinks? Had it gone bad, or was that the shadow of Isaac-1’s unceremonious dumping of Avery being cast upon Isaac-2? Avery sneakily sends our groupchat short, urgent missives “he looks exactly like Isaac”, like S.O.S. signals from the land of clone boyfriends. She leaves the date wires crossed, ambivalent, confused.
While she tries to mentally bisect the Isaacs from each other, Avery is preparing to go on a third date with Krystal.
Despite the amount of texts Avery and Krystal have sent each other, Avery isn’t sure if they’re on the path to fuck town or if all this dating is going to lead to the land of sappho-platonic friendship.
As any responsible adult would do, she goes to the council: she asks us over brunch what route to pursue. Should she go on another date with Krystal despite her uncertain feelings or just cut losses and end things now?
The groupchat, aka the council of bisexual women with marginally more experience dating other women, are here to help guide her in her relatively-new journey into the WLW world. Over brunch IRL, we give her well meaning but, honestly, bad advice.
“Lesbian attraction sometimes feels sneaky and confusing,” one of us says, “you think you’re just being friendly but you’ll be surprised with something fun and horny out of nowhere.”
“You’re already this deep, you should try to fuck and really find out if you like each other,” another says. We, the queer elders, advise Avery to push past the ambivalence and to summon her inner fuckboy: go on another date, to make out, eat out, and fuck – then decide if she really actually likes her later.
Because of our collective coercion, Avery and Krystal go on another date - this time to see an indie play (Krystal is a thespian and loves The Theater, Avery finds plays uncomfortable and cringe but is open to learning more about the interests of others). Seated, they receive the playbill and Avery learns that Isaac-1 was the lighting designer. Soon after that, both Krystal and Avery watch the show and find out that the play is quite bad – and the lighting surely didn’t help things along. It seems Isaac-1 is haunting this date with his bad vibes, too.
Afterwards, they do not have sex and they continue to text each other -- a lot.
Plagued by romantic and sexual frustration in her dating life, Avery wants a proper night out dancing, dancing, dancing the night away. And if there happens to be a spontaneous stranger makeout, that’d be just real sexy gravy.
There’s a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday party out on the west side, which happens to be near a club that apparently plays good music and has an interesting, mixed crowd of weirdos and normies, the kind of place where a semi-quirked-up bisexual (such as Avery) may strike it rich, sexually and/or romantically speaking.
So, it becomes clear, that Avery and her friends must venture into a scary and forbidden land — one full of creeps and ghosts and all sorts of indescribable atrocities (like tech workers in Patagonia at venture capital-owned mega bars) – but nonetheless, a land that may have the party that she seeks. A place that Avery once briefly called home but now is loathe to return. A place called Logan Square.
I happen to be out of town for this adventure, and grateful to miss out. Chicago has a lot of great things going for it, but the burden of traveling east to west is not one of them.
Avery, also, does not want to go out west, to a part of the city more than an hour away on the CTA, to take another gamble at having fun. But for the sake of this party, and for the sake of her dating life, she’s being brave.
One birthday party later, at the maybe-bisexual-friendly club, someone from Avery’s past pops up: A man we shall call the Clown, because I once saw a photobooth strip of Avery and this man in which he is fully done up like an uncanny 1920s clown.
Avery and the Clown dated for a couple months a couple years ago, back when Avery used to live in this neighborhood she now hates. A hot-cold kind of relationship wherein the Clown asked for a lot of intimacy and time, giving Avery affectionate nicknames like “booger” and “muffin”, make plans, and promptly disappear for days or weeks at a time. The Clown let loose his chaotic personality, a constellation of un-interrogated patterns – one of those people that seem to be a stranger even to themselves.
I heard a neighborhood rumor from someone who used to run in the same party circuits that the Clown had totally messed things up with his smart, kind, baddie then-girlfriend, and has, for the last couple of years post-fumble, been on one very long downward spiral. Drinking too much, living amongst stacks of empty pizza boxes and dust, luring other people into his life and messing them up with his needy attachment style and disappearing magic trick combo.
The last time that Avery had heard from the Clown, it was after a month of sudden no contact. Zero texts, zero calls – until he showed up at her apartment one morning unannounced at 7am, having spent the night wandering the streets after everything had closed and before everything opened. He rang her doorbell, hoping she would answer. He drunkenly apologized for his behavior, begged for them to go back to normal, which Avery refused. He then asked if he could crash on her couch for the night (morning?), which Avery also refused.
Back in the present, here in the bar in Logan Square, she sees him walk in with a girl. A righteous fury overtakes Avery, egged on by a couple of cosmos (and a couple of shots). She feels the need to go up and warn this girl, confront the Clown for his behavior, interrupt his messy, ghosty patterns. Our friends try to hold her back, convince her not to make a scene, but when the two most anti-confrontational friends call their car home, Avery’s chains are broken and she charges the Clown at the bar. The Clown hits Avery with a very nonchalant hey, it’s been a while! And Avery returns with a couple of verbal jabs such as No and What the fuck happened to you? And What’s wrong with you?
The Clown would like to meet up over coffee and catch up and Avery fumes We’ll catch up alright. As Avery puts her number into his phone, the last remaining friend, unafraid of confrontation but definitely not in favor of a friendly reunion between the two, yoinks the phone out of Avery’s hands, returns the device to the Clown and ushers Avery out the door back home.
However, Guardian Friendgel did not take the phone out of Avery’s hand soon enough as he did indeed get the full digits and set a date with Avery on a Thursday evening.
But, it seems, old patterns die hard. While she was en route to their location, The Clown reveals that he is not coming. He, for some reason, interpreted a series of questions and plan making, the confirmation of a location and time, as a disinterest on Avery’s part – he assumed that she had cancelled without saying she had cancelled. Okay, sure, Avery says. Goodbye forever.
*
Krystal is getting increasingly clingy, sending Avery longer and longer texts. She’s checking in about their next date and making sure that they’ll have time to see each other again soon before either of them leaves for an out of town trip. She’s sending unprompted, 3-minute voice notes And so on, and so on, for days in a row, with minimal and obligatory replies from Avery..
As Avery realizes that this thing with Krystal isn’t the strange new feeling of sapphic love, it’s actually the lack thereof – it’s a missing spark, its forced conversation – and its Krystal being really annoying.
Avery makes herself distant, tries to fade out their non-relationship. Krystal, however, notices the fading out and clings harder. The texts get longer, the voice notes more frequent, the tone a little desperate for making sure everything is okay. Avery realizes that Krystal is a doppelganger, too another test from the past, like her encounter with the clown, and perhaps like Isaac-1 and Isaac-2.
This time, though, Avery has encountered a dark mirror of herself: the clingy, anxious attach-er from a couple years ago, the girlfriend‡ with porous boundaries. Avery responds to a multiple paragraph text from Krystal, ignoring most of her questions and concerns, going straight for the jugular: she is kinda getting friend vibes and they should probably stop seeing each other romantically.
Ok! Thanks for letting me know! Krystal texts back, curt and chipper, ties immediately severed.
After a couple more dates, a couple sleepovers, a couple more bangs, and an offer to lend her his apartment keys, Avery decides to bring Isaac-2 to hot pot, a big mixy-mixy group hang that’s perfect for friends-in-law and pseudo boyfriends to join. It goes well, even though the rest of us are high on several milligrams of ingestible weed and being goofier than normal.
A week later, he reveals that he’s not looking for a serious relationship, that he's been seeing someone else from Milwaukee who he’s kind of in love with, and, although actively infected with a new strain of the novel coronavirus, he plans to go to a birthday party and a wedding over the weekend – but “if that’s all cool,” he would like to see Avery on Monday.
Ultimately, things with Isaac-2 end the same way it did with Isaac-1: a sudden and brutal reveal that someone else matters more. At least this time, Avery has the satisfaction of doing the dumping.
† I honestly don’t really resonate with the concept of prom-themed parties for adults, but I did have a big ridiculous dress from Selkie that needed another wear or two to make it worth the price tag, so I went. Also, I will do anything my friends ask me to do!
‡ Avery does not identify with being a girl, but allowed me to use this word, as well as she/her pronouns throughout, for the convenience of the sentence. Avery is beyond pronouns.