Our Connection Was in the Cloud

It felt like fate, but could a personal ad answered by a distant stranger really solve my love life?

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

Somewhere around 2017 the lesbian internet became infinitely more interesting when a popular Instagram account devoted to sharing lesbian historical archives created an offshoot reviving the format of sexy personal ads from back-in-the-day gay periodicals. Each post was about 50 words, submitted by followers, describing the seeker and the sought in clever and (sometimes) delightfully slutty terms. I followed the personals account closely for months before I submitted my own. 

One summer morning a few weeks later, I opened the account to see a familiar headline, “I’D DATE MYSELF.” My words came to life in Courier New font on a pink background. “Meet me in the idea realm, keep me embodied,” it began. “Me: 30, driven, writer, long-legged, desert-grown, leopard print lovechild of Dolly Parton & Ginger Spice. ISO gorgeous, jubilant, affectionate, sturdy but flexible babes who love talking & allow silence.” My bold declarations of self and desire were broadcast all over the W4W+ world, with a link to my Instagram profile in the caption. I waited and watched in a near-fevered state as likes, comments, follows, and DMs filtered in.

I wouldn’t have normally been so game, but six months into my third decade, I was open to where it could lead. This shift started in January of that year when a few close friends came to visit for my 30th birthday. One was a friend from childhood who had never traveled from the Bay Area to Seattle to see me. I loved to travel; she hated it. When we were kids she was the friend who never slept over at other people’s houses, who snuck away to her own bed after you fell asleep on her living room floor. As we grew up, I hopped between relationships, jobs, and living arrangements, while she met a great guy and got married, had a job that matched her degree, and lived in the same apartment for years. Where she was a solid line, I was a squiggle.

She flew in for my birthday because I said I needed her there, to celebrate me after the series of heartbreaks that had been my twenties, and because the other part of our trio said she’d kill her if she didn’t. That weekend, I was amazed to witness her hold her own and meld with new friends in my world. I felt beloved knowing she left her comfort zone to make me happy and comfortable, and offered days of uninterrupted time with me. I didn’t know it when it happened, but her presence on that trip changed us. 

After that, we began talking on the phone and video chatting constantly. I sent her videos talking about my day while I brushed my teeth, and made her guess what I was cooking for dinner by the sound it made while I chopped. I started calling her my LDR, for “Long-Distance Roommate.” 

We became so close despite being apart that I began to believe distance didn’t matter in relationships. I half-hoped that a successful personal would point me in the direction of my next life adventure. By now, I felt like I had exhausted the dating pool in Seattle, and life there, generally. I wanted to move away, but I didn’t know where to go and I didn’t have a purpose to steer me.

The personal ad was only the latest of my attempts at exploring queer relationships and solving my love life. If online dating was a skill, I had it. I’m not the kind of person who gets approached in bars, and I usually failed to get the attention of a crush by directing strong mental currents and hot shorts their way. But on the internet, I was magnetic. OkCupid was where I reigned, winning dates by writing witty responses to stock questions and posting great selfies. In the decade prior, I had pursued many kinds of love: living with monogamous partners, being in open relationships, and dating people of every gender, many of whom I corralled from dating sites. Now I was opening the aperture in another way, reaching outside my area code. 

This is why I didn’t ask questions when the most intriguing messages my ad garnered were from someone in Minneapolis. In her first messages, she recounted that multiple friends had forwarded my ad to her, stating they had found her soulmate. This, combined with her plans to visit a friend in Seattle the next month, made it all seem plausible and gave me a fated feeling.

We skipped from coy DMs to scattered emails, then graduated to a flurry of text messages. She flattered me with assertions that I could date any cute lesbian anywhere based on the success of my personal ad, and she alternated between a charming bravado and self-effacing compliments that hooked me in equal measure. By the time we had our first FaceTime call, I had memorized her face from old Instagram photos. Yet, I still swooned when we looked into each other’s eyes for the first time. 

Awaiting her visit, I spent the following weeks in a dream state, establishing feelings by phone. By the second week, I was sleep deprived from late-night talks, which enhanced the surreal feeling I had. My screen would light up with words like, “I can’t wait to fall in love with you,” and my stomach would do backflips. We fell into a hopeful loop that we might be everything each other wanted. 

But some days, we’d be mid-text conversation when she’d announce she was off to bed, or seemingly lose my call when we were chatting late at night. I couldn’t tell what this meant because I didn’t know her outside of our current context. Were these weird red flags that she was avoidant and rude? Or was it just the normal life interruptions that are bound to disrupt digital communication from time to time? Texts the following day like, “I thought about you a ton today!” always assured me it was the latter. 

Per the spell my personal ad cast, she met me in the idea realm. She was astoundingly smart and analytical. I didn’t feel equipped to engage with her rigorous and challenging thinking, all of which intrigued me and stretched my mind. She said she was intimidated by me, but I couldn’t comprehend why. I felt ignorant compared to the breadth of her grasp on politics, literature, and art. I also felt like an open book emotionally, and I thought it should be clear that I was all hers. I got to know her through this sharp intellectual exterior, and through her occasional softenings—statements of need, of past hurts, of losses and a desire to be loved.  

I met her at the airport early in the morning with a thermos full of cold brew. It was maybe the only thing I was certain she liked, which I learned from Instagram or an Instagram-worthy photo she texted me. I didn’t know whether we should kiss or not. As the face I had seen through the screen became a body with texture and scent, I grasped for a translation of us from digital to 3D that I couldn’t quite fathom. We hugged awkwardly. She said the coffee was too cold and expressed surprise that I had parked to come in and meet her. This embarrassed me and made my romantic gestures feel foolish and flat. I wanted to be reassuring but had no idea what reassured her, so I was passive—waiting, observing—until she demanded I take the lead. I expected her cues to tell me how to fill the space, and maybe she expected the same of me. We negotiated maddeningly.

“You live here, I don’t know where to go,” she must have said a dozen times in the days we spent together. Feeling like I’d already failed, this pressure froze me into inaction. When I shook myself out of it and made a move, choosing a restaurant or activity, she’d inevitably counter with what was undesirable about the choice. After deciding to steer us toward a hike one afternoon and being met with opposition, I pulled the car over to calm down and think. As I tried to stave off continued arguments, she stated plainly that things weren’t going well. I refused to surrender.

I was enamored with how singular she felt to me—and the bubble of intimacy we had made together in the preceding weeks felt so true—I was determined to inhabit it IRL. Our connection was in the cloud, I just had to figure out how to download it. It felt promising that the conceit of her trip had been to visit someone else, yet she spent most of her time with me. Between our many impasses, we spent comfortable mornings reading together on the porch, sweet nights of spooning, and luxuriated in deep conversations. As her trip drew to a close, we evaluated our time together and agreed that we were interested enough to gather more information about us. It felt like a breakthrough. We planned another trip.

After she left, I wondered why I had struggled to think of things for us to do. I’d been eating and drinking in this city for years, why couldn’t I pick a place to do either? When did I become so anxious that I couldn’t handle a couple of days dating someone cute? I chalked up our difficulties to the strangeness of the circumstance. I thought next time would be easier. I wouldn’t be so nervous now that we’d met, and maybe I could relax in her city, where I wasn’t supposed to be the expert. 

But I also recalled many first dates with strangers that had felt comfortable and harmonious, whether or not we ended up clicking. I suppose I’d expected these niceties, the way you both work to fill the spaces and prevent it from feeling awkward. It tickled my brain that we didn’t have that kind of ease, yet there was something so sticky and intoxicating between us. I believed our cross-country conversations in the dark, stretching into early mornings, were weighty and solidified a bridge between us that was the relationship. Our curiosity, our attraction, our hours spent in digital thrall had to be representative of something transferrable to our embodied selves.

Now that we had met, we no longer used our texts to describe our fantasy-filled anticipation. Instead we sent constant “I miss you”s and caught up on our days. Outgoing calls and texts she left on read were later followed by scattered phone calls and texts at inopportune times begging me to answer. 

She hung up on me during an argument about travel plans the night before I was supposed to leave for Minneapolis. I considered canceling my trip. She called and apologized. I couldn’t calibrate my thinking in the emotional whiplash. I resolved to see it through and took the flight. Despite a foreboding start, my worries were quelled when I landed. She was sorry for being a jerk, and it felt good to be together again. We spent the next three days rapt in the extreme beauty of Lake Superior. Blissed out on adventure, on nature, on the majesty of the lake, it held us in its peace as long as we stayed near it.

When we returned to Minneapolis, conflict returned. At an arcade we played a giant version of Jenga. When the piece was pulled that sent the tower crumbling, she walked away and left me to reassemble the bulky structure alone while a group of men sipping beers looked on.

“You can’t be that insecure,” she had said to me once, and it played in my head each time I had this sense that she didn’t like me, that she was being cruel, a reminder that I ought not need her validation and attention to be OK.

I took one more flight. It was a claustrophobic trip in a city neither of us knew well, and we were misaligned, again, on all decisions. After uneasy days trying to avoid having the wrong opinion about lunch, she had a serious anxiety attack that I didn't recognize. She needed me to already know what she needed, but I didn’t, so I tried to help in the wrong ways. She lashed out at me and asked me to leave. I wept on her stoop while I looked online for the next flight home. By the time I accepted this was over, she’d calmed down and wanted me to come back inside. 

I stayed the rest of the trip, but I had gone out the one-way gate. The questions about us that had pulled me along all summer evaporated. There was too much in the histories of ourselves that we could not seem to lay bare, yet we felt too tied together to understand that we had not laid the groundwork necessary to have a relationship beyond pillow talk and flirtation. I finally accepted what she had tried to tell me on that first visit: This was not going well.

When I eventually allowed the answer to be that we were not a match, it was laughably true. In the most basic ways, we did not get along. I vastly miscalculated the intricacies of navigating time and space with someone else, regardless of desire and mental connection. In my attempts to have queer love that is uniquely mine, devoid of heteronormative standards, I have sometimes attempted to defy relationship norms and stages that I needed.

Relationships are not made of a shared dream but of millions of infinitesimal moments together. When I got home to Seattle—resolute in having said goodbye, and a little bit worse for the wear—my long-distance roomie comforted me in phone calls and encouraging text messages that felt as good as a hug. 

Friendships like this had shown me how enduring and magical love can be, and made me believe in my ability to have successful romantic partnerships too. But I had formed these friendships so long ago that their foundations had become invisible to me. I had forgotten the early and uncertain days and the many years of bearing witness to each other’s formations that made our love easy and unbreakable now. This web of memories is what holds us together through the phone alone, despite our differences and occasional missed calls.

While I would never be immune to a crush, I vowed to never try to make love in a corner of the internet again. Instead, I would use my avatar to turn interest into a date and nothing more. I knew I could not live up to the ideal my digital footprint planted in someone else’s mind any more than they could, and that all the intimacy a phone can hold couldn’t replace the necessity of learning to agree on a place to eat and navigating the dailiness of life as a pair. 

The next time I fell in love, it would hit me slowly, accumulating in unexpected moments. I would have found my own way to a new city I chose for myself. I’d meet someone from Tinder whose texts were brief and who rescheduled our first date. I would keep agreeing to dates with her because it was fun to be together. What she meant by the tone of her texts and why she sometimes had to change plans would unfold along with the other parts of who she was—and who we were together.

In a few months, I’d look back and realize that she never made me cry, she made sure my bookshelf got built, she’d been there for me when I was sick, and brought me flowers when I got a new job. We would have never texted “I can’t wait to fall in love with you,” but we would have done it, building a foundation that was hardwired and tangible, and sturdy enough to go the distance.

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Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.