‘Sensitive means mama’s boy, doesn’t it? Like he’ll make you a playlist, but he’ll wait for you to do his laundry and he’ll leave all the dishes in the sink. And he’ll want you to talk about the playlist he made for, like, the next week at least. Here, let’s use this photo—you look hot.’

I moved the sushi around on my plate, leaning in to look. ‘I hate that picture.’

‘Look how tiny your waist is!’

‘Yeah, and look how my face is all squinty.’

‘It was sunny. You’ve got a good tan.’

‘Fine.’

‘Are we done? Let’s get a drink. I’ll tell you if we get any interest.’

Maybe I shouldn’t have had three slivers of fish for dinner and four glasses of wine, because we did swipe right later plenty of times, giggling in the corner of the bar where we had planned to shoot pool but ended up hunched over our phones instead.

The subsequent chatting ruled out most of them, but I ended up with two coffee dates and one of those morphed into drinks. It took a month, maybe two, before I could figure out within the first words of a chat whether or not a guy was just looking for someone who was DTF. Sometimes that was fine, but after one or two I stopped. It felt dangerous. A precipice above the past. I became good at using emojis, and I realised that a sense of humour is a fairly difficult thing to communicate via text.

It was—admittedly—a shallow reason that drew me to Ash’s profile at first. The photo showed him on stage but was taken from close up, so his green eyes and dark, close-cropped hair were evident. It sure as hell wasn’t his interests that caught my attention: he listed playing drums, downhill skateboarding and hanging out.

When I showed it to my friend over brunch she said, ‘Oh no. Hell no. Not the musician-slash-skateboarder, please.’

I ignored her and swiped right.

‘You’re going to regret that one, honey,’ she said, dumping another creamer into her coffee.

I still don’t know if she was right.

The first time we met was in a bar Ash suggested in Santa Monica, the kind of place that tried to look older than it was, with tables made of reclaimed railway sleepers and wooden whiskey barrels lining the walls. I walked in with my phone in one hand and my purse in the other, ready to bolt if he wasn’t there. I was fifteen minutes late. Walking into a bar by myself is right up there as one of my least favourite things to do.