My name's Jim and I'm a 40 year old widower and I'm lonely. There I've admitted it. My wife died 5 years ago and left me and my daughter Amy heartbroken. I miss her terribly. If I'm honest I've never really recovered, I've not dated since and I don't know how to bring myself even start. Part of me feels like it would be cheating but another part of me misses the romance.
My daughter Amy is 18 now and reminds me more and more of her mother every day. She's so full of life and energy and spirit. Without my responsibility of raising her I think I might not have coped at all. I've thrown myself into being a dad and into my work to keep my mind busy but it's been creeping upon me recently and I've realized just how lonely I've become.
It came to a head when I was away on a business trip in the next town over and sitting alone in my hotel room. I was scrolling on my phone and saw an advert for a dating app called Kindling. Something broke in my sitting in that banal, sterile hotel room and I found myself installing the app. It asked me to create an account and add some photos of myself but after taking selfie, after selfie, and none of them seemed right. The nerves, the guilt, I could feel myself backing out before I had even begun when it hit me. I should create a fake account, a test, a trial run. Get used to it, test the waters before creating my own real account.
I searched for photos and stumbled upon a male porn star's social media account. He was young and good looking and living life to the fullest judging by the amount of photos he was posting of the parties he attended. I picked a few of the not so raunchy ones and set up a Kindling account with them. Once I was in I started swiping left and right like I was an old hand. I got a few matches fairly quickly but neither of them responded to my "hello" message. This was gonna be harder than I thought. After another hour of swiping and then having to pay for a premium account once I ran out of likes, I hadn't even gotten a single conversation. I was feeling down but pretty glad I hadn't created a real account now as I'd have taken it personally! I called it a night and put the phone away.
The next morning I woke up and decided that I should get rid of that app. It obviously wasn't for me. Something compelled me to open one last time though and there it was, a new like. I clicked on the icon and stopped in my tracks. There in front of me was a picture of Amy, my daughter. Her bright blonde shoulder length hair, her beaming smile, her button nose. My Amy.
I looked through her photos in a daze. One was her in a skimpy swimsuit that I didn't know she owned and in another she was topless with her arms covering her breasts. Her profile talked of "short term fun" and "live laugh love". I obviously knew that she was a women now and had had boyfriends but I found it hard to think of her as being a sexual being.
For some reason I felt I couldn't reject or dislike my daughter so without really thinking about what it would mean, I liked her back. Almost immediately a notification popped up.
- "Hello there handsome"
The irony. Desperate for contact and the first girl to respond to me is my own daughter.
"Hello right back at ya, gorgeous. How're you doing?"
- "I'm pretty good. My day is getting a whole lot brighter all of a sudden."
"Oh, is that so?"
- "Yeah! I mean it's not every day you match with a celebrity, right? I mean it is you? I'm a big fan of your, err, work!"
Damn, maybe I should have paid more attention to the photos I used.
"Haha, it's always nice to meet a fan."
- "Is that an offer? :) It's always been a dream of mine to meet a real life porn star."
