The Truth About Love, Validation and Digital Romance

He was completely insane to think she would agree to it.

An AI bot, whatever it was, would pick random guys on lots of dating sites for her to date.

So that was his idea for a combined art and AI project.

He could forget about it.

His PlaynDate app, on the other hand, she thought as she calmed down.

She liked it.

But it wasn’t good as a project.

She had given his online dating app some thought since he had shown it, and she was starting to think it was a shame it wasn’t on the market so she could download it and try it out.

She was good at word puzzles and, despite her image, not completely lost when it came to general education.

It was just that she rarely got to show it.

Later that day, her pocket beeped but she ignored it because she was in a boss fight in GTA.

When she left the environments of the fictional cities and returned to the harsh reality hours later, she got a slight shock.

Somehow, she had missed a day.

Maybe because of all her thoughts the past few days.

To: All students

It is now 24 hours until you have to submit a project description for your degree project.

Anyone who does not submit on time risks not receiving full grades.

Good luck!

School management

FUCK!

And they had nothing.

The last thing he said was that she would come up with a project.

As if she had anything.

She hit the pillow a few times and swore.

In a frenzy she started scrolling through Dating Line.

Uninteresting pictures and notifications.

Probably as uninteresting as herself, she thought, but refused to fall into that loop when she suddenly saw a message from a friend she knew from her hometown.

They were quite close, and she knew most of Nikki even though they didn’t hang out often anymore.

She clicked on the message and froze.

Hi Nikki.

Hope everything is well.

I don’t want to make you sad, but I think it’s good that you know about it even though on Dating Line it looks like you’re totally over Fredric.

I walked past Pink bar yesterday and saw this through the window.

Thought you’d like to know.

Have a great day.

Clair!

And then the picture.

The picture of Fredric with a woman in a situation too intimate to be dismissed as a business meeting.

Her blood ran cold, and a thought echoed and disappeared.

So, she still cared that much about him.

After all the tears had flowed and she had screamed into the pillow, she was left with great emptiness.

That emptiness when you know it’s all over.

It had never been about work.

He wasn’t here anymore, but it was hardly a job that had pulled him away from her.

Or was it?

Maybe he had met her through work?

But what did it matter?

He was with someone else, and she could now put all thoughts of the two of them together aside.

If she could.

And in all this, she had to come up with an idea for the project.

What?

What?

What?

As the hours turned into night, her thoughts wandered between her, Fredric, the project and Joachim’s idiotic idea.

But the longer the evening dragged on, the less idiotic his project seemed.

What did she have to lose?

Fredric was gone and she was still going to date.

If Joachim had developed that online dating app she liked, he could surely create an interesting project on the same theme.

She got to be the guinea pig for his boyish, fluffy imagination, but so what?

That was her contribution to art.

He got to create the algorithm that paired her with unknown men – with her approval, of course.

But what was the difference between her choosing or her approving what someone else had chosen?

Or maybe something else was the right word?

She thought it could be more of an adventure than a traditional date.

And the word adventure stuck with her.

Because what was an adventure if not a start, a new phase, an experience and what could be better than building on something like that?

Because it was the construction of the new that Nikki saw more and more clearly before her.

She just had to find it.

At 0:30 she texted Joachim completely without regard to whether he was asleep or not.

He probably didn’t care if they were going to do this or not, but she couldn’t do that.

Nikki wrote 4 short sentences:

I will.

But I have one requirement.

We’ll talk tomorrow.

Meet me at 9 in the school pavilion.

Not every connection should begin with a swipe.