Still feeling adrift, I kept entertaining the idea of dropping everything and moving to Australia. When it seems like a great plan to start over on the opposite side of the planet, you're in a strange mental space...

One day I browsed Australian profiles on the dating app, and came upon Линдсай. Her writing was exuberant and intelligent, and I marked her as "four stars" in the user interface and sent her a playful message. She saw the mark right away, and replied to the message only a few minutes later, which was surprising because of the time difference. It was 10:00pm where I was, making it 3:00pm in Melbourne. I assumed she was at work.

We dropped into the chat console and began firing a ton of questions back and forth about our urban environments and overlapping pieces of American and Australian pop culture. I told her I was having fun reading through poetry collections, and she told me "hold on a minute" and went quiet. Five minutes later she asked for my email address.

The email was a recording of herself reading poetry aloud, and I was shocked to find it was turning me on like a light switch. The timbre of her voice and her reading style reminded me strongly of Шеррила, and her accent was fascinating. I told her how much I loved it, and she offered to call me via Skype. When I started speaking, she replied that she found my voice weirdly erotic as well. We joked and horsed around late into the night. She held the microphone near her window so I could hear the sounds of the bats nesting in the trees outside. I told her about a strange dream I'd had a few days earlier.

Finally it was so late that I absolutely had to sleep, so we said goodbye and promised to call each other again soon.

A day later we chatted online at our respective jobs, and got very wound up with sexual tension. I drove home, and when I arrived I found an email from her:

"I just want you to know that I'm home now, and when I got here, I had to tear off all my clothes and get busy with my hands, with your voice echoing in my head. I want you to know that you did this. You made me do this."

I found that hilarious and flattering, of course, and soon we were talking online again.

A few days later, we hit a speed bump: I asked her for more pictures of herself, to fill out the ones I'd seen on the profile, which were all headshots. She responded that she wasn't ready to share them yet. I knew she was a young redhead with freckles and an adorable voice, but I didn't know what shape she was in, and if I was going to dream about her I wanted a body to attach to her head. I asked her several times over the course of a week of conversations, and each time she got very agitated and told me to cut it out. After the third time I apologized and told her I wouldn't bring it up any more.

We had a few more live conversations that were great fun, but I couldn't help feeling like she was hiding something from me, and my sense of trust in her took a left turn and got lost in the weeds, in spite of her voice. ... That, and, the inescapable fact that she was thousands of miles away across an ocean, and seriously pursuing her would mean following through with my fantasy of leaving the country.

A few days passed without correspondence, and she dropped off my radar. I was left with a sense of whiplash about the whole thing. How could I have felt such deep chemistry over a disembodied voice? And why the hard limit of sharing pictures from the neck down, after so much explicit talk?

The first thing I thought of was that she was out of shape and very sensitive about it, and felt that as soon as I saw her body I would disappear. If she believed that, then she believed it was better to perpetuate the fantasy of her in my head so she could enjoy my enthusiasm before it was killed by additional information. I had been too polite to demand a reason why, but even my politeness was a signal that I knew too much: Nothing she said, and nothing in her profile, gave any kind of alternate theory, and if she thought she was unattractive, odds were I would probably find her unattractive as well.

And what's the point of being in that situation? Either you trust someone not to reject you immediately if they see your whole body, just like they would if you met in the physical world, or you need to trust someone enough to tell them that you're worried about being rejected and want them to hang around a bit while you work up the courage and decide whether they're worth the pain of rejection. If you can't trust them with the sight of your body or the state of your mind, what are you getting out of it?