“Do you like rollercoasters?”

He asked me. I answered, “I like some rollercoasters and some I’m afraid of”

Lately I’ve been on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Is this one of the rollercoaster rides that I like or am afraid of? I can’t tell. The highs of the ride are amazing, and the lows are so dark and scary, I sometimes wonder if I can handle it any longer.

Over winter break, I a friend of mine suggested that I should try meeting people since I’ve been single and ready to mingle for so long. I thought, Why not? And so I downloaded a matching app, thinking that maybe chatting with some people on there would help me keep my mind off the problem. It wasn’t my first time on a matching app, I’ve tried it before back in the US and I never really had luck with it. The most I’ve ever gotten out of it was your typical “hey, whats up” and a conversation that either dies after a few exchanges, or I simply have 0 interest in the person so the conversation eventually fades out. For the most part, it just felt like a lot of the guys were just looking to get in my pants. I hated it.

Now, the pool of matches in Japan was quite different. Well, I also approached it a little differently too. I usually swipe right on anyone who seemed interesting enough. But this time around, I barely swiped right on anyone and only did so when I actually wanted to start a conversation them. I got a decent amount of matches. Had a few nice exchanges with many of them actually. But alas, conversations can flow but I was still not interested in any of these people. Only 1 brave soul managed to ask me to do a voice call, in which I did, we talked for a good 2+ hours and never talked to each other again.

So that’s how things work around here huh.

Oh well, not that I was expecting to get anything out of this. Plus, having the opportunity to talk to many different people was actually quite interesting. So I continued to talk to those that were interesting enough, and swiped left and right throughout winter break. As winter break was coming to an end, I realized that I probably should stop all this non-sense. But before deleting the app, I felt a little sad for dropping my conversation with this one boy, so I asked him if I could add him on Line. He gave me his ID, I added him on there. We continued our conversation there.

Funny thing is I remember clearly that I almost swiped left on him because judging from his profile, usually ‘guys like him’ and I would have nothing in common. He seems to like nature, sports, and in general the outgoing type. Meanwhile, I’m just straight up an indoor nerd who can’t play sports. But, he had a cute dog on his profile, and I mean he was pretty cute too so, I thought “EH”, why not? It happened to be Christmas day too so, I had an easy opener for a conversation. And so we exchanged messages since then. What was different and interesting about him was that I noticed he’d constantly ask me questions to keep the conversation going. Although sometimes some of these questions seemed kind of out of the blue, it still kept our conversation going and we’d end up talking about other stuff out of it.

As we exchanged more and more messages, to my surprised, we found so many things that we had in common. Whether it be why we both prefer mornings over night time, to our values, then our favorite foods, and how we both own the same series of DJ Controller + headphones. What is up with that? It really started from almost 0 interest in someone to his messages become the 2nd highlight of my day(Sorry! #1 highlight will always be seeing my students hehehe). Our messages have gotten to the point where they’d be 10’s of long messages. We both laughed about how ridiculous our conversation became.

Now, every time I get a message from him, I smile, laugh, cheer up and feel motivated. At the same time, it sometimes takes him more than a day to respond to me. I actually don’t mind it at all but within that 24 hours my mind can’t help but wonder if the long messages are overwhelming, or maybe I said something wrong, or maybe this time around he’d finally ghost me (lol). Despite him clearly showing interest in me, I still have these stupid thoughts running through my mind.

Another thing that I find myself agonizing about is the fact that we’re clearly both interested in each other right now. But… we haven’t met. What would happen when we do meet? What if it doesn’t go well? What if it does go well? What would happen? Am I ready to jump into another relationship? Things are kinda nice the way it is right now, but it isn’t going to last forever.

And the ride continues.