Chapter Text
Nick sits on his settee and scrolls through TikTok. He caved at last and installed the dreaded app after a student at his school was put in detention for something that was apparently connected to some sort of TikTok challenge. You have to keep up, these days, to understand the youth, as painful as it might be.
His girlfriend Heather, lounging on the other side of the settee, suddenly squeaks.
“No way! Monica got herself a boyfriend!” she exclaims.
Nick stops scrolling and looks up from his phone. “Oh wow, how did she manage to pull that off?” he asks, amused.
Monica is their unhappy, chronically single friend, who has always entertained them Friday nights at the pub with endless tales of disastrous dates. As much as he’s delighted for her, he’ll definitely miss the stories.
“There is this new app,” Heather tells him.
Nick raises an eyebrow. “An app?”
“Yes, Nicholas, these little programs on your phone, to do things with. You surely know what an app is?”
“I know what an app is!” He waves his phone in front of her face, with the screen facing her. “You can’t mock me any more, I am a TikTok user now! I am up-to-date.” His left hand is making little quotation marks in the air, and he puts on an earnest face.
She laughs. “So, there is this app called MeetCute.”
“MeatCute? Sounds like Grindr for low-carb fetishists.”
“Meet as in meeting someone, Nicholas! It’s a dating app that promises, and I quote, ‘to find your true match based on psychological analysis’.”
“So you have to go to therapy before they find you a match?”
“No, you dipstick!” She throws a pillow at him. “You have to answer a bunch of questions, and then the app analyses your answers and finds your true love via some secret algorithm.”
“Getting together through a TikTok challenge,” Nick states with an ironic nod.
“Good grief, you are obsessed with this TikTok thing. I will uninstall it from your phone if you keep this up!” Heather groans. She’s quiet for a few seconds and then continues with a shifted tone. “It’s actually really smart, don’t you think? You answer 30 questions, and they match you up on your basic values and preferences, so you don’t have to worry about dating an absolute twatwaffle who doesn’t like dogs.”
“There are people who don’t like dogs? Do they let psychopaths sign up, too?”
“Nicholas! Can you, for once, focus, please?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t aware that this is a serious topic here. I’m all ears!”
That earns him another pillow on the head. “You are insufferable, just forget it!” she laughs, and they both get back to their smartphones.
Nick had just found a rather delicious account about rugby training videos (seriously, how is this sport still considered straight?) when Heather puts down her phone again and looks at him.
“Do you reckon we’d match?”
“What?” Nick raises his eyebrows again. “You do realise that we are already together? Or do I have to slip you a piece of paper – yes, no, maybe later?”
“Of course I do. But do we actually match? Like, would we find each other with this algorithm?”
Nick puts his phone down. That took a turn he didn’t expect, and suddenly he’s getting all anxious. “Do you have the feeling that we don’t? Are you unhappy?”
She looks at him thoughtfully and sighs. “I am not unhappy, no. But sometimes I have the feeling that we don’t have a lot in common. And that everything is so … domestic. I’m missing the fun that we had in the beginning. Let’s do something fun again!”
“You know, I’m all up for fun!” Nick agrees. “What do you wanna do?”
“Let’s sign up on the app.”
If Nick had had tea, he would have choked on it now. “Excuse me, what? Do you want to … open our relationship?”
She rolls her eyes. “No, of course not! I just wanna see if we match! Make a game out of it!”
He shakes his head. “Babe, I love you, but I don’t think that’s a sound idea. Actually, I think this is your stupidest idea yet. This is a recipe for disaster and drama.”
“Oh, come on, Nicky boy, this would be fun! That’s some trust you have in us! We sign up, answer all these questions, and just see whether we match or not. And when we match, we can make a role play out of it.”
She gets up from her side of the sofa, crawls towards him, and kisses him. She looks him straight in the eye, and with a deep voice continues, “Flirt a bit. Get on a date. Have a hot night.”
Nick smirks and puts his phone on the table. “Well, when you phrase it like that …” He cups her face and presses his lips on hers.
Later that day, he sits alone at their dinner table to answer the questions for signing up in MeetCute. They’d decided it would be best if they did it truly individually – no peeping, no influencing.
30 questions, about his morals, his preferences, his life goals.
Are you interested in seeing people of the opposite sex? Clear yes.
Are you interested in seeing people of the same sex? Well, he doesn’t want to date anyone else besides Heather, but this is clearly about his sexuality, and he is clearly bisexual. So yes.
Do you want children? Yes.
Do you like animals? There’s no "well, duh!" option, so yes.
He continues to go through the questions, answering as honestly as he can, and then goes ahead to create his profile description.
Self-advertising has never been his strongest suit, and he thinks hard about what to add here. He goes back and forth, writing and deleting it again – including a whole paragraph about being in a happy relationship. He scolds himself for mentioning it on a dating app, then scolds himself for hiding it, because he isn’t going to look for someone else, and finally scolds himself for overthinking. Eventually, he acknowledges that he isn’t actually looking for someone else, and just jots down some nonsense about the dogs and his mum.
God, this is so hard. How do people do this for real?
Okay, now a photo. He opens his “Heather, Nick, and Heather & Nick” folder on the phone and scrolls through, starting at the beginning of their relationship. He smiles, looking at the huge amount of photos they have taken with, and of, each other over time, remembering all the nice things they’ve done together. He can’t help noticing, though, that the longer they'd been together, the fewer pictures they took. They seemingly spent less and less time as a couple, until eventually all the photos showed Heather or Nick off with their own friends, absorbed in their separate hobbies.
Was Heather onto something? Nick thought they did fine so far as a couple. Yes, the butterflies from the beginning were gone, and they aren’t as inseparable as they once were, but isn’t that normal?
He starts to wonder whether they’ve drifted more apart than they want to admit.
He quickly decides on a photo from his latest pride. He remembers vividly how much fun he had with Tara and Darcy – and how disappointed he was when Heather cancelled at the last minute. Ignoring the pit in his stomach, and decidedly not thinking about how shit things might actually be with Heather, he takes a deep breath and hits post.
