Chapter 7: Assaf from Kfar Saba / Error 404: Relationship not found

It was supposed to be easy. Easy! Kfar Saba. Which, in my terms, is more or less the backyard. No passports, no packing for an overnight stay, no Wiz. Assaf. On paper (or on the screen), it seemed like a "perfect match" for the algorithm. We're both people from the big world of the keyboard. I write content, edit video. Him? He has a sales website, does e-commerce. Colleagues, for God's sake! The preliminary conversation was like a particularly successful team meeting, only with strawberry and flower emojis instead of dry borax.

The HTML stage (a warm technological introduction)

It was after midnight. The golden hour of romantics and insomniacs. Instead of sending poems, we exchanged URLs. The new romance, ladies and gentlemen.

Assaf:

Yael:

Yael:

Kobe:

Yael:

I felt like we were speaking the same language. The language of code, the language of design, the language of "we understand each other." There was a click. Not just a mouse click, but a communication click. He sent strawberries (🍓), I sent stars (💫). He suggested going to bed, I laughed,

A morning of pictures, Instagram and everything in between

In the morning, the idyll continued.

The Encounter (or: the Optical Illusion)

We met. He seemed... okay. Like Assaf from Kfar Saba. We sat in the gallery. The coffee was hot, the atmosphere was pleasant. The conversation? The conversation was lively. We talked about business, the children, life. There were no awkward silences. There were no strange looks (like with Kobi and the Flannel). There was no one-on-one lecture (like with Roni from Italy). There was... a dialogue. I felt comfortable. I felt like I was sitting with a mature person, who understood the subject, that we had common ground. We laughed. We smiled.

When we were done, we paid (without drama), and went outside into the January cold. We stood by the cars. That moment. The moment when everything is decided. Usually I can read the map. I know when it's "no" and when it's "maybe." This time, I felt "yes." With the innocence of a rookie (even though I'm already a Tinderland janitor), I asked him, with a smile: "So... will we meet later?" He looked at me. His gaze changed. The "nice guy from the chat" disappeared, and in his place appeared a judge in a high court for dating matters.

boom.

And then came the sentence. The cliché. If I had a shekel for every time I heard a variation of that, I would buy his website hosting company.

I stood there, stunned. Wait, what? An hour ago we were talking about cars and whatnot, and laughing about Instagram. It was pleasant. It was intelligent. What had happened in the last 60 minutes that made him decide, so firmly, that "we're not going to make it"? Was I chewing on the cookie too loudly? Was my opinion on web design too radical? Or maybe, just maybe, he was looking for something I couldn't give, and I was looking for something he didn't know how to receive?

Assaf's lesson

I drove home (a short drive, thank God). On the way, I thought about the irony. We do this stuff. We know how to design a "user experience." We know how to keep the customer on the site, how to create a "call to action." But on this date? My user experience collapsed. He went to my home page, browsed through the content a bit, said "the design is nice," but in the end he clicked the red X in the corner.

The bottom line? You can be charming. You can be smart. You can be a professional who lives just a stone's throw away. But sometimes, the other party is just looking for a bug in the system, just so they have an excuse to format the drive and start over with someone else.

Assaf from Kfar Saba taught me an important lesson in interpretation: When a man says "it'll be interesting" in a chat, he means a conversation. When he says "it's me, not you" in reality - he means "it's totally you, but I don't have the strength to explain why, so take this cliché and let me go to sleep."

Status: The site is down. The server is not responding.

Next.

אסף מכפר סבא / שגיאה 404: זוגיות לא נמצאה