I knew she was doing this for money . <| sep |> Not trapped so much as stuck there unable to move . <| sep |> Is it just me , or is there a certain kind of person who says diversity and means just black people ? <| sep |> Affinedating . com ? I asked , incredulous . Just , try it , okay ? Jane , my sister , asked me . It ' s a nice thought , I said , not really meaning it . butJane visibly gave up . Okay , that ' s cool , don ' t worry about it . Mom and Dad and Beb made me promise to say something so now I can say I did , right ? All three of our parents ? Even Beb ? Of all our parents , I ' d have expected Beb to have understood . Hadn ' t ae been in a similar situation aerself ? I knew ae hadn ' t married my parents until their midtwenties , and my parents had been highschool sweethearts . Sorry , Jane said , and she meant it . Parents , what are you going to do ? Later that night , I checked it out . And it seemed okay , at first . Modern website , but not in a stuffy corporate sort of way . In addition to its obvious purpose , it had polls , forums , games basically a social network for the affinelacking . And I ' d joined the site for maybe an hour , total , before I glanced up at the inbox and saw I had a hundred messages waiting for me . Well , ' 99 ', but if anything that was worse . Of course , I made the mistake of opening those messages . Ayy get , wut u up to ? ayyy get ayAnd that was the ones that didn ' t send pictures of their genitalia . Fully half of the messages in my inbox featured a penis or a labia a few times couples sent both . I even got a few explicit messages from other Affine , even though I ' d checked the straightbisexual box . I ' d forgotten about this , because I ' d been trying very hard to forget about it , and the world did not want to let me . Affine dating was rough when you ' re a teenager absolutely nobody wants anything to do with you . Men and women of that age are practically monosexual , because guess what ? You can ' t have a child if an affine ' s not involved . Stereotypes of Affine as homomonosex pretty much all stem from desperate aff teenagers full of hormones and othergendered classmates who desperately want to not get knocked up . Almost immediately after college , that all changes . I went from being a nobody to being talked up by couples constantly . If I was at the bar , sure , it wasn ' t a surprise , but the store ? The gas station ? Where the hell were all these couples five years ago ? And it only gets worse . Midthirties or so , people start getting desperate . The biological clock may or may not be a real thing , but the biological timer definitely is You ' ve only got so long until you can ' t have kids . I literally could not leave the house for longer than a few minutes without running into someone who wanted a kid . Not even to take a walk ! I ' d always thought the Green couple down the street were nice , but nowadays they were kinda creepy with they way they seemed to always be watching me . I closed the damn website . Didn ' t even bother to delete my account , just blocked the reminder emails and tried to forget the entire experience . My parents even beb ! would bug me again come the holidays , and boy wouldn ' t that be fun , but I could at least say I ' d tried . Hell , Jane could back me up on that one . I ' d known I wasn ' t actually going to follow through , though . I ' d known that relationships weren ' t for me for a long time . I ' d known ever since I ' d gotten into that accident in college , ever since the doctors said I ' d make a full recovery , but that there were certain longterm complications . And I hadn ' t really realized what that would mean , at the time , but thinking back my doctor had tried to prepare me as best ae could . Now , though , I knew . Every day a couple made up some excuse to run into me and chat , I knew . Every time someone with only one wedding ring made eyes at me , I knew . I leaned back in my chair , pet my cat , and sighed , knowing none of that was for me . What use was a sterile Affine ?