Around 2022, I was 46, single, living in Los Angeles, and making a conscious effort to meet women in real life instead of on apps. This decision had been arrived at painfully.
The problem with dating apps, particularly if you’re a creative person, is that you end up filling in blanks with what you would like to be there. Give me five pictures, a short bio, and three weeks of texting, and I’d create an entire human being who did not exist. Then I’d meet the actual person and be like, Oh. Right. You.
So I was trying to use my in-person people radar more. At a party you can watch somebody interact with other people. Are they polite? Are they funny? It’s useful information you just can’t get when you’re meeting someone in a vacuum. But every once in a while, an app notification would appear and something interesting would be on the line.
In this instance, the app was Feeld, which had started out as a place for couples looking for threesomes and had basically become the app for people who wanted to fuck but also wanted you to know they’d thought about it. The match was with Carla.
Carla was 35 or 36, Southern, blonde, blue-eyed, and extremely beautiful in a clean-cut Brandy Melville sorta way.
Her profile on Feeld didn’t give away too much about what she was looking for. The one word that stood out was “sapiosexual,” which was a very popular word around this time and always struck me as strange. I think people use it as shorthand for “I might fuck you if you’re not a moron.” Smart.
We started messaging and eventually exchanged numbers. One night she suggested we get to know each other by sending voice notes rather than talking on the phone. It makes for a pretty stilted exchange where you can get your little flirtatious nugget sounding just right before you ship it off.
But I have to say that I enjoyed listening to Carla. Her voice was cute, sexy, with the slightest touch of put-on babyishness and a moderate amount of vocal fry. Normally that might have annoyed me. For some reason, it did not.
The weird thing was that Carla made everything sound sexual without ever saying anything sexual. I mentioned a restaurant called All Time, and she’d send back this breathy voice note like, “Oh my God, I love All Time. Sometimes I go there in the afternoon when they’re just about to close for lunch and have a glass of wine. All. By. My. Self.” I gotta admit, it was engaging.
Before I get to our date, I have to tell you about a tree. The rest of the story hinges on the tree.
So I was still furnishing my post-COVID single-guy house and one day went to Sunset Nursery looking for something five or six feet tall for an empty corner of my living room. This was three or four days before I would meet up with Carla.
I told an employee what I wanted, and the guy absolutely lit up.
“My friend! My friend! I have the tree for you!”
He led me into the greenhouse and proudly presented what appeared to be an extremely average dracaena. You’ve seen this tree a million times.
“Beautiful tree. Wonderful tree. You know who came in earlier this weekend about this tree? Angelina Jolie.”
I gave him a very nonplussed, Yeah, sure she did.
He immediately pulled out his phone.
There, in his camera roll, was a picture of him standing next to Angelina Jolie in a white sundress and black sunglasses, clearly buying this exact kind of tree.
I started laughing. It was a great pitch because it totally worked. I brought it home, put it in my living room, and named it Angelina Jo-Tree.
Cut back to Carla.
She wanted our first meeting to be during the day, so we met for coffee near my house. She actually stopped by my place first, immediately noticed my new tree, and said, “Oh, that’s amazing.”
“I have a funny story about that,” I said.
But somehow I never told her.
At coffee, things were fine. She was obviously beautiful, but I didn’t feel much chemistry. Then, in the middle of the date, she said, “Do you want to do something with me right now?”
Fucking finally. It was a return to the sexy vibe she’d been sending me slices of all week.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I need to show a house in Topanga Canyon. Do you want to come?”
She gave me a little smirk, and I immediately thought, Oh, I’m going to fuck her at a showing. I guess I’d been primed by the realty porn sub-genre.
So we drove to this beautiful $2.5 million house, and Carla started setting up her business cards and realtor stuff with this Annette Bening in American Beauty energy: I WILL SELL THIS HOUSE TODAY.
I asked, “By the way, who am I in this setup?”
She told me I should pretend to be a prospective buyer.
Perfect. I’m not above a little role-play.I wandered around inspecting fixtures and sitting by the pool while actual prospective buyers came through, fully assuming that once these people left, Carla and I were going to soil this house.
Forty-five minutes later, the last people left. She started packing. I’m waiting for the movie to begin.
She said, “Do you want to go back to the café?”
And that’s when I realized I had not been brought to Topanga Canyon for sex. I had been brought on an errand. She had incorporated me into her workday. Honestly, it was impressive. I tried to be annoyed by it, but I found myself admiring the cool efficiency of it all.
We returned to the café, and by then I’d kind of had it. Not because we hadn’t fucked in somebody else’s $2.5 million house. There just wasn’t any there, there.
I went inside to grab a sparkling water. Carla followed me. I opened the cooler.
And standing inches away from me, also reaching for a bottle of water, was unfuckingbelievably Angelina Jolie. She was wearing the same white sundress. The same black sunglasses. Her kids with her. So was a security guy in Lululemon who you could tell was actually a ninja. And I thought: I have to tell her about the tree.
So I quietly said, “Excuse me, can I tell you something really quickly?”
She said sure.
I explained Sunset Nursery, the salesman, the photo, the dracaena.
She said, “Yeah, yeah, I bought that tree.”
I said, “Well, he sold me the same tree, and I put it in my living room and named it Angelina Jo-Tree.”
She laughed in a way that read as completely genuine. And yes. I realize she’s an Oscar-winning actress.
Then she folded her arms, cocked her hip toward me, and said, “What’s your name?”
“Ben,” I said.
“Well, Ben, you and me are plant twins, aren’t we?”
Now, from my perspective, this was an extremely funny conclusion to a stupid story about a houseplant.
From across the café, however, it apparently looked like the woman long considered to be the world’s most beautiful was hitting on me.
Our interaction over, I turned around. Carla was staring at us with her eyes wide and her jaw slightly open.
“Oh my God.”
I started to explain.
“Are you fucking serious?” she said.
I wondered how this funny celebrity interaction was playing out in her mind. Would she rush me back to the open house in Topanga Canyon to get to the bottom of why I siddled up to Angelia Jolie and got a laugh out of her? I was actually looking forward to explaining the whole ridiculous tree thing. I didn’t get a chance
“Well, if you feel like you can make it work with her, then I guess I don’t need to be here anymore.”
I genuinely thought she was joking and sorta laughed in her face. But then the rage in her eyes finally registered, and I started to backpedal.
“No, no, no,” I said. “You don’t understand. The tree—”
“It’s fine.”
Which of course meant it was absolutely not fine.
She told me she’d had a long afternoon and was going home. That was the last time I ever saw her. I think she later sent one of those very Los Angeles rejection texts where you don’t just get rejected. You receive a small benediction about your journey.
Something like, “I don’t think our visions align, but I hope abundance smiles on you.”
Whatever. The fact remains that Angelina Jolie and I are plant twins.
