For two months the app had been a thing that happened to me. Women replied or didn't, showed up or didn't, said yes or slowly or nothing. My job was to read the signals and be grateful. Rei was the first woman I turned down, and I was surprisingly bad at it.

She was twenty-four, an office worker, two months on the app, and her profile had the tag I'd learned to look for – 積極的, proactive – plus a line I liked: I hate the heat. It was August. So did I. Her stats were middling in the way that's actually fine: fifty men a month writing to her, a reply rate under half, two reports, which for a pretty woman in her first month is background noise. Nothing on paper said no. Nothing on paper ever does.

The coffee was on a hot afternoon in a café that was too loud for it, and I want to be fair to her, because the thing that went wrong is not a thing she did. She was sweet. She was, if anything, too pleased to be there. Within ten minutes she'd moved her chair round to my side of the table, and within twenty she'd taken my arm, and she spoke so quietly, and so close, and so continuously, that I spent most of the hour nodding at sentences I hadn't caught, and smiling, and feeling something I hadn't felt yet on the app, which was the wish to be somewhere else.

Clingy is the word I wrote on her file afterwards, and it's unkind, and it's accurate. I'd spent two months learning to want warmth in the room. Rei was warmth in the room with the volume turned up to a point where it stopped being warmth and became a kind of pressure – the sense that the evening had already been decided, by her, and I was being carried along it. Hina held my hand like it was hers. Rei held my arm like I might leave. It's the same gesture. It isn't the same thing.

The thing nobody tells you about saying no on this app is that you don't know how. The women have a whole vocabulary for it – ゆっくり, silence, the grey frame – and I'd spent the summer learning to read it. I had nothing. I wrote three messages and deleted them. In the end I sent the one I'd want to receive: thank you, I enjoyed meeting you, I don't think we're the right fit, I wish you well. No excuse, no "work's busy," because she'd have known, and because I'd hated it when Miyu and Sumire hadn't bothered to send even that.

What it taught me That being the one who says no is its own skill, and I'd been on the app for two months without needing it, which tells you how the market runs. That I'd been reading "proactive" as an unmixed good, and it isn't; it has a top end, and past the top end it's not attraction, it's need, and need is the thing I came here to be free of. And that it gets easier. There've been two since. Neither took a day.

I hope she found someone who wanted to be carried. There are plenty who do. I just turned out not to be one of them, and Rei was how I found that out.