After Aya, Noa and Momone, I had a spreadsheet, a set of rules, a much better first message, and no evidence that any of it worked. Hina was the evidence.

Her profile was the kind I'd learned to look for and hadn't yet found: quiet stats, low reply rate, nobody she'd written to first, no board posts, no reports, a couple of years' tenure and a score near the top of the range. On paper she was answering almost nobody. She answered me in five minutes, and the reply contained no information whatsoever: nice to meet you, thanks for the message, let's get along, three emoji. I've had more personal replies from a vending machine. Twenty minutes later, unprompted, came the only question in the thread: daytime or evening? I didn't register it at the time. I do now. Every woman who's gone anywhere has asked me something like that early, and every woman who hasn't has waited for me to ask.

Coffee was two days later, a Sunday, three in the afternoon, third floor of a café by Shinjuku east exit. I nearly cancelled it that morning – a gig had come in – then rearranged the gig instead, which tells you something about where my priorities had got to. I turned up in jeans and a polo with a guitar case, having warned her that looking for the foreigner with the guitar would be quicker than looking for the foreigner. She was there before me.

The coffee was not what the profile suggested. I'd expected reserved. What arrived was a woman in her mid-twenties who talked with her hands, laughed at full volume in a Starbucks, laughed out loud, and asked more questions in thirty minutes than the previous five women had in a month combined. Quiet on the app, apparently, meant she couldn't be bothered with the app. In person there was nothing quiet about her at all. Big eyes, round cheeks, a mouth that spent most of the coffee somewhere between a grin and laugh, and a great deal of light-brown hair that she'd shove back with both hands when she wanted to make a point, which was often.

I wrote to her from the platform, four minutes after we parted, and said the thing I say: lovely to meet you, I'd like this to become something special in time, no rush, sushi next. The next night she replied, and the reply is the reason this entry exists. うん！！ひなたちのペースで仲良くなっていこーっ🙌 Yeah!! Let's get close at our own pace. The polite form was gone, overnight, without a word from me about it. And "our" – she'd used the word for the two of us before I had. I answered "understood, understood" with two exclamation marks, which was a play on words that she had used in our coffee. She replied 笑笑.

Dinner was a sushi counter in early August. Even so, I hadn't planned on anything. I'd learned from Noa not to.

She had. Somewhere around the second round she put her hand on my arm and left it there, and when we walked out she took my hand without comment, the way you'd pick up your own bag. It was the first time in two months on the app that a woman had initiated anything, and I remember the sensation very precisely: not excitement, or not only that, but relief. Something had been confirmed that I'd started to doubt. The rules worked. The kind of woman they were designed to find existed, and she was standing in a Shinjuku side street holding my hand and asking which hotel.

I'll leave the hotel at that. It was lovely. I was, for the record, prepared.

What Hina taught me was the difference between warmth in the thread and warmth in the room. Noa's LINE had been all hearts. So was Hina's – stickers, a dancing chick with maracas, 笑笑. The difference was never in the thread at all, or not where I was looking: it was in who asked the first question, who dropped the keigo, who said "our." Noa never touched me in three dinners, and Hina touched me in one.

Then she went to Sendai for ten days, for work, and told me so in advance, with dates – and, this is the part that mattered, she booked the next dinner and hotel herself for the evening she got back. Noa's "later" never had a date in it. Hina's had a train time.

The evening she got back, she was an hour late. She called an hour ahead to say so, from the train, apologising in a way that made it clear she was more annoyed than I was. We had dinner and it was fine, and it stayed dinner, and we booked the next one before the bill came. A phone call an hour ahead is not a flake. Shiina – another story – was a flake. This was a working woman with a train problem.

So Hina is on the Board as the first name in the first column, and the thing I've learned to say about her is this: the stats got me to the coffee, it was the coffee told me she was fun but the whole point was in how she responded during the bridge to dinner. That told me everything.

The retry's on the 14th. She's the one who booked it.