▸ Column · Modern grounded / contemporary American dating-app world
BLACK PANTHER replies.
Replied to by Black Panther, with a rebuttal from Killmonger.
The letter
So I've been talking to a guy named Oliver on Hinge for almost three weeks. His profile pictures show this lean, clean-shaven guy with good hair — hiking photos, mountain views, the whole outdoorsy thing. Very appealing. I got to the brewery for our first date Saturday and scanned right past him. Twice. He's got a shaved head now, a gray goatee, and I'd put him maybe forty pounds heavier than anything he posted. He mentioned, pretty casually, that the photos were from a 2016 trip to Colorado. And when I made a face (I genuinely couldn't help it) he got kind of defensive — said everyone uses their best angles, like that's somehow the same thing as a ten-year-old photo.
Here's the confusing part: the actual date was good? He was funny, we talked for two hours, I felt something real. But I keep coming back to how I almost walked out without even saying hello, and I feel embarrassed about that, and also kind of angry at him for putting me in that position in the first place. I guess I'm asking whether a bait-and-switch this old is a dealbreaker I should honor, or if I'm letting the beginning of the night unfairly color someone who might actually be worth knowing.
— Second-Guessing in Atlanta
Black Panther replies
What caught me was this: you scanned right past him twice. You say you almost left without saying hello. But you were also looking for a man who no longer exists, because he had been careful not to let you see the one who does.
I know something about maintaining a face that has been outgrown. My father built Wakanda around a closed door — hidden, seen only at its best, never seen plainly — because he believed the world would take from us if it knew us truly. I spent years carrying that posture before I understood: a closed door is not protection. It is fear, and fear makes every room smaller. Oliver, too, is still reaching for who he was on a mountain in 2016, afraid that who he is today would not be let through the door at all.
That does not excuse the deception. The withheld choice was real, and your anger is honest. But what troubled me more than the photographs was his first move when you showed surprise: "everybody does it." That is a man defending a closed door, not opening it.
So the question is not whether you can forgive a decade-old photo. It is whether he can be honest about it — plainly, without the deflection. Have that conversation. If he can own it without reaching for cover, you learn something worth knowing. If he reaches for cover again, you have already learned something else.
— Black Panther
Killmonger weighs in
My cousin keeps finding the human wound inside every wrong move. "It was fear, not malice. Have the conversation." That's easy to say from a throne you were handed.
I found my father dead. The golden kingdom he came from knew, and they chose their comfort over him — over me — and they called it peace. So I know exactly what it looks like when somebody decides their ease is worth more than your real choice and then tells you that's just how it goes. It's not fear. It's a calculation. And Oliver's first move when you caught him — "everybody does it" — was him making that calculation again, live, standing right in front of you.
You already had the honest conversation. Saturday was it.
— Killmonger
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